Today we must accept…
ROBOTICS & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE… BLOCKCHAIN & CRYPTOCURRENCY… ALTERNATIVE ENERGY & STORAGE (solar, wind, geothermal, gravity, atmospheric)… GENETIC MEDICINE & DNA SEQUENCING… 3-D DIGITAL PRINTED HUMAN PARTS & PRINT ON DEMAND HOUSES / PRODUCTS… SPACE TOURISM & EVEN A COLONY ON MARS (is not just planned but fervently being worked on)… there are too many dramatic tech-based changes that have come out in just the past few years, to list them all above.
Technology evolved slowly for most of mankind’s existence, fire, stone tools, bow & arrow, wheel, iron, steel…
(you can skip this long list) — civilized comforts, automated mills, gunpowder & all associated projectile weapons, the steam engine, railroads, the internal combustion engine, automobiles, wireless messages, radio, telephones, television, nuclear bomb, nuclear power, mechanical business machines, jet /rocket engines, electronic credit cards, huge computers, computer guidance missiles, satellites, transistor radios, small electronic calculators, copy and fax machines…
{start back here} … personal computers, the World Wide Web, emails, cell phones, cloud computing and storage, online shopping, social media platforms, our entire life and work depending on digital devices, online dating apps, smartphones becoming mini-computers accessing all the knowledge of the world… plus a hundred other services in that one thin, hand-held communications device that we keep on our person every waking hour.
This list leads us back to that hard-to-comprehend tech list at the beginning of this article. Of course, change is constant and it always has been, but the difference today is the speed of change. The time between the radio receiving sound magically through the air in our houses and the addition of a moving image being added to that sound through TV technology, took decades for that transition to occur.
Today the time between announcing a new idea and it being available seems to be months, and sometimes sooner.
Sci-Fi’s self-driving cars have been available for a while now, but trusting our lives to a self-driving car is lagging far behind the reality that we can currently own one.
Our best and brightest engineers are capable of creating more than the average human psyche can process and embrace. Even worse, we constantly keep adapting, because we must, working hard just to keep up, although never being comfortable with the previous iteration, which quickly becomes obsolete. The result is we have constant anxiety about our competence with technology, and seldom become an expert at the current one in front of us… we only become constant early adopters of the newest tech.
In my opinion, this techno-anxiety is affecting society and playing some role in the divisive and anxious atmosphere we are experiencing.
I might be putting too much emphasis on technological changes because our anxiety could be caused by all those thousands of different wireless waves penetrating our bodies every second of every day, that deliver every wireless service. We cannot see or feel these frequencies bombarding us and only realize they are constantly in the air when we use our wifi and phones or turn on the radio.
This is our current state, we live in an unnatural, man-made, electric-wave-filled atmosphere and we must constantly adapt to the avalanche of new technology dumped on us daily, CREATING techno-anxiety… BUT we also love our favorite tech devices and our ability to wireless connect to breaking news, social media, good friends, our family, and our business contacts, no matter where in the world we happen to be!
The moral lesson behind the story, “Jurassic Park”, where technology brings back the dinosaurs, and the situation gets out of control (the dinosaurs get loose, running amok, killing all humans) IS… the question — EVEN IF WE HAVE THE TALENT AND ABILITY TO ACCOMPLISH SOME AMAZING FEAT, THROUGH TECHNOLOGY (THAT COULD POSSIBLY DESTROY THE HUMAN RACE) SHOULD WE CREATE IT ANYWAY?
Only time will tell.
