Do you sometimes get the feeling that Google maybe knows you
too well? Do you also find it creepy how
Google sometimes complete your sentences (not much unlike your partner does)
when you do an online search? In this
day and age when we are so completely connected with smart phones, tablets and
laptops and having so much information at our fingertips with vast amounts of
apps, software and gadgets, I could not help but wonder, is this messing with
our brains.
There are many days that I sit in my office surrounded with
gadgets and I wonder what my office would have looked like in 1983. My laptop probably would have been replaced
with a typewriter, my email inbox with a physical inbox, my iPad replaced with a
filofax and my iPhone with a pager. When
I think about it, I must admit, it makes me anxious. I have become so used to technology and being
effortlessly connected all the time that the thought of not being connected sends shivers
down my gay old spine. I know that
people managed just fine without it, back in the day, but I am sure many of us cannot
imagine our lives without it. But this
begs the question, with technology making our lives so much easier, what is the
price we are paying for it?
Every day I see people in meetings, when having a smoke
break with colleagues and even at home with friends and family. I see how technology is adversely affecting
us. I see how technology draws us in and
how it is making our real world attention span shorter. It seems most people cannot go more than 20
minutes without checking their phones. I
am no different. I check my phone even though
I didn’t receive any push notification.
I check my phone even though I didn’t get an email. I check it and I don’t really know why. Do we do this because we are bored? Do we do this because we are so afraid of
missing something that we constantly have the desire to be connected? I am not sure what the answer is, but we all
do it or at least know people who do.
Then there are social media.
Being a social media whore myself I cannot be judgmental about it. I am on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkeIn
and Instagram, to mention but a few.
Social media is a great way of connecting with old friends, staying
abreast of world events, networking for work and getting sneak peeks into the lives
of celebrities. But with it also come a plethora
of dangers. As you know, a couple of
months earlier I discovered with a shock that I was friends on Facebook with a
monster who cut up his boyfriend and ate a piece of his ass and taped it. As it turns out this was not his first murder
and he is in fact a Serial Killer. As in
life there are many dangerous and demented people on the internet, but unlike
real life you can’t always tell until it is too late.
You can be anyone or anything on the internet. Technology has evolved to the point that some
people can life completely separate lives on the web with things like Second
Life. They can create a character for
themselves, work, shop, have relationships and even have sex all in the comfort
of some basement somewhere. They can
create a life for themselves that exists only on the internet and in the
process become recluses who may lose the ability to interact with people in the
real world. Sure not everybody goes to
that extreme, but ask yourself how many people with whom you chat with on
Facebook on a daily basis you have or even plan to meet with in real life. Ask yourself if that is any different from
the folks who embrace Second Life?
Even scarier is how the advancement of technology will
affect us physically. Just the other day
I heard a debate on the radio while driving home where one guy said that not so
long from now we will have technology embedded into our bodies. We will enhance ourselves and instead of
having a handset for your smart phone it will be build into our hands. We will have technology build into our bodies
that will replace the gadgets we currently use.
This is not as farfetched as you might think. It is already been done to body parts. In the United Kingdom a man who lost his hand
in a Jet Ski accident have been fitted with a fully
functioning bionic hand. But imagine
when we get to the stage when we will voluntarily amputate our limbs to get
fitted with a bionic limb that is better and stronger than our organic human
one.
We have already seen this in sports. Sure these athletes did not voluntarily
amputate their limbs but the artificial limbs are better than the human
limbs. Just look at the athlete Oscar
Pistorius. In last year’s Olympics he
competed with able bodied athletes, something that would have been unheard off ten
years ago. Is it so farfetched that in a
couple of decades from now we will stand in line to get the newest version of
the fully integrated hand, eye or leg, much like folks queued for the new
iPhone 5? Is it so farfetched that in a
couple of decades from now all our homes will have WiFi and that all our software for our enhanced
synthetic body parts will update while we sleep? It is frightening, but as some experts
believe this will happen.
I am ashamed to say that I really do think Google is making
us stupid. Who of us have not used
Google to check the spelling of a word?
Not known something and then quickly Googled it so that we sound smart
and knowledgeable on a subject matter that we really know nothing about it? Maybe stupid is not the right word to use here,
perhaps lazy is more appropriate.
Technology and the internet has made us lazy and in a few decades from now life as we know it will be vastly different.
With the advancement of technology we as a human race are
figuring out and creating machines and gadgets that make life easier for us,
but the one thing we are not realizing is that we are also making ourselves
redundant in the process. The more gadgets
and machines we create the more the human factor is being taken out. Soon machines will take over most of the
function we as humans perform and the real question then is, who will the real
Master be? The creator or the
machine? I guess the answer to this
question will have an exceedingly complex answer as half of the human body
could, by then, be synthetic and a machine itself. I am just very glad that I will not be around
by then to have to figure this one out.
Till next time.
