Blog 25th May 2023 – My Take On Technology
Good Evening Pounders,
That’s right I’ve given you guys a title, Pounders, it has a ring to it. Today’s blog is about my take on technology. I remember sitting in a classroom in my primary school days after lunch where we sat around half asleep, taking turns in talking about what the future will be like. That was the single most interesting class I experienced in my schooling career. Our post-lunch sleepy eyes became wide with excitement as we enthusiastically went around in saying our two bits about what post year 2000 might look like. One said we’d have cities on Mars and the Moon and they would’ve been terraformed so that we could breathe the air and would resemble Earth in every way. Another classmate said that we’d have robot for butlers and workers and the humans will have enough money and free time to do what ever we liked. I remember liking that vision of the future the most. Humans having unlimited time and money to do whatever they wanted was a very enticing reality.
Another kid said that we’ll have cars that can travel in high speeds and fly to the moon. There were about twenty of us each sharing their vision of the future and they were all good. Then years rolled on at lightening speeds. The year 2000 actually happened. All we got was the whole y2k bug that will wipe out humanity. Then over the next twenty-three years after 2000, we got none of the things that we daydreamed about that sunny afternoon at primary school. Every now and then some gizmo came that somewhat was futuristic thing but turned out to be a failed venture by some money hungry venture capitalist.
In the late 2000s we did get something that did revolutionize and change the way humans interacted the “smart phone”. I must admit, when I first saw that thing, I was genuinely impressed. The massive screen with all those pretty icons all doing something that no one has ever seen before. Then over the next two decades, the smart phone became increasingly more impressive, with addition of a camera, connection to the internet, Angry Birds, infinite number of apps, integration to social media and so on. This is what none of us predicted, no one. Still to this day, I do get impressed with the way we became all connected like we a big happy family. With the right interesting content, hashtag and understanding of the algorithm, we can reach anyone on the planet. That is some wizardry right there. I’m all cool with it.
But what happened to the promise of widespread space travel, robot butlers, flying cars, hover boards and matter transporter? All of technological progress seems to have been all for the “smart phone” and to keep us all bound to a three-year phone contract and addicted to the useless contents on the countless social media apps. Pretty much all of the other technologies that we grew up imagining is nothing more than a rendered photo or video on the social media apps. Let’s take space travel for instance. Sure there are footages of rockets going into space, roadsters launched into orbit and rovers on Mars, but that’s all that is, footage. No ones ever seen space, no one that I know anyway. And don’t fool yourself thinking that there are people that you know that’s done any of the fantastical things that we’ve seen online. I’m not a cynic but we are living in an age where a lot of things are just big illusions accept the digital devices that we are all hooked on. If you go outside, you’ll notice that not much has changed physically. We have brighter neon lights in the city, slightly more reliable cars but so what? We didn’t get the future that we were promised.
In lot of ways, the digital technology set us back as a planet. The phone keeps us hooked on content that can only be compared to sugar, a poison that does nothing more than inflaming our minds. The cheap dopamine bombards us from the moment we wake up in the morning to when we go back to sleep. I can only imagine the kind of radiation that is flowing all through the planet to provide our phones, TVs and monitors with 4K HD resolution. This blog is a continuation from the yesterday’s where I talked about the way we’re all addicted to cheap dopamine hits through the smart phones and the internet. Unless we come up with a way to consume the non-information, the future doesn’t look to promising. I call it non-information because the infinite amount of stuff out there are neither good for us nor even the truth. I have to admit, I myself am hooked on the phone and if I don’t pick it up for more than ten minutes, I feel like something is missing. I depend on the phone for a lot of things like the map, email, texting not to mentions mindlessly scrolling through the various social apps. We’re all out of control.
I think I’ve rambled on long enough Pounders. I don’t have the answers. I’m just pointing something out that we all need to be aware of. Anyway, I’ll talk to you tomorrow with another topic.
PEACE