No, this really isn’t an anti-technology blog. Quite the opposite. It is a blog focusing on the question of what drives technological advances and what purpose their implementation is really for.
Is all the technology that we already have, that we are being offered and that we are being promised: Making life easy? Making life reliable? Making life cheap?
The chances are that once you have stopped to think about it, your answer will be at least one of these, but probably all three.
But tech is easy, reliable and cheap for who exactly; is this really about the end result for you?
If we look subjectively at all the technological development there has ever been, right since the industrial age began, the general consensus would likely be that the rise of tech has only ever been good for us. That no part of it could possibly represent anything bad.
With the arrival of the internet and the smart technology age, as we dip our toes further and further towards a waterfall of AI, it really does seem that everything in life couldn’t be progressing faster or improving at an increasing or exponential pace.
But as the ease with which a fully-tech-orientated life seems to be taking shape, the upcoming generations are no longer fully familiar – if indeed familiar at all, with the process of traditional learning and remembering information and processes of thinking that will equip them in dealing with the future experiences that they cannot yet see. And why would they, when a search engine linked to their smart watch or phone, can instantly do it all for them instead?
This rate of so-called progress is coming at a massive price. It’s not just the dangerous lie that knowledge is the same thing as experience that is breaking the fabric of society and our humanity apart.
It is both the dependency and preference that we have for a tech-takeover of our lives in every sense that is supercharging the process of us all forgetting and proactively leaving behind the people, the individuals and the human beings that we really are.
We are told and conditioned to believe that technological advances have created an age where it is no longer possible for humanity to go backwards in any way. Why would we question this when every stream of accepted information or media narratives tell us that the flow and breadth of Information, pharmaceuticals, digital money and foods that even 100 years ago could never have been dreamed of, really do make us all, the unwitting participants in a game where we are actively being led to think and believe that we are all the new gods.
The technology that we already have is great, and it is mind boggling to visualise what is yet to come. But have you noticed how someone who we would probably only ever catch a glimpse of on social media or TV is always doing well out of it, whilst somewhere, someone and indeed many others are suffering as a result – usually in growing numbers and well outside of the media view.
Whether it’s the people who are no longer needed for the jobs that they were trained for relying on food banks or the billionaire tech moguls being able to declare that their latest inventions will mean nobody will really have to work again, technological development is being used as the tool of money-obsessed-age.
Technology and technological advances are not being used as the tools to improve and enhance life and humanity in the ways that each and every one of them genuinely could, in the right hands.
The uses for technology today and how we could be using them look very much the same. But man cannot have two masters.
For as long as tech development is driven by profit, the humanity and freedoms we so believe in are being sent back to the stone age at a like-for-like increasing pace.
The metaverse and the world of virtual reality may not have taken off in the ways that it has the potential to do so yet. But as we have seen with the drug-like hypnotic ability that computer and video games have on different people, we must surely be very close to turning point where people can step into a pretend world where they never again have to leave.
Again, the question must be asked, ‘What is this really all for?’ ‘Who really benefits from the general population losing touch with everything that matters?’
A growing population that has the resources and information available for everyone to think freely in a way that history has never allowed normal people to do so before is a problem for the people who abuse the power and responsibility they have gained at the top.
Like lambs to the slaughter, we willingly embrace the march of tech as it preaches the message that we are one step closer to a quality of life that we can’t even begin to imagine, each and every day.
We ignore the loss of jobs, the redundancy of our skills and talents. We are blinded to the dependency we are all building upon machines and processes that the wiping of history through the whims of the strangely all-powerful woke will quickly leave even the most educated of our younger generations unable to understand.
The nightmare story of life within a dystopia that we ridiculously still believe is restricted to the pages of great works such as 1984 is already unfolding around us all. But instead of rejecting it, we are embracing it like we are all the lead in some modern day parody of Oliver Twist, where we are falling over ourselves with the begging bowl and crying out for even more.
Tech would be even more beneficial and helpful to us all, if its overriding purpose were to improve life and its use were to be restricted by principles such as choosing restraint and consideration over its use, rather than the default setting today, which is always to do use it, not because it is morally right and healthy for everyone to do so, but simply because its profitable for someone, and they can.
It is both sad and very regrettable that technological advances have become yet another tool where those who already possess so much, are effectively unopposed by anything as they impose even more restrictions and choking controls on life and our ability to flourish, just so they can have even more of the power, money and influence that they will never use as they could and really should.
The harsh and uncomfortable truth is that none of those who are bought into and fuelling this specific kind of technical age and motivated this way will ever say, is that without care for humanity and what the basic tenets of life are and should always be about, the few can only become smaller in number.
Whilst the power, wealth, influence and control of the few continues to grow, all others will become the soulless slaves and bodies, drugged by a technologically engineered experience where they believe they have everything, but actually have nothing. All under the auspices of a repressive system harnessing tech for all the bad reasons we can imagine.
This is nothing less than a process of enslavement by tech. Not imposed on us voluntarily, but voluntarily imposed.
We are all playing a part in allowing this to happen. But the alternative needn’t look or feel like the rejection of tech in any way.
The freedom of us all hinges upon our readopting and repurposing tech for uses that are genuinely useful and important, so that it is used to benefit the many, rather than coming at cost to the many in ways that will only ever truly benefit the few.
Adam Tugwell 