A Philosophical Digest of The Tech Goggle Debacle.

07/06/2023 - Oxford.ing

Now look. I like technology just as much as the next guy, or girl, or old person who actually knows what's going on. Or what snapchat is. There still appears to be some sort of difference between the old people that know how to do things, those that actually know what things are. But hey, at least we have that good old thing called technology right?! Because who wouldn't want to know what's going on one minute and then have absolutely no idea what's going on after just a brief glance away from the screen because you thought outside looked alright for a bit?

No what I'm on about is the more philosophical challenges that face both us and the companies telling us what to do, how to do it, and just how much money we'll all have to pay to be able to do it, and with a depressing sprinkling on top of how much that thing you've only just got used to is going to increase in price because of some hyper-trivial notion of it suddenly costing 'more' to operate. Like how a newborn suddenly is easier to look after than the first kid whose already up and running around with whistles and permanent markers and fueled on a diet of sugary sweets and cereal marketed as 'the healthy alternative', usually the alternative that has some sort of flavor.

What I immediately thought when I scrolled past this image you see at the top, whilst mindlessly using another app that you definitely already know which one just by me saying the word 'scroll', I had a shocking realisation that we're getting to that scary point of Ready Player One and the Matrix trilogy all bungled up into a strange mess.

Right now tech companies like Apple and Google are fighting for control over the AI worlds, quickly throwing out their newest and innovative thingy-majigs that we regular folk might as well call black magic at this point. We've got ChatGPT constantly learning, Google releasing introductions to AI and the guys and girls at Zapier making it all linkable with everything else. We really are living in a world of innovative AI competition and freakily impressive tool-age for making things quicker, easier, and for the most part, better.

But lets have a look at that idea of things just being 'better' with AI shall we?

We as consumers live in an almost mad max existence in western digital societies now, we go from place to place living off of different resources always thinking the grass is greener back east, and the people back east thinking the same things about the west. As a simple reflection on digital existence Mad Max works quite well, although the whole thing with the cars probably doesn't translate as well as it could. The ideas we have now are not too dissimilar to a world of total anarchy, where only a few really have power and control, because lets face it, we as phone scrollers don't really have a power, yes we use the stuff, but the argument their is that we can quickly, almost immediately, stop using the thing that we're using, and use something else, or nothing at all. As a society we've developed a world where we need digital spaces because there's simply not enough space for physical enterprise for all 8 billion of us to have the same as the some 100 billionaires we see online, in pictures about money and economics.

But the concerns for me aren't in that we've created a total heroin style addiction to the want of these tech companies innovations, but more so that our total dependency was so willfully offered with little to no resistance, and the companies kept on telling us to say 'yes please' and 'ooh thanks! that looks cool!' and 'Oh, it's only $3999 dollars to never have to leave my room and even less of a reason to experience a genuine human existence? Where do I sign?'

It gets more concerning the more we think about our teachers in life, the ones who once taught us to 'go out there and make something of yourself', and that 'you wont always have your phone on you', oh how we laughed when we were young hey? I'm scared for what the future holds now that so much teaching is digitally dependent, and think that COVID and lockdowns and online learning were just an extra bucket of petrol that the tech companies were able to throw on the fire, and that we all kind of cheered for as they did so.

If our teachers as like this what does a future with technological hardware and AI really look?

It gets even scarier the more we look at the past and peoples thoughts on what the future would hold for us all. We've all seen the different little snippets and videos of kid's talking about flying cars and humans being regarded as more of a statistic than as actual people, but what about the nearer past events like those pesky Matrix films and those times we saw the dangers that technology can bring with it. Ok, Terminator would be a bad one to bring up. Bit too harsh on the fantasy side, but the robotics isn't exactly far off, and some would even argue that we're already kind of 'at war' with technology now anyway.

People have always pushed back from technology but there is always a time when technology we consider to be innovative and too cutting edge now, to become a scary norm of society. Like the personal computer, or texting, 'what do you mean I can contact anyone I know at any time, from anywhere? Does privacy even exist anymore?' Sir, I'm sorry to tell you 'privacy' is the least of your worries...

The companies that run the show are introducing more radical things by even my standards, and yes I still think they're pretty cool, but I still understand the risks involved and I think a lot of others also do as well. As wheels keep turning and things keep moving, the technology still gets more and more impressive and scarily connected. But what we're forgetting isn't the part about it kind of looking like a Mad Max-Matrix-Ready Player One-Terminator style bit of just how scary it will be when we can't control the content we see in any of the place we go because it's all so interconnected, or that other part about not ever having privacy, or even that other, other part about not really having a decent level of control over the content we consume within those spaces. No.

My concerns for the future or AI and tech innovations stem from that same fear my teachers and parent had, and that slight level of disgust my grandparents had for smart phone, which slowly changed when they realised they could use it to watch only fools and horses. I already harbor the the same fears about what the future might hold, whilst thinking also about all the incredible things that might get achieved because of those exact same advancements.

But when we think of these advancements we've stopped thinking in terms of generations, and have started thinking in terms of the next big thing. Humans really have become just a statistic to the companies designing and innovating this stuff.

My biggest concern is that the normalisation of AI and tech in general will have such a drastic and significant impact on developing mental health and socio-economic psychologies, even more so than it already has with basic social media and digital spaces.

Just a little food for thought really. I cant wait to be told what I need to buy next, right?

TLDR: Tech advancement good, but now I'm starting to feel like the old man who sits on a porch talking about 'the good old days', and now I'm kind of scared about the desensitisation of future generations through AI and tech hardware innovations.