Decoding the Code.

Have heard people give differed views on the upsurge of technology in our daily lives.
Some hail and welcome the change bought into their lives through technology, the comfort and convenience that have been nailed into the everyday chores.
Don’t we just love the climate controlled cars and offices, sleeker tablets, memory foam pillows, mattresses or shoes, recommended viewing suggestions on our favourite channels or even the fitness bands and mobile apps that keep us in our best shape and health.
While there is this another anti-technology brigade, who absolutely detest technology and anything that is related to gadgetry.
They believe technology has made humans more cold, distanced them from the tenets of physical contact and emotions. They believe humans are turning into this machine who is reduced to a slave following the orders of a central command centre.
While both these thoughts are varied, both groups are also largely unaware of what technology exactly has to offer us in the future – and that is the scary fragment.
The first group is right in using the benefits of technology in making lives easy and more productive for themselves. However, the delusion or ignorance in its flipside is completely overlooked.
Likewise, the other set of people will rave on the ill-effects of technology, but this is more of a generation thing than a vice of technology in itself.
There isn’t any merit in looking down upon the future generation really. Every generation has labelled its successor as unreasonable or unruly.
If we speak to our grandfather’s, they would complain about how our father’s generation lacked ethics or values.
One would always hear their father or elders complaining with identical insinuations, we would do the same with our children and so on.
Technology or its upsurge has no role to play here, however these are subjects used to relate the diversion of every generation’s value stream from the previous.

Now lets look at the real issues.

The advantages in research and development of ethical technological implementation is immense and farfetched.
The average life-span of humans has increased considerably as per facts and analysis (again the notion that people were healthy earlier is a myth).
Thanks to scientific advancements in medical research, we are now able to control child mortality and even predict many diseases upfront or have a treatment to cure those.
There are vaccines available which treat epidemics in months if not days which were once life threatening.
We as humans are able to analyse products and services that best suit our requirements based on data which is readily available to us on a click right on our smart phones.
We save on hours and hours of our time which would be otherwise wasted in irrelevant and mundane activities.
We are able to locate long lost friends, communicate with people across oceans from our drawing rooms, transfer money in times of emergency to our families seamlessly all thanks to the marvels of technology.
Those who loathe it, should rethink their beliefs and wonder where the absence of these innovations would have left us.
Its not the technology or gadgets that makes one outcast, but the intent for which an object is used does. If this wasn’t technology, it would have very well been some other medium which would be tagged as evil or catastrophic.
During the second world war, Hitler used the radio extensively to spread his propaganda amongst people. It wasn’t radio as a technology which was malevolent but the intent of the person who used it to spread terror and hate.
As humans we have an innate trait of passing the buck (also name as blame game) to mostly a wrong entity or method. In this case of failures spurting out as a by-product of human advancements it happens to be technology.

This again doesn’t mean we should not watch for the path which technology treads on.

Technological revolution has now advanced into the disciplines of robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, IOT, etc.
These are not sciences which are futuristic and something which would occur twenty years from now, but are applications which have already seeped into our lives.
While we have mentioned the benefits of technology above, the endeavour of humans producing pseudo humans poses grave threats to mankind.
The threat is not presented to us as a monster which we can safeguard ourselves from, but in well disguised formats which can be easily overlooked by the human emotion.
The disguise may be through understanding your food patterns through food ordering apps and bundling that data to restaurants to keep displaying the same data irrespective of the impact it causes to your health.
The disguise of presenting the recommended list of your movies based on movies you watched in the past, imagine how crippled you would be in its absence of scrolling through hordes of content.
The disguise in the name of comfort and convenience and then crippling you mentally from decision making or analytical prowess.
The question is who is feeding the morality and ethics code into this pseudo human which will replace the human in its entirety.
Who amongst the technological giants of the world today will be the flagbearer of creating an ethical ecosystem for robotics and artificial intelligence.
Do we have a Tony Stark in the real world who would dump the superhuman suit in the larger interest of humanity?
Today the adoption for any new product or service is faster in our lives than ever before, which is driven largely on the principle of FOMO (fear of missing out).

There is a mindless demand created for technology without a supply. People waiting for the next iPhone release without utilising the existing features or awaiting the next model of any high-end car is a proof of this unbalanced equilibrium.
A calibrated approach towards the adoption of technology or any offspring of technology is a possible solution to deal with this probable monster.
We need to place the human intelligence quotient on top of the pyramid or knowledge chain to ensure it engulfs all technological advancements.
This would be simple when we understand clearly the use of a product or service in our lives that relates to technology.
We might choose technology to help us with the mundane and routine work which brings or creates no value.
However, humans should remain the custodian on decision making and analytical ability as before, now and in the future that follows.
With all the benefits it has to offer, let technology not be that prospect that entices humans to bring its own extinction.