This should be a mile-long essay, but in turn it’ll be a quick braindump of sorts.
We research and improve technology to make our lives easier. To save ourselves from retyping entire documents when we make one mistake. To enable faster communications and easier business. And many, many other aspects of life should benefit from technology.
Instead, the direction we took involves a lot more sweating, but this time under the leash of the cellphone-and-laptop day. The corporate masters whip us even harder to increase production - and instead of freeing more time in our lives for family and friends1, we must produce more. We have some amazing tech available to us, from RFID to image recognition, and we use it to turn our lives into an Orwellian epic. The problems we have online - phishing, spamming, invasion of privacy, the MAFIAA - would not be so grave, had we applied technology more carefully, with more consideration of the impacts of what we were doing.
I do not see a radical change in sight. I could argue for or against it, but it would all be speculation. I believe, however, that education about technology can seriously improve our quality of life quite fast. As much as I enjoy being part of a ’select’ crowd, if you can call it that, I think that once technology gets out of geekdom and into popdom we stand a fighting chance. Once high-schoolers learn about technology just as they do math and social studies2 more people will be aware of the aspects, good and bad, of a life so focused around tech. And, most importantly, they should be able to make informed decisions by taking into account those same aspects.
This is no call-to-arms about disabling all that is tech around you. Understanding that technology cannot be escaped - and, really, it can be a good thing - is the first step to the cure. In fact, it is the first step in the education that I was talking about.
Then there’s the free flow of information, shutting down of governmental intervention and espionage of its subjects, globalization through the Internet…
