THE PEOPLE FRIENDLY TECHNOLOGY?

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all wrong reasons.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

Scientific and technological advances are considered to be inescapable for the advancement of mankind. The technological developments are believed to have made the lives of the people more comfortable and progressive. So new technologies are more often than not labeled as people-friendly notwithstanding whether they are so or not. But, a question that evades a satisfactory answer in the minds of many people is whether these technologies are people-friendly as made out to be. It is a difficult question to answer in either negative or affirmative but both the points of view may have many takers.
There is no gainsaying that the mankind has progressed by leaps and bounds only due to the technological advancement over a very long time. The technology alone deserves credit for uplifting the people from many miseries and protecting and saving them from many a natural calamity.
It was the early men who set the ball of creative inventions rolling with their never-ending quest for knowledge and improvisation. The relatively innocuous wheel is said to be the first break-through in the history of mankind’s march towards progress. Subsequently, the profoundly ignited minds have never let any opportunity to improvise the known technologies go waste. This intellectual, scientific, and technological community painstakingly laboured a great deal, burning a considerable quantity of mid-night oil, to invent/discover.
When someone has patience to comb through the recorded history it can be seen that the Time Line , viz. Classical Age (from 500 BC to 500 AD), Middle Age (from 501 AD to1300 AD), and Renaissance Age (from 1301 AD onwards), is rich with the progress of mankind. All these periods and the Modern Age bear testimony to the Civilisation, the Greek creativity, Spread of Religions, Creative energy of the Europe, Exploration by the adventurists, Colonialism, industrial revolution, bloody political revolutions, bloodless coups, Nuclearisation, Information technology et al. In all these milestone events the contemporary technology played a pivotal role in shaping the destiny of the human kind the course of the history.
Sadly, over the years the contemporary technology began to be misused and abused by those who were intoxicated with the urge for more and more power and authority to rule over the mankind. Every invention became a slave of a selected few and was not put to the constructive use of the people. If we analyse how some events have heaped unimaginable sufferings on the innocents by the selfish, this becomes quite apparent that technologies are more often misused ad infinitum ad nauseum. Take for example, how the invention of munitions originally meant for delf-defence has ended up as a powerful political weapon to decimate the perceived and real enemies. The arsenic chemicals have become handy tools for some to wipe out certain ethnic communities from this earth over which they too had equal rights. Nuclear arsenal has become too useful for the Superpowers to obliterate some areas from the globe. The stories of the cruelty of the selfish man using the technology thus have no end.
Unfortunately, technology was the unwilling and unwitting victim of the insatiable greed and perversity of the mankind for power and pelf. They have enslaved the technology to heap untold hardships on the fellow-men. Madame Curie who sacrificed her life to discover Uranium had the least idea that the same material would be enriched to create nuclear devices which have the potentials to annihilate the entire earth many times. When we do introspection we learn that the technology was a potential weapon in the hands of the wrong people.

The technology also poses a formidable threat to the working class in its struggle for employment. There is a Man-versus-Machine conflict in the industrial scenario and the employment market. Every new innovative machine has the fire power to replace scores of people from the job in which they are employed. Automation in any areas can render millions of workers jobless. The automation issue, therefore, presents a Scylla and Charybdis like situation. As far as embracing automation is concerned the world is facing a classical dilemma of damn-it-if-do damn-it-if-don’t. Nevertheless, in the race between the man and machine, the latter seems to be the clear winner. We seize the gravity of the problem only when we understand that the machines have already edged out several professions from the professional world and continue its odyssey to finish of several more professions in the future.
However, it is no one’s case that we should be opposed to new technology like a Luddite. That is no one’s case. But, we ought to remember that technology should not be a means to a wrongly intended purpose. Not using the new technologies will tantamount to throwing the baby along with the bathwater. What is, therefore, required is a prudential use of technology for people-friendly purposes.
Just look at the way how technology has changed our lives as we experience now. Today, sitting in the cozy comfort of our home we know what is happening across the globe on a second-to-second basis at the click of your mouse. But we do not know what has happened to our neighbour: we do not know whether s/he is dead or alive. Because no one has time or inclination to look into such silly matters and we have far more serious issues to know and address.
Long live technology!