A Brave New World?

^{Image by Tumisu from Pixabay}

A new era began a decade ago. In the last two years, or perhaps longer, a kind of global embarrassment has emerged.

No one ever wanted to be left behind, miss the boat, or become outdated. And today, this frenzy and urgent need are even more noticeable.

Is technology really helping us to have more time to do what we really need to do, or is it just distracting us and making us, in a way, slaves to a system in which we depend entirely on external computerized systems with highly complex algorithms?

We are increasingly handing over some of the tasks we used to do to a technology that is said to be changing the world and society in ways never seen before. And I have no doubt about that.

It remains for me to understand whether this passing of the baton will lead us to a better place than we are currently in.

We often see, in various areas of our lives, that when we become more dependent on a particular technology, we trust that this technology will always be functional and available. But what should we do when this is not possible? Are we not surrendering the few intellectual abilities that distinguish us from one another, and have reasoning and mental ramifications become mere ideas collected by a huge library of data?

Are we not, therefore, surrendering something like our intellectual soul to another? Not in the sense of trusting “it,” but of being overcome by laziness and idleness.

In life, when we stop doing something that was previously more laborious, we always find something new to do. We shift the time that was spent on that task to later, and very hypothetically, do something we like better.

Take simple household chores, for example. We can wash the dishes by hand, and it's no big deal, especially if we live alone and there aren't many dishes to wash, but we can greatly improve our quality of life by buying a dishwasher.

The few minutes we spent on this task, which does not require high intellectual capacity, were like a mantra, allowing our ideas to flow freely. Those minutes, when we were simply doing something mechanical, were used by our consciousness, which detached itself from reality and let ideas float...

How many of us have had an “epiphany” while vacuuming the house, taking a shower, or even cooking? It is in simple tasks that our minds found a nest and a starting point for neural connections to be established, without even thinking that we had to develop something.

Nowadays, and increasingly so, we hand over that time to a machine, or even another person, to use their time and perform the task. We think we will use that time to do something more productive, but exactly the opposite happens.

We often stand in front of the giant screen in the living room and let our eyes, thoughts, and ideas simply revel in what we are being presented with. We often don't even realize that the content we are consuming adds absolutely nothing to our lives. Quite the contrary. It limits our vision and delivers something that should take longer to process immediately.

There is something very valuable about performing simple, even physical, tasks. The effort and dedication we put into them makes us better prepared for future difficulties, whereas if we depend on someone else or a machine, if one day we can't count on them, we will have great difficulty in accomplishing things for ourselves.

Another example, and I speak for myself here, is our dependence on calculators. How many years has it been since I last did a simple multiplication problem? Or if I do, how many times have I checked it with a calculator? It may feel good at the time to take on a burden that seems tedious and difficult, and leave simpler things with a low degree of complexity for a computer to handle.

The Age of Artificial Intelligence is only just beginning. But instead of seeking to use this “help” for something that would not have been possible before this technological development, such as the development of new drugs, or new technology for controlling earthquakes or floods, we are using it to find out the name of a certain actor we just saw in a series that premiered yesterday, or we are asking it to generate an image of ourselves that resembles someone we idolize in some way.

Let us not fall into the temptation of letting the little humanity we have inside us drain away... and escape... forever.

^{Free image from Pixabay.com
Original text written by me in Portuguese and translated with DeepL.com (free version)}