We need our lives to mean something, and while the startling advance of
technology has made finding that meaning more difficult, the ultimate
innovation will be the day we can manufacture significance without strife or
conflict, find importance without the necessity of death.
And then, maybe one day, we will become integrated with the machines
themselves. Our individual consciousnesses will be subsumed. Our
independent hopes will vanish. We will meet and merge in the cloud, and our
digitized souls will swirl and eddy in the storms of data, a splay of bits and
functions harmoniously brought into some grand, unseen alignment.
We will have evolved into a great unknowable entity. We will transcend
the limitations of our own value-laden minds. We will live beyond means and
ends, for we will always be both, one and the same. We will have crossed the
evolutionary bridge into “something greater” and ceased to be human any
longer.
Perhaps then, we will not only realize but finally embrace the
Uncomfortable Truth: that we imagined our own importance, we invented our
purpose, and we were, and still are, nothing.
All along, we were nothing.
And maybe then, only then, will the eternal cycle of hope and destruction
come to an end.
Or—?