Technological Upgrades and Advances we need-Part II

 

This post is going to be slightly anecdotal and a representation of what it is like to be inside an intellectual excavation of my mind. 

I happen to have been born and brought up entirely in India and after 20-25 years of living in the same place, we've finally got an upgrade to our local commute vehicles. Some time ago, I grabbed an opportunity to ride it with a few fellow co-passengers and I uploaded a video of it on my Instagram story on the same day. Seeing it, my brother, who doesn't live in the same place as me, commented 

"Whoa!😲 Now is is like Japan! " 

We had a long talk and while I won't be mentioning all of it I did say something along the lines of how we need a lot of civic sensibilities to reach Japanese level of living. However, on the ride to the office today, I noticed how a lot of technologies we live with today lack an emotional metric to it. 

Here, let me explain with a few examples.

Examples that come to mind

We started building machines for our convenience right through the Industrial Revolution and while we have made massive improvements in our pieces of technology, I'm afraid we haven’t spread it in the right direction. For example, take our newest technology, phones. It is beautiful. It is optimised. We can look after our pet from a distance. It is a wonderful piece of technology. But have we built it right? I suppose what I mean to say is if I had to list its disadvantages over us today, it would far outweigh the negatives. 

• It is built to be addictive. 
• It is bent to shape around our lives instead of a normal or useful addition 
• and everything on it that comes along for free with it meant to ruin our health, both mental and physical, and extract the most amount of money from us. 
• Furthermore; and this is where the emotional angle manifests the most; which company we buy it from signifies our status symbol to society.

Here is another more better example: Traffic lights. We have built a machine that signifies when we can move on the road. Useful. Nifty even. But have we taken any safeguards against the worst tendencies of human nature? We relied on self-judgement and correction but have we made any efforts to nudge us in the direction. What is stopping someone from not running the light if not their moral instincts? Fine? A sum of money given to the government? What if they have an abundant amount of money? Can a person who stops them and correct their wrong behaviour really fix the bigger problem? I suppose you can sense what I'm nudging towards. Your answer must have been "Oh! We should teach them civic sense while they are young." But here is where I'll load you with two problems. 

1) Can you guarantee 100% elimination of the problem?

2) Why have we made technology that can give people superpowers before learning and diversifying into technology that teaches people and takes into account the entire scope of human nature? Isn't the whole point of advancing as a human race is to live better lives than people who came in, say, 1100 AD?   

The post that came before this was a prequel to this and you can read it here but in this one I aim to narrow down and pin the exact problem we started with collectively. Have we tried to understand human behaviour? If not, why not? What are we collectively running from? I know that the instinct when someone messes up is to shame them but has anyone for that matter taken up the responsibility to forgive and teach someone how not to mess up? In other words have we taught our children and the future generations the importance of integrating emotional mind and intelligence in our technology? I know I have spoken about this a lot of my blog but I do this over and over again because we need to keep pushing it in the right direction to make an impact. Not just technology but materials too. Look at fast fashion and plastic and non-recyclable materials. What have we done to our earth? Perhaps I'll save it to relay in a different post more creatively.

Here is another one of my example I'll let you tackle in the comment section. Do you know what genetic engineering is and what do you think about it?

As for the microplastics that are in our blood now, I suppose we can make tiny filtration device to filter it outside our body and pump that blood back in us. 

 Read my "I am..." series and especially this one to understand the depth of my emotions. Thank you.

 

Author's note:- I promise I’ll try to write a story next. It is just hard to sit down and write a good story.