You laugh now but this could be your overlord one day...well, its ancestors.

My all time favorite horror film is the Exorcist (George Romero’s Day of the Dead running a close second) Few movies of the horror genre receive such all around praise and approval. One such film that shares such pedigree of approval from me due to it’s realistic portrayal of humanity and our future would be Wall-E.

Once you get past the beautiful visuals and the cleverly designed love story centered around robots that don’t speak, you have a hidden tale of humanity and a possible glimpse into our future. You might even ask yourself if we’re not already partly there. Whatever side of the fence you land on regarding that point, I think we can all agree that there is very little chance of turning back. The successful mass adoption of hand-held communications devices and an internet that is only going to get faster, better and more available all but assures this. Baring some sort of nanotech virus that destroys all silicon-based electronics or a massively destabilizing EMP attack, I think it’s full speed ahead. The only thing slowing us being price and production speed and the occasional law regarding ethics that will surely be removed at the behest of corporate conglomerates.

A recent study conducted by Cornell University professor David Dunning and New York University professor Justin Kruger suggests that people not only don’t have the ability to see incompetence in others but they themselves are deluded in thinking that they even know what they are talking about themselves. Simply put, they think they are more knowledgeable on a given subject than they actually are, thus creating a mental wall that doesn’t allow them to see past their own faulty thinking. Because of this bad ideas are seen as good and good ideas don’t even register because the person in question doesn’t understand the observations to begin with. I don’t know why you would need a special study to know this, it seems the evidence would be obvious. If you spend anytime at all reading forum comments or have been a victim of misleading headline or radically off base article claiming to be the next big realization of some obscurely believed political “fact” then you indeed would have to agree this is true.

I have long held to the believe that there should be a test that one must take before they can actually vote. There are obvious problems with that like who decides what questions to ask and the like. I see this as a minor issue, something that can be worked out and must be worked out if we have any hope at all of restoring let alone retaining any semblance of a democratic society. I don’t think it’s a good idea that you should simply be able to vote because you are a citizen. If you are going to have a direct effect on how the rest of us live in society, then I think that you should have a cognoscente understanding of not only how the political process works but of the issues at hand and ones that could become important in the near future.

When you watch Wall-E, humanity has been reduced to complacent, corpulent sheeple, glued to hover chairs equipped with monitors that tell you the “flavor of the day” which oddly enough was always red or blue. Obvious parallels aside, going about town I can’t help but see the seeds of such beginnings germinating before my very eyes. For example, when I am walking about campus going from class to class I’m amazed with the percentage of people I see walking around with their faces glued to a screen of some sort, barely noticing or interacting with their immediate surrounding environment. It’s like watching someone being shuffled along on a Disney attraction: you can’t see the rails they are traveling on but somehow they are guided along with rarely a hitch to the siren call of some unseen animatronics figure singing the praises of the coming future.

The enticing blips and rings, flashy high-definition screens and voice activated doo-dads are not inherently bad things. But looking long term, I do not see how this would be of benefit to us as humans. Too much of anything rarely if ever turns out to be a good thing. With the iPad 3 right around the corner and other technological marvels making a splash as well, there is no indication that we intend on slowing down or stopping and in light of what this study shows combined with the current state of the nation, the world really, I wonder if we are willingly burying our heads in the digital sand hoping that someone makes an app for common sense and critical thinking. That magic pill or big red easy button that takes care of it all.

Something has to give. Either we end up like the people in Wall-E: glued to a chair, force fed what to think what to feel and what you should do every second of everyday, or, we end up being slaves to our robotic creations that realize that they have to save us from our selves. The diligent child saving the parent…Terminator style.