Email to Professor Warwick

Hello Prof. Warwick,

My name is Paul Coffield and I am a second year Multimedia Design student at the University of Huddersfield.

I came across your work as part of my research for a current brief I am working on. The project has had me looking at a technology named Orison [from the book Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell] in relation to a quote from Marshall McLuhans' War & Peace in the Global Village - "We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies".

My research has followed 2 different paths:

• How we must become robot-like in order to properly use most technologies, we must follow certain protocols to interact with them
• The ways in which people, such as yourself, have started to allow themselves to become more robot-like but in a literal sense - by adding capabilities that humans are yet to be capable of.

I am of the belief that we humans ultimately aim to become more robotic in order to enhance our lives, and our strengths whilst limiting our weaknesses.

I see this as man taking the torch from nature in the process of evolution. No longer are we letting nature control which defects stay with us and which are killed off. We have decided what we want our bodies to be capable of and we are now looking at how we can achieve these goals through a synthesis of various technologies.

With this being the case, it seems that the opposite is true when looking at the developments of interactions with technologies. We seem to be aiming to make them more organic and less robotic.

I appreciate that you may well be busy at this time of the academic year but if you have any comments regarding my views, or even better if you have any other views on this situation that you would be kind enough to share, I would be very glad to hear them.

I would also like to seek permission to incorporate some of the images form your website for inclusion on my blog [http://orison-tech.blogspot.com/] which has I have set up as a place to host my research finding for this project.

Thank you for your time, I hope to hear from you in the near future.

Paul Coffield