India Future Society

Since the origin of human species, it is our own curiosity which has been the driving force behind the working of our society. That, combined with ingenious properties of imagination, knowledge, free will and emotions can be perceived to act as global glue which unifies human race. This property and human wisdom gave birth to something we call technology today.

Technology, as defined by most of the dictionaries, is a discipline, which deals with arts or science of applying scientific knowledge to practical problems. The viewpoint which I have chosen for technology, i.e. it as a decay element responsible for the decay of bonding between human and nature, may be perceived by most of the readers as a negative attack on it. But, here, I’d like to be neutral and would try to focus on just the effects of technology in the context of the article, rather than actually saying anything about it being good or bad. Of course, pros and cons are the two faces of the same coin.

As A.P.J Abdul Kalam, the former president of India, righteously points out in his book – “Ignited minds”, that- our planet is in a perpetual state of motion as it goes spinning through space. He then goes on to say- “everything on this planet is a part of this movement, even though it appears to us as motionless. I am on the planet and thus part of the energy that moves it. The energy that is the very essence of the planet is in me.” It is transparent from the same logic that the same analogy can be applied to technology. The basic essence of technology is that it is a part of the very same nature of which we are made up of, and what we see and perceive around us. But this manifestation of nature has been acting as a factor which led us to a path which takes us away from the nature in this modern world, and thus deviates away from the principle goal.

With a bit more retrospection, we can say that the origin of present day technology has its roots in the birth of mathematics and the evolution of scientific analysis few thousands years back. It has evolved from that native form to something which has now got ingrained into the very fabric of our social existence. But where is this evolution taking us to? We have the proof that with our increased dependence on smart phones, GPS, internet, communications, energy, computing, computers and software, electronic devices, digitally morphed social structure and many other inevitable technological aids, we are absolutely helpless without it and all of it has taken us far away from the very pure nature and its own way of working. By its own way of working, I mean how it originally operates and tends to operates without human consciousness. The way it operates in our neighboring planet Mars. The way it operates on a different planet of a far away start system, inside the trees, amidst the inside of mysterious clouds, the inside of the atomic nucleus, at scales down to billions and billions times smaller than that of the size of electron, inside the minds of non-human living species and many other such similar undiscovered territories.

The very fact, that it is fragile, and has the tendency to sway away from us at the most critical and needful moments has been repeatedly and conspicuously showcased to the entire world. It needs to be strengthened. The moments, when a Tsunami occurs to cause the death of tens of thousands of people, the moments when a flood sweeps an entire city into its womb to death, when a volcano eruption destroys its neighboring area and interrupts the aerial transportation for days and changes the financial dynamics of the entire world in a fraction of a second, when there is a oil leak which makes the oceans impure for the living forms to live in it and even die, when an accident occurs and leads to the loss of an innocent life, when some technology fails and leads to air and land crashes, and all such apparent critical scenarios. No doubt, it has helped us to evolve to a stage where we are now, but we do have an urgent need to adapt it to the tune of nature to live in resonance and harmony with it. There is now a very self-evident situation in our present contemporary world, where we can find research where technology in helping us to understand nature by an understanding of the very fundamental building blocks and processes. Renowned and scientific leaders in their own fields are now talking about merging of man and machines, successful synthetic origin of life, decoding the entire genome of living species, more number of missions to neighboring planets (may be to a different star system someday), artificial intelligence, defying death, understand matter, stronger & faster global networks, technological singularity, convergence (of life, physical and engineering sciences), reverse engineering the entire brain, uninterrupted energy sources, a third revolution, and what not. Prospects looks not so gleam that it will indeed bring us very close to the nature as we know it.
Coming to our present era, which can be undoubtedly dubbed as the information age, where changes are happening at the speed of light, technology has brought us to a point from where it is not only difficult to go back, but seemingly impossible. It won’t be wrong to say that the way it has made contemporary life so much easier, sometimes the freedom tends to take the vox-populi away from its original purpose of bringing us closer to nature and provide its understanding. The citizens of our modern world have the choice in their own hands, either to adapt to it and work on it for its better prospects, or wait until it’s too late to act..

Tags: Society, Technology