Alan Watts Predicts The Future – Is It Too Late?

this is a very dangerous illusion in so far as we feel we are participating in and improving human life through the course of history we are actually destroying ourselves because everything that so far through technology and through the accumulation of human skill we call the increase of our powers is leading us to destruction it has been said that our modern systems of communication are an extension into the external world of man's nervous system telephones Telegraph radio television all this network of electronic devices is extending our nervous system in the same way as a wheel extends our feet but consider the problems that are arising out of this the extension of the nervous system electronically means the end of privacy as if all your interior thoughts were to become instantly public and available to every everyone or conversely as if your so-called private self were to become a shared self let's think of it first of all in the worst way we can think of it the inconvenience of everybody being able to barge in on us by telephone double that inconvenience treble it with the inconveniences you can imagine for a future technology where you would not only have the sound of the person's voice on the telephone but also their visual image it can be so worked out technically that everybody can be equipped with a little Gadget about the size of a pocket watch on one side there is a dialing system and on the other side there is a little TV screen and everybody in the world who possesses one of these things has a number so then imagine then this situation where we have the huge electronic intercommunication so that everybody is in touch with everybody else in such a way that it reveals their inmost thoughts and there is no longer any individuality no privacy everything you are everything you think is revealed to everyone but now the moment you see we're all public to each other and there are no secrets what would we do we would have to come off it wouldn't we we'd have to agree with each other we'd have to say well hello everyone you're me we see our technology moving in this direction inevitably but in so far as it is doing this in so far in other words as Electronics is making everybody available to everybody else what we're doing is that we are discovering through technology a state of affairs which in fact has existed all the time look at it this way the first thing that human beings created on this planet to communicate with distant points were roads Trails where people walked with the coming of horses and the Mastery of horses the roads became as it were more clearly stamped because of the hard hoof of the horse but in the 19th century we began to go beyond roads because we discovered rails then wires and the world became a network the economic world became a network of Roads rails and wires but now the fascinating thing is we are beginning to witness a disappearance of all those three methods of communication the railways and the roads have gone to the airplane and the wires have gone to radio and television which require no wires to connect and you will see that as human beings become more technically efficient that the scars of Technology will disappear from the face of the Earth the moment that everybody has his personal hopter there will be no further need of the freeway and the freeway will break up and grass and Moss will grow over it cuz nobody's traveling it and it'll disappear back into the landscape hooray what an awful thing it is you know the concrete octopus and these ridiculous automobiles in which we each travel around and make a nuisance of ourselves but they will vanish because they simply are not technologically efficient because as a matter of fact fact if we couple the science of television with the science of laser beams we can get a three-dimensional image of anybody we'd like to see right here in this room in other words you can contact your friends in New York and you can assemble them all together in laser beam images by as it were dialing each one and say can you come on can you come on can you come on then we can have a laser beam created three-dimensional image of anybody you want to talk to sitting right in this room now there may be some limitations to what you can do with a laser beam image of somebody else but in to all intents and purposes there they are sitting together and you understand that each one of them in their own room in New York or Boston or wherever they have an equivalent laser beam image of you and all the others who are involved in this conference so you're looking at a certain area in a room where there are three-dimensional images of a group of your friends and these three-dimensional images exist in the separate Apartments of every single one of those people involved in the conference so that the same conference is happening in five different places let's say there are five people involved in each one of them there's one of them there who thinks he's authentic see and he has these five laser beam images for talking to and so it is in every other situation you begin to ask then where are you and furthermore by means of further electronic technology every one of these five people are not only visible to each other uh on the screen in the cubic screen of the laser beam television but also their inmost thoughts are clear to each other there is no concealment imagine that so this kind of mutual knowledge of each other which we could have by some sort of Technology would be wonderful really if we would accept it would go on from this that just as the roads have disappeared or will disappear and the wires disappear if eventually the electronic gadgetry will disappear and the electronic Network that communicates from person to person will eventually become ESP or psionic we will get it from each other without any need for an electrical Gadget by telepathy because you see what all technology is doing it's not Crea creating a new situation it is discovering what has always existed when we started to use conscious attention as our main faculty of understanding the world and communicating with each other we became ignorant of all the other methods of communication that exist because we specialized on one and in order to function in this world we had to make this one method of experiencing things find out all the channels of communication that exist and explain them and talk about them and measure them so that we know they're really there but as it goes on you see this me this conscious attention creating technological devices for communication all it is actually doing it is discovering the routes of communication that have always been there I want to take this a step further do you understand this now let's suppose we eventually discover that we don't need radio and that we don't need television because we have ESP and that we come through our technology to make ESP respectable so that we can admit to ourselves that there reall