The
most considerable difference between previous generations and those
born after the 8o’s, or better still, between 1950 and 2000 is the
incredible speed of technology’s improvement and reachability to
the world. The internet! Mobile phones, smart phones, androids! The
Hubble telescope! This is not nothing and unless other areas of
learning being keep up with the speed with which mechanical
technology is advancing, they will really lag behind. This is the
case with Philosophy, unless it keeps up with the changing times
(meaning technology in this case) it could become obsolete. Even
though the study of the world and the human being, through ethics,
epistemology, metaphysics and all other nice them for branches of
thought that Philosophy looks at will never be obsolete in a level of
abstract importance, and will always always be necessary for us as
humans; there is a danger that the flashing blue light that
illuminates our screen will make us forget everything, even what is
important, even ourselves.
The
American Transcendentalist Philosopher Henry David Thoreau said of
technology: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which
distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved
means to an unimproved end,… We are in great haste to construct a
magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may
be, have nothing important to communicate.”
In
a way I think he means that never have we have such good means of
communications, yet nothing really worthy to communicate. If he said
that about the telegraph, imagine what he would say now! Reading a
text message thread of a twitter account. Poor Thoreau!
Now
a days we have the means to educate the whole world, to spread news
and truth, and instigate real change but guess what? The biggest use
we give our technology is sending petty messages to people when we
are bored and we invent and manufacture social personas that we are
‘happy with’ but are not who we are or how we really feel.
Do
not get me wrong, this is not by any means an attack to technology.
The point of this article is to shine light on the fact that although
technology is advancing so fast and is becoming more available; our
moral, social, intellectual attributes are not advancing at the same
rate, or are not being distributed at the same rate, or are taking
the back seat to mechanical technology. Our ‘what’ is getting
better, but our ‘why’ is lagging behind. Let me give an example,
and important one to my eyes. There is a big debate going on at the
moment: privacy on the internet.
So
it turns out the National Security Agency or NSA has created a
program to collect all the data of everything you do on the internet.
American citizens and others, of course. The have even built massive
infrastructure to store the hardware necessary for all the
information to go to. All you have ever looked at or posted on the
internet, every conversation you have, everything you have purchased,
everything will be known and stored, like a file. Great! Not great.
Really, not great. The internet has become like a second collective
consciousness for humanity and to my view, no government or agency
has any business storing and possessing the very personal life of so
many millions of people. Something, along the lines, is not right. We
must review the purpose of it and the ethics of it. We must open
debates. Here is where Philosophy has a place again. In the midst of
a technology wave, we must swim to find our moral ground again.
Technology
doesn’t need to be a scary thing. It can be a marvellous thing. It
gives us the means to spread art and information to the whole world
at incredible speeds! But we must also beware that this speed will
end up standardizing knowledge, ethics and aesthetics. The word
technology comes from the Greek word techne, which means art, skill
or cunning of hand. And logia, which means branch of learning.
Technology is a testament to the refinement of our skill, to what we
can achieve and become. It is what it is because of the tools and
objects that we’ve created with our hands, from our minds. But as
the current state of the world tells us, technology will always work
better when it is in agreement and balance with nature and the human
being, not against it. Technology is for thriving, yet for so long we
have also used it for war and destruction.
It
is almost a cliché to say that Einstein did not have the intention
to kill so many human beings when he split the atom. None the less,
this is the use we have given to the discovery of such a brilliant
mind. Perhaps when we understand and heal and tackle our
self-destructive instinct and our desire to hurt others, maybe then
we will use our technology for higher purposes. I’m afraid to say
that this change needs to happen as we don’t want our very survival
to hang from a string. Just imagine, if the money spent on wars and
drones was spent on good infrastructure, education and nutrition! We
would catapult a hundred years into the future and have a better
chance at exploring space! But for now, it’ll be nice to have a
world we can look at and feel proud.
You
may now think I’m an idealist (or at best, very impatient for
change), but I do believe that technology is not the problem and
governments alone are not the problem either. I think part of the
problem is that too many generations now, in the developed world,
have become too comfortable and we all feel unable to do anything
real about it all. Unfortunately, personal technology (which is how I
call mobile phones, laptops, etc) seem to accentuate the bubble in
which we live our lives. We can burst the bubble and use our
technology to connect instead of isolate and distract. How? By
remembering what is important and remembering why we built all these
things in the first place.
Eliza Veretilo
