Technophilia Unchained - A confession from a reluctant participant in the digital age
Tim Wyatt – England
Why do we love something which is murdering us?
The message is getting clearer day by day and even hour by hour. The technologies we’ve created are no longer killing us slowly. They’ve become a hyperactive means of death and destruction as evidenced by the hundred plus wars currently taking place in the world. And before this technocratic domination drives us into the grave it makes us weak, dependent and ill. And then it drives us mad.
Technology rules absolutely everything. As I’ve said before, it’s become the darkest black magic imaginable
And yet we still adore the seductive and addictive allure that technology offers. We should resist but we can’t. We have to adhere to it because it’s destroyed all our resistance.
For decades technology has advanced remorselessly like a juggernaut in a blitzkrieg progressively robbing humans of their individuality, their spirit and their dignity. It’s tantalized and seduced us in a dangerous liaison.
Technophilia – the adoration and slavish worship of technology – has reached pandemic proportions. It’s not only life-threatening but poses an existential threat. Technophilia has woven a tangled web from which there seems little prospect of escape. But I hope that I’m wrong about this and there may still remain a narrowing window of opportunity to counteract this systematic de-humanizing of every one of us.
AI – then the even more powerful General AI (which has an unlimited remit) – along with even darker and probably more demented technologies we know nothing about, ensure that everyone is caught in this ever-tightening straight-jacket of surveillance and manipulation.
Forget all the promised and putative benefits the proponents of AI preach about so glibly and enthusiastically. Look at the grim imminent realities AI promises. It will steal our jobs, eradicate skills, make us idle and unable to think any more. It will slowly create a brain-dead, mindless humanity incapable of generating original let alone creative thought.
These developments suck us up in their whirlwind and there seems no way to resist any of them. At one time there may have been a choice as to whether we became engaged with and absorbed by emerging technologies. Now – other than decamping to a lonely wilderness and becoming wholly self-sufficient (which for 99.9 per cent of people is very unlikely) – that choice has largely gone.
Functioning without technology has become almost impossible because it slithers deviously through every dimension of our lives
Most technologies rely on electricity and we’re also entirely dependent on this. AI and its cousins will require a huge increase in power generation. Can supply keep up with burgeoning demand? And what happens if and when that supply stops for any reason, even locally. The lights go out. Catastrophe quickly ensues. Without backup generators people in hospitals can no longer be kept alive. Pumps stop and cities flood. People freeze. Food production and distribution ceases. And every other single aspect of the world we know progressively tumbles into chaos as a domino effect takes hold.
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Naturally, the more observant among you will already have noted the deep hypocrisy and contradiction in what I write. Without the very technology I detest and despise I wouldn’t be able to communicate with you in the way I do. In the past I would have had to use a typewriter, post the manuscript to a publisher of some kind and hope they might print it in a periodical or a book. (In most cases they didn’t; my words were returned in a brown envelope with a terse rejection slip.) Now at least I can communicate directly without any intermediary (and as a fringe benefit avoid receiving a note which usually read, ‘…your work does not fit our requirements at this time etc. etc.’)
I agree there are double standards in my argument. I have to admit that technology has brought us tremendous benefits in every single area of our lives. And this is why it’s made us over-dependent and is stripping us of our autonomy. It’s made us soft and malleable.
We’ve become easy to manipulate
At one time technologies developed very, very slowly. Horses and carts remained unchanged for centuries. Progress was usually gradual and incremental. In the past two centuries, since the Industrial Revolution, successive generations of time- and labor-saving technologies have appeared and then been superseded at an ever more rapid pace. Stuff is often redundant by the time it reaches the factory’s goods outwards department.
All this stuff may have brought convenience to our lives and reduced back-breaking domestic and industrial chores. During the twentieth century technological advancement and the pace of change accelerated exponentially especially in communications – the telegraph, telephone, photography, film, wireless, television, the mobile phone, virtual reality and the internet. And anything else I’ve forgotten.
Advances in AI are ensuring that a ‘machine consciousness’ becomes even more powerful and pervasive than it already is. This and its accompanying digital technologies create a harsh and soulless one-size-fits-all dislocated and alienated mentality. As an analogue man trapped in a digital world, I feel very uncomfortable about all of this, and I cringe when I try to imagine what the future holds – especially if I’m obliged to reincarnate quickly.
The paradox is that technology which started out as our servant has now become a dominant and abusive jailer. It improved and enhanced our lives and then it started to ruin and diminish them.
On a more optimistic note, let’s regard the technologies themselves as neutral, neither good nor bad. This is a little naïve, I know. But let’s suppose that it’s the purpose and use to which they’re put which is the problem. And there appear to be four very sinister and damaging applications – to weaponize these technologies, to control and manipulate people, to spy on them or create large numbers of unnecessary and imminently redundant products for commercial exploitation. The last reason may be the least egregious.
There’s always the constant promise that these technologies will offer improvements of some description – enhanced enjoyment, new ways to spend our leisure time, improved healthcare and food production or just cooking up ever more efficient ways of killing one another. But since profit and performance usually outweigh potential, no one thinks very much about the implications of their future use. Well, why would they? There’s no morality at play here.
Hypnotized, or what …?
Photo © David M. Grossman
Who would have thought that in four decades the mobile phone – an exciting and innovative invention to bring people in closer and more convenient contact – would have gone from a wireless communication device to a ubiquitous accessory carried by almost everyone? Who could have imagined that in a few short years it would develop into the biggest tool of enslavement yet devised?
This once simple communication device now divides rather than unites. These devices cook our brains, stilt children’s cognitive development and turn us into screen-staring zombies. They monitor us and the world. They can even tell us if we’re in imminent need of cardiac defibrillation. We can’t go anywhere without them. They’ve become our identity, our bank vault and principal means of perceiving the wider world.
Forty years ago, working as a TV reporter for the BBC I was one of the first people outside millionaire status to obtain a mobile phone. It looked like something purloined straight from the military, weighing as much as a car battery and featuring a curly two-foot aerial along with a handset robust enough to smash rocks. Even in those days when I was young and strong it almost gave me a hernia.
These days travel anywhere and the majority of passengers on the train, plane or bus – or waiting in the lounges to board them – are hypnotized by these pieces of plastic and usually staring at them in a kind of religious adoration. Walk down any street and it’s the same. There are more of these phones than there are people on the planet, which can only mean that some people are using more than one device simultaneously.
As someone at the lower end of the spectrum of technological dependency, making only a handful of calls a day, I feel fortunate and even a little smug that four decades of use haven’t sucked me into deep and irretrievable addiction. Sometimes I boast to those who’ll listen that I’ve sent fewer than twenty text messages in my entire life. (I have a particularly potent allergy concerning this particular form of communication.)
Finally, on a positive and, I hope, more practical note, rather than ranting about the invasiveness of technology and how it’s destroying the world, I should offer a possible solution to humanity’s doomed love affair with machines.
Perhaps one way would be to set up a support group for those afflicted just the way they do with alcoholics and other substance abusers. Technophiliacs Anonymous might be a rather copycat name but it makes the point. Participants would sit in a circle sharing their experiences. ‘My name’s Jim and I’m a technophiliac.’ Inevitably, many such sessions would be interrupted by someone suddenly rushing out of the room in a frenzied panic to catch up on the latest algorithmic offerings from their social media feed.
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