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Alienated Sentience and Endosymbiosis in the World of H.R. Giger

• bshepard 5y ago
  "In other words, if superintelligent machines prove capable of everything except consciousness in this enlarged sense, could our descendents become endosymbionts, or sentient organelles, in our technology? Might future humans find that their only purpose and function within larger biomechanical constructs (including spaceships) is their useful capacity for feeling and perhaps higher consciousness or ecstasy? Is late capitalism itself already such a machine? Giger’s world shows us this dark threat of cyborg endosymbiosis: not to be simply augmented by machines (or even simply replaced by them) but to be parasitized and engulfed by them in a kind of numbed ecstasy that somehow masks the violence being done. "