Technology and The Wisdom of Gods

I spent the weekend de-cluttering my closet and filing my income tax. Yes, it's April again, the cruelest of months. The beginning of the month is also the time to settle all my credit-card bills. Housekeeping chores like these are made more palatable by listening to audiobooks or podcasts. That's how I get myself to do more tedious stuff nowadays, and kill two birds with one stone.

Technology has changed so much of our lives and if are not careful in how we use them, we can literally get used by technology. I'm happy to read that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook has now suggested regulations on social media.

I use social media very sparingly these days. I was among the earliest users of Twitter and Facebook. There were hardly anyone in Malaysia there during that time. I used them because I wanted to learn how to apply some of their tricks to the SMS service that I was building then. At that time, no one could foresee how much social media would impact our lives. We were just happy to be able to link up with our long lost childhood friends again through social media.

By and large, technology has improved our lives. I remember at one time my Encyclopedia Britannica which I bought in the early 90s was my most prized possession. Now it sits like a museum piece on my bookshelf. It is a miracle that we can read about any subject that we can think of just by asking Google or Siri. Knowledge on demand. What a miracle of technological progress!

But as I mentioned in a previous blog post, technology merely amplifies everything blindly--both the good and the bad. While we don't see any downside to what an abundance of goodness can bring, we cannot say the same for the bad. The internet and social media in particular, is a very powerful platform for the promotion of both good and evil. As we saw, in the Christchurch shootings, even a deranged white supremacist gets a platform to broadcast his demented views to the world.

While social media claims that they are merely a platform, the fact that this global platform is controlled by private corporations, with profit motives is a big problem. A corporation is almost like an organism that only cares about its survival and wellbeing, which is measured purely in dollars and sense, or in business-speak, shareholder value.

It is by sheer luck that a few companies ended up controlling platforms which operate almost like critical global public utilities. The rise and fall of nations and societies could be determined by these social media platforms. Whilst traditional broadcasting media like radio and television are regulated and licensed industries, social media are not. But they are certainly much much more powerful than their technology predecessors. They profit from our medatadata--the information about our clickstream, location, sites we frequent and people we follow. They exploited data to the hilt, when regulations are still clueless about the consequences.

Now we have learned about the effects of social media the hard way. These social media corporations make as much money as they do now simply because they have exploited a loophole. Now, the side-effects have outweighed the benefits. Time for regulation and anti-trust laws to check them. And check them we must.

Technology is always neutral. Humans are not. When technology allows us to project our biases and prejudices into the world in degrees unimaginable before, we have to pause and take stock of where we are heading. We learned that with nuclear energy. Now, we are beginning to understand the disruptive impact internet, not to mention the ominous cloud of artificial intelligence.

Technology will afford us the the power of gods one day, but we have also to ask ourselves: do we yet possess the wisdom of equally divine proportions to wield them properly? The answer is clear: we don't. So let's proceed with caution and humility.