The ongoing technological revolution in the world is a good thing. If you take the time to appreciate what devices, data and connectivity are at your disposal from the standpoint of a human alive just over a century ago, your mind would be blown to pieces with warm wonder. There is no doubt as to the stewardship that rests on our shoulders as we direct science and technology. Humans are seriously on the way to colonizing mars. With the big breakthroughs with this plan being made regularly, our recent successful hitchhiking of a probe on a comet seems like child’s play-a far cry from what we will accomplish tomorrow. The reductionism of nanotechnology has blessed humanity with lifesaving stints implanted in blood vessels and whole fabricated immune cells which are artificial and fight diseases. With the digitization of most analogue procedures too, I still cannot say for a fact if all this is for better or for worse although I am enjoying the development of things immensely. Such a question would be better answered by someone else who has lived through the doorway of both eras.
One problem we could face might be the underutilization of these technologies due to the machine-gun-rate they are being churned out at us. As a result, we have so much more softwares to solve a single problem while other problems sit unattended to for years. It is like the coal mining days again. Once coal was discovered in a specific place, everyone went there with their diggers and shovels ready to disembowel the earth. It is the same phenomenon we face today. When a specific problem is targeted by software developers for example, all other software developers cannot think of any other problem that needs to be solved. We have gotten to a point where we have the same development issues on the lips of everyone and the same method of tackling it to tag along-be it poverty, migration, healthcare delivery, or the displacement of persons; when we think about the problem, everyone has their softwares ready for that single problem that might not even have a great impact if it is solved. It is as if the technological race that we are all involved in today is to impress one another rather than resolve problems. If this is the case then we must reform our thinking and address one problem at a time with one tool at a time from our box of technological solutions rather than doing otherwise.
The experts at the producing end of these most engaging technologies we have seen yet must cross-pollinate their ideas while at the same time maintaining their individuality in problem solving to avoid repetitive innovations. If they successfully implement this, we would have societies with an infinite armamentarium of solutions for problems as they arise. We would truly then reap the fruits of the 21st century and although I agree with Rene Dubos when he says that “Natural and cultural forces will overcome technological and political imperatives and continue to nurture the genius loci which accounts for the persistence of place”, I am convinced that even him would have his jaws drop if he could see now, how fast and proficiently we are going in our time.
