Is technology dehumanising interaction?
Yesterday I picked up the following quote from one of my newsletter subscriptions:
'As predicted, Amazon just announced that it will roll out its newly named “Just Walk Out” cashier-less technology across its Whole Foods Stores. This is exciting news. The rollout will enable consumers to walk into Whole Foods, scan their palm or a bar code on their phone, load up their cart with groceries, and then leave the store. When they walk out, their Amazon account will automatically be charged for the products they took with them. How’s that for convenient?'
Imagine a convenient store without any staff. Yes of course it would be very convenient to just grap stuff and walk out the door. The part of the story where I personally got hung up was where it said: 'scan their palm'. I suppose this means some form of implanted chip. Which sent the shivers down my spine reading it.
Are we really going to go the path of replacing everything with chips and fleeting ones and zeros in cyberspace and turning humans into cyborgs?
I do not think the human experience was made for less human interaction and less physical contact. And I do not think the human body needs to be enhanced by technology. A healthy body is capable of healing itself and it is capable of anything any technology shows us if we are willing to believe and find the dormant aspect of our bodies to develop it. It is the same as your muscles. If you do not use them they wither and you are not aware of them.
Many humans have shown that we are capable of so much more. Take the examples of the Shaolin Monks drying wet towels on their body at freezing temperatures by raising their body temperature mentally.
Technology is in a sense dehumanising us. It invites people to externalise innate capabilities and thereby believing they can not do it themselves. It is disempowering. Technology never is nor was there to do that. It is in a spiritual sense a mirror image and invitation off and to develop those same capacities ourselves.
Take a cell phone. The network chip in it operates kind of like our pineal gland. It connects cell phones. Just like we on a spiritual energetic level connect to each other via our pineal glands. Yes I know it is considered fringe science but so was the electric motor 130 years ago and look now.
I am very worried about the invasion of the techies as I call it. Up to about two years ago I was considered to be one too, being a full time software engineer. Although I never considered myself to be a nurd, nor an unquestionable worshipper of Iron Man (aka Elon Musk). I never really understood that gadget worshipping and Hollywood induced person glorifying. Yes I got hooked on computer and programming in my teens in the 80s, but after a few decades of working the allure of the technology was gone. It was just one big really good hamer, that I used to drive nails with on a daily basis and paid for my living expenses while I was having fun creating value for real people. Although I never saw much of my companies real customers. As most IT nurds will tell you that they love their work very much, if only for those pesky customers. Of course they will never admit that point of view, except amongst colleagues.
I see that technology makes life more convenient, but at the same time I see that it makes us dependant on it more and more and that it dehumanises social interaction. It takes the soul out of it step by step. The amount of ways we can communicate by technology has exploded since my youth in the 80s and even since the start of the Internet, when we only had character based email. I will dare to say that the quality of communication has dropped inversely and keeps dropping, which is not strange as you are stripping more and more of the richness of communication. It is a scientific fact that 80% of effectiveness of human communication is based in non-verbal signals. Most technology based communication just cancels almost all of that 80% out.
Take for instance the new multiverse by Facebook, it is hyped by Oprah talking to Mark Zuckerberg as a fantastic new means of ‘safely’ interacting with friends, family and colleagues. Safely because you do not really interact with each other, so no germs are passed. And then it is claimed to solve the problem of only video and audio communication and would enhance communication quality and fun in social interaction. Well I do hope people see that it is kind of like saying: Look at how great it is to ride a bike, when everybody can only walk, because a government told everybody they cannot drive cars anymore. It makes no sense and it is just a form of gas lighting in my humble opinion.
Human beings are made to interact face to face. The richness of that form of communication can never be matched by any reduction of it by any technology, not even holography. What in my opinion is happening is that technology companies and media are intentionally or not dehumanising human interaction. It is creating soul less forms of interaction through machines. It creates barriers for real personal interaction where there before were non. I have no clue why they are working that agenda, accept as a means to find another form of control when technology such as crypto and blockchain promises us more freedom from centralised control. But oh my God I must be a conspiracy theorist for suggesting this.
In my youth the dairy sales man came to my house to deliver the milk and butter and you would be able to look them in the eye and talk about their lives and our lives, you could get inspiration and advice, you could give them a hug or a shoulder to cry on if needed and hear about what is going on in the neighbourhood. But all of that is gone. You put in the order online and the groceries are delivered to your doorstep contactless. No chance your going to get to talk to the delivery person. And what is going down the tubes next year? Perhaps I am getting too old, but not too old to see that this is not good for humanity.
Hugging is considered a social no no these days, but it is proven scientific fact that humans need physical contact for emotional well being. Depriving people from it is one of the causes of depression.
These days when you try to communicate with a big company you do not get to see or speak to a human at first anymore. You get a bot to speak to who most of the time does not even understand the simplest human question. Very convenient to discourage a customer from ever interacting with you for real. It is soulless and dehumanising in my opinion.
I am worried that all this technology will even further worsen human communication and will create all kinds of problems because of communication break downs. The Corona period has already proven this. If you cancel out human interaction you create all kinds of social and economic problems and a back log in for instance mental healthcare that could take years to catch up with and create a negative domino effect. No amount of technology will solve those kind of problems. That is one of the biggest fallacies of our time. The believe that every problem can and needs to be solved by technology. We desperately need to balance all this technology with an increase in human awareness and discussions about the consequences of its use. Otherwise we will probably end up like Atlantis destroying ourselves in the process. Ooh boy he has his tin foil hat up again!
We need a counterbalance that takes into account the fact the we as human beings have souls and feelings and a body and that we need physical stuff to relate to. Otherwise you could as well volunteer to be hooked up into the Matrix as in the movie. If we don’t, we run the risk of turning into the society portrayed in the terminator movies. Controlled by a power hungry elite via AI. Where we all are measured and put through the same standard of social conduct. Brrrr… No thanks. Human bodies were not designed to be reduced to worthless, unnecessary deemed things, that need to be enhanced because they are so fragile and insignificant. They were designed to allow us to grow, develop and interact with the world and are perhaps the only real ‘technology’ we really need. All technology is only a surrogate, a mirror image of that same thing.
End of rant.
