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The Meaning of Life
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It's interesting to see commentators reflecting on The Meaning of It All in places as disparate as a Sims review:


The Sims presents an entertaining look at life, if life lacked purpose and emotional heft. Your Sims are merely electronic paper dolls with eight-pronged stomachs. They crave everything except the only things worth craving. Where's the little "need" bar for Transcendent Truth? What items should I buy for my Sims to teach them what values are worth dying for? And why does my Sim brawl with his enemies without consequence or concern, yet shake his fist at an uncaring God when his bed is aesthetically unpleasing?

...

The question of this era isn't "how." How to make money, how to manage money, how to get ahead? Contemporary America can answer those questions. The real mystery is "why" -- why make money, why work harder than you must, why treat others as something other than a means to our ends? It's great that The Sims teaches children about budgeting money, but couldn't it also emphasize those qualities of life that aren't so easily budgeted?


And a Bruce Sterling article on The Singularity:


The singularity's biggest flaw isn't that it's hard to imagine, but that it flatters its human inventors. We may be on the verge of an astounding breakthrough! Or, with equal likelihood, we may be at the edge of a new dark age of plagues, mass hunger, and climate destabilization. More likely yet, we live in a dull, self-satisfied, squalid eddy in history, blundering around with no concept of progress and no sense of direction. We have no idea what we really want from our own lives or from society. And no Moore's law rising majestically on any 2-D graph is ever going make us magnificent or spiritual when we lack the will, vision, and appetite for spiritual magnificence.


In other words...being superhuman won't help us if we don't know what we want as humans. Good point.


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