I stated in my last blog that I love technology, but that comes with a disclaimer. I love technology that is subjugated to human interests. More and more, I believe that we are allowing technology to dominate us.
Stephen King wrote a great story called The Tommyknockers which featured, as the villains a race of extraterrestrials who loved to tinker and build great gadgets, even though they didn't understand the science behind them and had no real purpose in building them. They just tinkered and mindlessly built a lot of junk and found uses for some of it. Of course, being a King novel, the uses were evil.
Are we much different? We build great electronic gear, but we still, if we are honest, really don't know what electricity is. We can say it is moving electrons, but, while we can describe some aspects of those electrons and use mathematics to explain some of their motions, we cannot say just what an electron is and its motions are, according to quantum mechanics, kind of sketchy. But, we build and build and a lot of the stuff we build is pretty useful.
So we have made machines of greater and greater complexity, all the while assuring ourselves that all would be to our benefit. It is not. Humans need to work, to be active, and here and there, to feel creative. We all love to complain about working but let me assure you, having recently gone through it, not having a job to go to each day is incredibly disorienting. Retirement is not easy to get used to even when you have reached the appropriate age.
Thanks to advances in technology, folks who have trained to do certain jobs, who take pride in their work, are being replaced by advances in technology. I recently read about the people who were working in Eastman Kodak's facility in Rochester, NY. The rise in digital technology which had led to the ubiquitous smart phone pictures has put them out of work. There are those who say that they just need to retrain and get new jobs, but what is there to do? Robotics have streamlined production to the point that few real humans need to do much and, as time passes, robots will do most everything. We will become a Nation of burger servers and Uber drivers and it will hit other, poorer countries harder. In Third World countries, folks work for next to nothing making clothes. What will happen when machines are sophisticated enough to measure, cut, and stitch material? If that cannot yet be done, hang in, it will be soon. Actually, I may be behind the times, and machines may be now making our clothes, things change so fast it is hard to keep up.
What will happen in those countries when people who are willingly working for slave wages are told they no longer will even have that? Heck, what will happen in this country? Corporations will tell you that they are responsible to investors and must find the lowest ways to produce their goods. I guess eliminating people altogether and sticking with robotics, from that view point is the way to go.
But what of the billions who are just eking by? What will they do? Well, pay attention folks, because here is where things get weird. Look up, on your computer, The Georgia Guidestones. This monument, paid for by some anonymous donor, seems to be a statement of purpose, a plan for recreating the World, and one of its goals is to limit the World's population to 500000000, a half billion. To get there would require eliminating about 6 billion humans. Now, I have trouble believing that the sponsors of this program are going to patiently wait for birth control to lower the population. And this is not just the work of some loan, rich nut. Other groups have echoed similar sentiments, many of them men and women with great power and influence. Think David Rockefeller kind of rich and influential.
How will those goals be accomplished? I don't have a clue, bur I am fairly sure that it won't be pleasant. Sometimes I think that the primary way will be to simply convince everyone that they are meaningless and let angry despair set off a wide range of disasters. This is some, not all, but some, of the driving force behind the great allure of terrorism. If someone feels worthless, the idea of pleasing some angry deity by killing themselves and others becomes a little more understandable.
So next time you think of how great all your gadgets are and how wonderful our computerized world is, think again. All things in this world are a blend of good and evil. Any thing that purports to be a great boon to man will come with a Devil's Price. What will the future bring? Who knows? Remember Frank Herbert's book, Dune. The story is set in a time when man, tired of being ruled by machines has rebelled and fought a long war against the robots, finally winning and banning thinking machines forever.
In Part 2, I will talk a bit more about what our compulsive use of technology is doing to our souls. Remember, technology is fine, as long as we remain the bosses.
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