Is life without technology better?

What has technology taken from us?

It is also rarer to find happiness in a man surrounded by the miracles of technology than among people living in the desert of the jungle and who by the standards set by our society would be considered destitute and out of touch.

– Thor Heyerdahl Norwegian – Explorer October 6, 1914 – April 18, 2002

As a senior I am less and less impressed by technological advances thrust upon us today. Whenever something new comes along there are the obvious benefits but it seems there are double the number of issues that come with it. Social media for example. If you don’t see the downside of social media, check out the movie “The Social Dilemma” if you dare.

There is always bad that comes with the good

Another personal example was when I owned a small auto repair shop back in the late 1980’s. I worked alone so it was very difficult to leave the shop to do a service call as I worried about missing important phone calls. Enter the cellular phone. I thought it was a godsend as I could forward my shop phone to it while I was out and handle incoming business while attending to my service calls, it helped me increase business. I was quite happy with it. At the time these were very expensive to buy and to use, typically only business people had them. I started to find that as more people started to use them they started to have the opposite effect, instead of saving me time it became a leash  on me.

People knew I had one so they would call any time a thought crossed their mind and would be angry if I did not answer even late in the evening whereas before they knew I closed at 5 and would just call the next day. Instead of being a time saver it now became a time robber. It lengthened my day, everything was urgent now and I got to the point that I couldn’t turn it off for fear of missing out on some business. The biggest problem was that now everybody had them and I could not go back to the simpler time without it costing me business. It seems it was a trap.

The trouble with technology is that the inventors and often the initial users can usually only see the positive outcomes. Unfortunately almost everything can be weaponized, politicized or monetized which most often outweighs the good. I feel that it has never been clearer that our lives are completely controlled from an unseen force. Is it really all of humanity that wants to colonize Mars? Do we all want refrigerators with TV screens on them? Did we all want to switch from paper bags to plastic and now back again? Do we all want driverless cars? Do we all want complete surveillance to keep us safe? You don’t have to think about any of this stuff for very long before you can see how things might go wrong.

Why did we let ourselves get so dependant on tech?

If the power goes out, the kid at McDonalds can’t sell me a cheeseburger because the payment machine is out and he can’t take cash because he can’t figure out how to make change for a 10 dollar bill. The automatic grill most likely quit working anyway. We control everything with computers even so many things that aren’t really improved by it, my toast is just as toasted with my 30 year old toaster as with a new high tech one which will most likely not last more than 5 years. What have we gained? I know somebody will point out that the new toaster will use fractionally less power and has sensors that make sure it is evenly browned in such a way that will pass all quality control tests performed on it by the institute of idiots with nothing better to do. So what?

The Carrington effect was a massive geomagnetic storm caused by a solar flair on the sun that happened in 1859. It disrupted telegraph systems at the time and that was about it because that was all there really was to disrupt. Fast forward to now, there have been similar sized storms but they have not hit the earth directly but if it did then there would be massive power outages and most likely a lengthy disruption to life on this planet. Just think about that for a moment. Everything is now controlled by computers that would quit working, including the systems that deliver electricity to us. People freak out when their email quits working for a few minutes. Nobody knows how to survive without technology doing everything for us anymore. You can’t look up on Google how to survive a worldwide computer failure either, it will be gone too.

Does anybody care?

It is interesting to note that sales of survival gear and products for living “off the grid” have skyrocketed in the past few years. I am obviously not the only one that has given this some thought. Stephen Hawking (famed  physicist) famously went as far as predicting that future developments in AI “could spell the end of the human race.” and could be the “worst event in the history of our civilization”. Unless, of course, we can all get along and use it only for good – SARCASM there.

The answer to the question for me as a senior whether we are better off with modern technology completely controlled by computers or not is that it seems to have gone off the rails somewhere. I am not looking forward to the future controlled by it. I think we have gotten to a point where the bad is definitely outweighing the good. My plan is to retire to an island in the Philippines, live in a grass hut and just wait for an earthquake, typhoon, killer cobra or giant crocodile to get me. That way I have a little control over that situation.