Humanity vs Technology
If you had asked me to wager on writing another post here this soon, I won’t have put money on it, but here we are, and just like the last time, this one is also inspired by a talk I gave at Lighthouse Abuja last weekend during the youth convention by the same title.
We would like you to talk about technology vs humanity. How has technology influenced humanity? What is the future like? What can we do in the present? How can we achieve relevance through technology/social media?
When I got the brief (above) a few weeks ago, I struggled to grasp it (it’s hard to explain this in detail, but I’m typically someone who just figures stuff out as soon as I see them, or at least have an angle…drawing blanks is unusual and frustrating) and stayed in that infuriated state till the night before I was to go to Abuja for the meeting. (There’s a chance that I was just swamped and stressed and couldn’t focus, but that’s another story).
So in my desperation to get a handle of what I needed to say, I did what I usually do as a last resort when I need to get something to stick — abstract everything to the fundamental basics and find the common denominator(s) that makes sense.
The first (and frankly quite obvious) thing about man’s interaction with technology is that while there’s almost always constant contact, it appears to happen in waves.
Many of those waves have happened over time, from homo sapiens (are we still those by the way? There’s a chance we’ve evolved into something else) discovering stone tools, to discovering that they could rare wheat and domesticate animals, to the Gutenberg press being invented in 1440, to the industrial revolution that started around 1775, to the microprocessor being invented in 1958, to the adoption of TCP/IP by ARPANET in 1983 and the invention of the internet in 1989 e.t.c
When you take a closer look at each wave, you start to notice trends, each wave came with the positives and the negatives. Humans figured wheat out, and with that came dietary issues, relatively smaller fitness, etc. We figured out printing and all of a sudden we were able to document and incrementally build on knowledge; (if you ask me, this one singular wave has been the most important in recent times, and is the foundation of almost everything we know and believe today) but with that came the holy wars, which literally lasted over a hundred years. The computer and internet are more recent, so I don’t need to point out the positives and negatives of those, we live with them every day.
Bottomline, every wave comes with its good and bad, but that’s not even the most fascinating thing.
What fascinates me the most about each wave of the interaction between the human race and technology is that it ALWAYS ends with just one outcome: CHANGE.
Humanity vs Technology = Change
Every single time, technology causes the human race to change the way it lives. This is all the more fascinating when you realise how resistant to change we naturally are. (Side Note: This is why the Igbo vs Mandarin debate ignited by the tweet below a few weeks ago was super fascinating to me)
https://twitter.com/JasonNjoku/status/1155817891016642560
Back to the subject, if change is inevitable, why are we so resistant to it? The world we live in changes constantly, there would never be two days that are exactly the same. Even as humans, we’re technically never the same, as our bodies constantly change every second from the moment we are born, till we die. Every single thing changes. So maybe we’re hanging on to the bits we think are in our control to stay sane? No idea.
Everything we know, all the literature we have, the sum total of all the knowledge we have aggregated as a race points to the fact that everything changes and everything we know will change. So maybe it’s time we start to embrace change a little bit more?
On a final note, when you zoom out, you find that it’s the individuals and societies that are the least resistant to change that progress with every wave, while the ones most resistant to change get left behind.
The most important skill in technology (and life in general?) is the ability to change, because while even the most complex models and algorithms still struggle to predict the future, the one thing you can be sure about is that is the future will be different.
P.S: I’ll probably expand on this some more if I get the time, but from a strictly Christian/Bible perspective.
