The End of Time.

I feel the world slowing. Not the real world, the human world. Humanity is slowing. How can a species slow down on its own? We will stop in real time around 2150. It began slightly with TV and mass media but really got going with computers. We began to perceive through digitised connections. We speak, it is digitised and we hear. What we hear on the phone is not our friends voice but a series of sound packets that most closely resemble the voice looked up in their phones memory store. What is transmitted is not sound but a series of store locations and your receiver reconstructs them into what you hear. In more obvious ways text, e-mails, TV and radio do the same. Algorithms in mp3 and mp4 reduce the content of music and video to the barest intelligible minimum so file sizes and bandwidth are minimised. But how does that slow the human race up? Already many youngsters speak in a slew of syllables as if it’s irrelevant whether or not you understand. Though their typing skills are amazing their handwriting is scrawny because we are beginning and will soon interface more directly with our digital gadgets. Our audio and visual senses will connect directly by digitised connections making speach and writing redundant. Just as we have a human brain on top of a mammalian brain on top of a reptilian brain we will develop a digital brain. But this digital brain will connect via unchanging algorithms much like your phone's predictive text was originated during the Second World War and you’re still using it. Already we are watching old films and episodes of Friends made ten years ago. Music is grinding to a stop. We will achieve full digital integration with X Boxes and play games as part of our real lives. Every desire will be satisfied by what already exists. As we meld with the digital we will increasingly redo what has been done until all we do will be rehashes of what has been done before by others. We will slow until nothing is new and for us time will stop. It will continue for cats and dogs and fish and for the earth, the sun and stars, but for us if we don’t have the courage to resist our digital fascination, time will end.