What
I think about technology and its current state and effects on the world is to
some extent outlined in the chapter titled On
Nature in my book To My Daughter,
as well as in the blogpost titled How My World Has Changed. But I keep thinking about it, and meanwhile new children
are growing up into thinking beings (!), and not all of them have read the
above (or can), so I think it’s time to write on the subject again – for all
who are interested in the way I think, and want to understand why.
First,
science and technology are not synonymous. Far too many people are forgetting
this most vital point, and a lot of them these days never learnt the difference
at all (I can’t blame the young, when they hear of institutions with names like Jai Hanuman College of Science
and Technology Management). About this, I have written elsewhere – if you
don’t want to read that, a little research on your own will do you a world of
good.
Second,
technology has been with us for thousands of years: it isn’t
something that was born a few decades or even a couple of centuries ago.
Indeed, any true scholar of the history of science will concur that the most
epoch-making technologies evolved long before proper history began to be
recorded: little that has been developed in the last fifty years has had the civilization-changing effects of the wheel, fire, the knife, writing, gunpowder, the compass, spectacles, surgery under anesthesia and the sanitary water closet. Anyone who gushes too
much about the ‘revolutionary’ apps available on his mobile phone today is
merely betraying the fact that a college education does not these days
guarantee that you have greater practical wisdom and sense of discrimination
than the average rickshawallah.
Thirdly,
technology and computer science/IT are neither synonymous nor coterminous, for
god’s sake – as an increasing number of even ‘educated’ (heaven help us!) folks
seem to imagine. The prosthetics inserted in people’s eyes, hearts and bones
involve technology. Shipbuilding and bridge building and aircraft designing
call for technology, as much as cooking and scientific irrigation techniques do
(and they all developed long before computers came to the aid of engineers).
What an age we are living in when people have to be reminded of such things!...
and as I have written elsewhere, the fact that technology is stagnating in so
many fields, such as agriculture and power generation and automobile engines
and pollution control and water recycling and disaster prediction, so that
journalists and pop-science writers have to harp ad nauseam on ‘exciting’ developments
in IT says nothing either flattering or encouraging about the state of
technology today. As I say when I am in a mood for black comedy, we are heading
for a dystopian world where we shall have to see if we can live on a diet of
phones and TVs, they having become so cheap and simultaneously so ‘advanced’,
seeing that normal food, air and water are becoming increasingly unavailable
and unaffordable!
Which
brings me to another, vital and connected issue. As a very observant man
(incidentally both an engineer and a poet) told me back in the 1980s, jugta bigyaner noy, bigyaponer – it’s an
age of advertizing, not science. It is in the mass media’s commercial interest
to keep gushing about the alleged constant advancement of technology, and
manned by millions of hacks and ad copywriters who never qualified for more
worthwhile jobs, it bombards the public night and day with either trivial or
pseudo-scientific rubbish (just check out the kind of jargon they use for ads
of water purifiers and health drinks on TV, and I learnt not long ago that
these days news like Kindle is about to introduce a backlit reader qualifies as a ‘scoop’.
In my day a leak about Kissinger’s secret visit to China or about the first
planned moon mission would have qualified as such. Judge for yourself). Bernard
Shaw wrote a century ago about a time ‘when people had minds to think with,
rather than a collection of newspapers’. What would he have said if he were
alive today?
Net
result – the public has become obsessed with junking their perfectly usable and
useful possessions, be they phones or cars or hearing aids, to buy the ‘latest’
gizmos on the market, no matter how silly the little ‘improvements’ are, how
useless, and how grossly, needlessly expensive (automatic rain sensors in cars that can turn on the windscreen wipers, you know, probably designed on the assumption that the average driver these days is both blind and deaf). Unless you decide never to grow
up – in a most unedifying sense – you can get very tired of it. I don’t want to
keep ‘updating’ the operating system on my computer every few years: why must I
be forced? I don’t want to be told that the very costly camera I bought eight years
ago should be trashed in favour of the newest toy – I had meant to leave it for
my granddaughter, as grandfathers did with heirlooms in the good old days. It
irritates me when gmail changes its layout and I have to re-learn something so
trivial all over again, just because they want to stay cool with tweens all
over the world. And I hate it when I am told, after I have used Picasa for three
or four years, that the service is being closed down and I must switch to
Google Photos now – and evidently hold my breath for the next such ‘exciting’
news a couple of years down the line again (in my case, the consequence is that
I shall probably stop uploading photos on the net, and go back to a film camera, and I am not the only one thinking that way). Oh, I know, I know there
are many hundred million people in the world today with too much money, too
much time hanging heavy, too little responsibility, too empty brains and no
real passions of any kind, who need to be kept constantly engaged and
entertained this way, but what about the rest of us? Or, when is it going to be
officially declared that henceforth technology shall progress not for the
welfare of humankind as it was understood for thousands of years (as, say,
happened when penicillin was discovered and the Pill invented), but only to
keep lazy nitwits happy?
One
last issue. I read a conversation among morons where someone particularly
demented gushed ‘Technology does not discriminate!’ (having apparently read an
ad copy to that effect somewhere – where else can such gifted people find their
inputs?) Really? Read the whole history of warfare – war has always
cruelly, devastatingly discriminated against the side which lacked superior
technology, from the days of the chariot and ballista, and then the longbow and then the
cannon and rifle and today the robots and drones. In the field of medicine,
every time a new technology is born, whole generations suffer and die watching
only the rich being able to afford the new procedures, drugs and gadgets, only
praying that their children will be more fortunate (I read somewhere that eighty years ago doctors used to impress their dirty-rich patients by carrying around then-exotic ECG machines, and the eye doctor in my
neighbourhood who charged Rs. 13,000 for a cataract operation alongwith lens
transplant twenty years ago – that would be the equivalent of at least Rs.
35,000 now – does it for Rs. 3,000 today). India cannot go in wholesale for
online examinations yet simply because of the fact that several hundred million
students are still computer illiterate for no fault of their own, and the
system will leave them out in the cold. A stage actor works a thousand times harder and earns a thousand times less than a movie star for purely technological reasons. And every time a new technology
replaces a vast number of specialized workers – be they calligraphists or
painters, bank tellers or manual labourers – just where do those people go? Who
takes responsibility for feeding them: especially those among them who are
elderly, and ill, have families to support, in no condition to learn new skills, and have no savings
worth the name to fall back upon? Need still more examples? Technology does not
discriminate, indeed. There should be a law against rich, ignorant imbeciles puking all over
the net…
