From semantic Web to being taken over by technology

So I was having a nice geeky conversation with a friend of mine about this series of books where humans could extend their ability to take input through machines, and also dump their personality into a computer and transpose it to somewhere else (like a bird). Humans are now immortals and can do things we can only imagine. We talked about enhancing what you see with information added by the machine, like you can already do with an Phone, augmented reality I believe it is called. Take a video of your location and someone will tell you this is a restaurant, here is the menu. This is a famous historical building, buy the ticket now and so on.

We went on on a lots of crazy stuff and it was a really stimulating conversations. I could not really explain why the vision made me feel a little uncomfortable. After all, God-like life with infinite possibilities is quite interesting. Something very Taoist about it, except you become the Tao. All an illusion of course, if I can be the Tao, I can be pointed to and so I cannot be the Tao. Augmented reality has something I find scary which is someone would tell you what it is you are looking at. And from now on, everyone looking at the same thing will have the same narrow view of what they are looking at.

The I was watching this video about the semantic web, it is all related, bare with me. All about how you cannot really impose one single taxonomy on the world. There is not such a thing as one way to look at something. When machine are involved I cannot help thinking they have to be programmed in a way and thus already have an interpretation of what they are looking at. If we do use them predominantly to be in the world, we risk to view everything the same way.

Another weird thought occurred to be, people are now constantly posting information about themselves (twitter and all) and we are now becoming instruments ourselves. I see more and more people being obsessed with  sharing more and more information while events are currently happening than they actually forget to process the feelings and the implication of the events itself. We are not really very good at reporting an event and understand its ramifications at the same time.

I suppose it is a long way to say the more I think about it, the more I think we need to also unplug and just be. This will lead to better life experience, fuller life experiences and better creativity. Or maybe I am just starting to feel my age :).