How Ubiquitous Computing and an Over-reliance on Technology Could Negatively Impact Future Generations
If you were to look at the current state of technological integration in the world you would see many different situations all at wildly varied stages of modern technology. Places like New York, London, Tokyo and Singapore are all major bastions of technology where you would have a hard time going a block without passing some piece of modern technology. Meanwhile there are villages in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and Asia where you would be hard pressed to find a single piece of modern technology in the entire town. Although, this is not to say that efforts are not being made to bring these remote villages and towns into the modern area of technology, any potential disasters aside in 40–60 years and maybe even sooner a lot of these places may see a sudden shift in how things are done.
Farming, communication, shopping, and many more things will change as the outside world will start to catch up to these rural places and change how things are done there. This is not inherently a bad thing the people in these remote areas will see many short to midterm benefits but risk the long-term loss of generational knowledge poses a unique risk to mankind. As a species humans are lazy by nature, so we invent things to make our lives easier, from the wheel to the printing press we have largely invented technology to make our lives easier which again is not inherently a bad thing. Here in the 21st century it has never been easier to get things done however, now there is a distinct difference, a large amount of the inventions that make our lives easier rely on the internet and computers to function. A large amount of inventions and new products we see have some connection to the internet and a lot of them are products we already had but have added some internet connectivity or functionality. Should this trend continue at the same rate it is now we could very well see a future where all if not most devices and processes are connected to the internet. This poses a unique threat to mankind’s historic laziness what happens if our technology or the internet fails?
As an example of this problem I will use the farming industry to explain my point as to how we could risk losing knowledge for the sake of ease and efficiency. Its no secret to anyone that our population is continuing to rise, as it stands now, we are at 7.6 Billion people with estimates that 10 Billion is a soft cap to food sustainability. With this knowledge let’s say company x decides it is going to make a line of automated farming robots to plant, raise, harvest, and process crops autonomously. These farming automatons are more efficient than their human counter parts and do not require wages and work 24/7 which on paper all sounds great as we will need more food to support the increased population. However, over many years of use company x’s farming automatons have been adopted by most of the planets farms as food security becomes more and more of a risk. The general populations knowledge of how to farm will start to decline as people focus their attention to other things and let the machines handle it. For the sake of this example let us say that company x’s machines suffer from some fatal error or hack that bricks all their machines 20–30 years after they have been in service. How will mankind respond? There is now a general lack of workers with practical knowledge in how to farm among the workers who would be most suited to do such labor. While not a 1:1 comparison if you look back to Khmer Rouge in Cambodia when they forced educated “city folk” into communes in the country side to farm and produce food you can see the disastrous effects such a situation can have. Especially as governments come under extreme pressure to feed their citizens or risk extreme starvation.
The Link below is to a video that talks about the capabilities of CNH’s autonomous farming technology which is where I got the idea for the example.
Now with the farming example in mind think of how this could apply to any number of jobs or everyday tasks. In the past the wheel while a tool of convenience normally had to have a person interacting with it to move, these days self-driving cars and trucks can drive without any input from a human. Should autonomous cars like Tesla attain wide scale adoption how long could it be before the knowledge of driving a car is lost. It could even reach the point where cars no longer even have an interface for humans to interact with. In the television show Westworld on HBO while normal cars do exist there are ride share “cars” inside is just a U-shaped bench for people to sit on while it takes them to where they want to go. However, this is not to say that we should stop innovating and developing new ubiquitous computing and internet connected devices as that would limit humanities future. Mankind needs to realize and understand that if you are going to stake the generations of practical knowledge humanity has amassed over the millennia for automation technology and ubiquitous computing devices, we need to have safeguards in place.
A over reliance on technology like automation and ubiquitous computing devices could spell disaster should something go wrong. It is essential that we preserve knowledge in a easily accessible way that could be disseminated without the systems we currently rely on and systems that we will come to rely on in the future. While no information storage system is immune to problems, the maintenance of physical paper information stores is essential in a worst-case scenario like the collapse of internet infrastructure. The problem with solving the loss of generation knowledge is you have to solve it before a problem ever arises especially considering the fact this problem could be decades down the line. Another problem preserving information for future generations comes in the form of just how much information there is. Outside of an institution like the library of congress which stores and keeps records of so much information it would be hard to pull off such a psychical information storage system on even a state level. Without proper safeguards in place to protect our collective knowledge we risk potentially slipping into a “dark” age or worse. All of this may never come to pass and technology will continue to march on but, as the saying goes “better to be safe than sorry” especially when you are staking mankind’s future on the line.
