Technology and Humanity

About some hours back, I was dwelling over a topic that has drawn interest in recent times with the fast-paced and ever changing world we live in where our lives have become increasingly governed by the so-called 'smart devices' or 'gizmos', be it in our educational institutions, at workplace and today with the onslaught of the pandemic- our very own lives are governed by the very existence of this component in varied forms and practices so much so that the lines between personal life and professional life are getting blurred, and also the very thought of who a human being is and is ought to be is starting to be questioned with the arrival of AI and allied technologies such as robotics, NLP (Natural Language Processing), voice recognition, machine learning and much more. It is something without which our existence as of this current date would feel nearly impossible highlighting the true interdependence or interconnectedness that it has come to occupy in our lives in recent times. There is no other better word to refer to this 'life enhancement tool' or 'life simplifying component' than the word 'technology'.

Technology has revolutionized the way we live our current present day lives. With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as of the 21st century, a lot of people- specially us youngsters are glued to our mobile devices or 'smartphones' as the word has come to be used interestingly in recent times, the way we commute or travel has also changed quite significantly with many cities around the world coming up with the so-called 'autonomous vehicles' or 'self-driving cars' that has not failed to amaze many people, specially the 'Elon Musk enthusiasts' and not forgetting the financial assets that we have had or held till a certain period of our lives in banks and other financial institutions are today slowly moving towards the so-called 'digital currencies' or 'cryptocurrencies' in recent times and also a new term that has started to capture the interest of many financial speculators in the markets of the US and other Western countries are the 'NFT's' or the 'Non-Fungible Tokens' to sell original artistic work or creatives in the form of 'digital assets' in the virtual world- much like obtaining or buying a license to use 'Microsoft products and services'. Beneath all of this, there is something that is often neglected or not talked about in recent times and situations, and that is the serious effect that this revolution is having on humanity so far.

It would be hard to expressively say that technology, while at the same time making our lives easier and faster, has also impacted humanity drastically. All over the world, there is this phenomenon that has started to emerge in various businesses worldwide, where due to the automation of certain procedures or processes, many jobs that people once held earlier such as 'data entry keeper' or 'front desk' are today being substituted with technology, with the result being that many jobs have been reduced or cut down owing to it's predominance. The needs for the work place are constantly changing and evolving as a result of this digital revolution with greater emphasis placed on advanced skillsets and industry knowledge, much to the dismay of the educational and training institutions which with their current outdated and non-existent syllabus fail to prepare the future workforce for what the job or the industry in which it resides has to offer. In fact, it has gone to such an extent that today, that there exists a terminology in the influencer world called- virtual influencers who are digitally manipulated or computer generated 'models' that advertise for major brands from the likes of Calvin Klein to Prada, Balmain  almost taking over the entire advertising space in the digital world. This raises some serious questions as to what level or extent is technology taking hold or control of our lives? How long will it take to pass before technology eventually starts to rule us and we become slaves to it as a result of this?

A lot of conformists supporting technology point out that technology specifically it's implications in the form of AI, machine learning and NLP are a result of months and years of constant working and reworking of the coding that is required in order to keep these systems fully functional- all of which are a product of humans or mankind. Therefore it is not likely in the near future that the level of technological development worldwide would go to such an extent that it eventually controls us and we become slaves in the end as a consequence or an after-effect of this 'most-prized innovation' of mankind. A study conducted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation pointed out to a myth that 'AI could replace jobs' contending that the productivity in advanced economies will only grow by more than 2 percent per year. A key reason to this is that virtually all AI is “narrow AI,” focused on doing one thing really well. Therefore it is highly unlikely that job losses could be an issue that would have a drastic impact on the job market worldwide. According to a statement made by the McKinsey Global Institute, "Very few occupations will be automated in their entirety in the near or medium term. Rather, certain activities are more likely to be automated, requiring entire business processes to be transformed, and jobs performed by people to be redefined". This clearly points out to the fact that it is highly unlikely that the entire job market would be drastically impacted with the emergence of technologies such as AI, however it's repercussions could possibly impact certain sectors or sub-sectors of a business necessitating the need for 'an entire business transformation' in order to cope up with the rapidly changing business environment that we all live in.

On the other side of the spectrum, are sceptics who believe that technology and it's wider applicability in the society that we all live in as of today will have a drastic impact on current and subsequent generations of the human race going ahead in the near future. According to Manuel Cebrian who is the co-author of a study to the Max Planck Institute For Human Development- "A super intelligent machine that controls the world sounds like science fiction. But there are already machines that carry out certain important tasks independently without the programmers fully understanding how they learned it [...], that could at some point become uncontrollable and dangerous for humanity". There is yet another contending view put by Iyad Rahwan, another of the researchers in this area that "If we decompose the problem into basic rules of theoretical computing, it turns out that an algorithm that instructed an AI not to destroy the world would inadvertently stop it's own operations. If this happened, we would not know if the containment algorithm would continue to analyze the threat, or if it would have stopped to contain the harmful AI. In effect, this makes the containment algorithm unusuable." This points out to the fact that in effect, it would be nearly impossible to decipher the wide ranging effects that AI could have on the world besides the fact that unawareness of the existence of super-intelligent machines in the near future looms at an all time high.

All of these viewpoints point out to the fact of how serious the current landscape of technology is when it comes to it's deployment in the day to day societies that we all live in today's world. There is an urgent need to be aware of the possible existential threats that it poses on our lives and the need to curb the wide ranging effects that it could have on our societies, to be more precise the succeeding generations to take over this entire planet and eventually the entire of humanity as a whole!