Virtual bodies

Reading this article, a few things crossed my mind.  Not particularly in regards to the article, but they came to my mind anyway.

I cannot help at first to think of sci-fi stuff on TV, particularly Star Trek the Next Generation, where there was a character named "Data", who was an android crewmember of the Enterprise.  His ongoing story was trying to figure out the idiosyncrasies of humans and how to become "more human" himself.  I guess Data would a a literal example of a computer or cyberbrain being an actual body in reality, actually embodying a human form, maybe the reverse of virtual reality, where physical things enter a cyber realm.  And maybe another connection in keeping with the theme of Trek is that you constantly have the Federation preaching the Starfleet gospel, that humanity has arisen from possession, greed, money, want, etc.  Yet ironically they depend on having large spaceships, using technology for everything like moving around the ship, replicating meals, healing people, scanning for life forms, etc.  They even have a "holodeck" which puts them in a virtual reality for various purposes like combat training, or relaxation, or even living out Sherlock Holmes novels.  So what exactly have they evolved to?

Anyway, enough of my nerdiness.  Seeing the overall theme of the article coming to the conclusion that we shouldn't battle with tech, but just coexist with it, we can relate that to today's world, with everyone having a laptop or ipad or bluetooth, blackberry, iphone, droid, etc.  It is really amazing to see my generation (kids born in the 80's-90's) grow with all these advances of personal tech as the years go by, and how kids of the new millennium are growing up not knowing a life without vast amounts of tech available at their fingertips.  It is interesting to think that when my generation reaches maturity, how will the then 20-30 somethings be relating to the technologies of their time?  Will we by then be able to tap into the human consciousness even further, creating these symbiotic human-machine relationships?

Another scary thing, well to me anyway, is that we are losing touch with the physical world, that is, we turn now to Kindles, Nooks, ipads for the news, tv, and, most dramatic, reading books.  Proud parents post photos of their young kids daily online in blogs or on Facebook instead of printing out the pictures and putting them in a scrapbook or photo album.  Hayles says that information that exists on the cyberspace reached a sort of immortality, but what happens when the tech fails?  When the tech is erased or becomes outdated?  Sure, you could lose photos to a house fire, or you could forget the book after putting in your garage for 20 years.  But we are physical beings, existing in a physical world.  Our minds you could argue overlap between physical and metaphysical, but they are still not reduced to dots in a computer matrix.  We shouldn't shun books just to "save paper and paper waste", or photo albums because they take too much time to make.  Are we getting lazy, letting the tech do it for us?  Letting the tech embody what was once physical?