Question the Answer

We are born with the capacity to learn how to develop with time, and those who lived before us sensed the future we live in now. Previous generations questioned what the far future would be like, and we, in the present time, are living the digital dream. We are living their vision of how a society would be. The outside pursuit has so many rules that when a new technology emerges, we fuse ourselves to it, introduce this technology, and adapt our minds to it. But is there a dark side of technology? Or are we the ones enabling a malpractice of the innovation? The outside world as we know it has changed. Communities, governments, and schools are now weaponized with the ability to discern one digital evolution from another, and technology is vital in that weaponization. What we want to perceive from technology and how much we question its effect on us as a society can simultaneously pave the way to our evolution as a specie.

The question has always been the same. We began our journey with technology by considering it a savior. And truth be told, no matter what our regard for technology is and what it means to us as individuals, we must concede to the fact that it is important to us.

Applied science, telecommunications, industrial science, mechanization, or let’s simply call it by its name, the digital evolution, hooked our attention through the application of digital knowledge. Yet, by questioning the answer, we can hold whatever we want to perceive from this applied knowledge in our minds.

By putting information in our minds through repetitive, daily use of technology, we learned to appreciate and get attached to the digital world as we now know it. By using digital means to simplify our daily lives, we hastily learned and adapted to a whole new reality. It altered how we behave in societies, what to believe and what not to believe, what is acceptable and not acceptable, and what is ethical and unethical. Technology has altered the dynamics as we know them. This knowledge-based scientific application has educated us in a way that simultaneously allowed us to challenge it.

To those of you who think that we have become numb. To you, that may be the case.

To those of you who think that technology has no detrimental repercussions on us as humans, to you, I say the answer lies within the question itself.

We’re not incapable of differentiating what is right and what is wrong. We just choose not to. We decide to place the entire blame on the digital evolution because it is easier for us to accept that reality instead of questioning the whole ideology that technology did indeed give us something but also took something from us in return. And we allowed it to do so, as we are the architects of our own fate.

Technology is not the devil. The digital evolution is not our doom’s day. It has enabled us to challenge its offerings as much as accept said offerings.

While it did indeed take away our perception of what is right and wrong, by simply enabling human’s blind and thoughtless fellowship of tech, we, as humans, were the primary enablers of such fate.

Whatever the question may be, the answer is “technology is not to blame for whatever fate might befall us in the future. The blame befalls on us, and solely us.”

What we don’t know, or choose not to believe in, is that the mechanization of our present and future has augmented our awareness of what is truly transpiring in the world around us. It permitted us to interrogate the increased presence of injustices, broke the barriers of a restricted view of the reality around us, and gave us the mastership to look at things more objectively.

The question is not whether technology has blinded our self-awareness because, at the end of the day, it is nothing but a tool. The question is, have we, as users, permitted ourselves to be wrongfully blindsided by the offerings of the digital evolution and then put the blame on the tech itself?

Or does the question simply lie within the limitations of at least being able to determine what is right and what’s not? Technology was always there, and we saw that in previous generations’ perceptions of what the future might be, even if it was just a concept at the time. All the knowledge surrounding us now, and the knowledge we are currently drawing from our devices, was always there. The only thing different was its accessibility and the intensity of its application.

When we were in school, we sat in little chairs with our books and notebooks, with very limited knowledgebase provided to us. The digital evolution came and changed all that. So, if you really look at it from that outlook alone, this applied science has really given us the space to proclaim the glory of the challenges it offers us. No evolution in history has ever provided any scope to be accepted and challenged all at once. But technology did.

Nowadays, what is referred to as outside technology snags our attention as users and is teaching us far more than any legacy curriculums ever did. Digital development has taken societies to the next level of growth. There is no denying that. We have progressed as societies and become extensively aware of our role in the world. A change we would’ve never seen coming a century ago.

Throughout time, the need for change, a revolutionizing progression of humanity, became very assertive and continued until our current time. And chances are, it will maintain to grow furthermore. Technology has become a mentor to humankind, teaching us what to believe, how to perceive the world around us, and how to react and act upon said digital progression. This purpose can be deemed as the leading eliminator of the idea of the dark side of technology. Innovation has become the code for understanding societies. It has become a unified language everyone speaks, putting us, as humans, in agreement on one thing.

It was not our choice to accept technology and its effect on us. Nor is it our choice to dictate whether there is a dark side of technology or not. It was this knowledgeable application’s choice to devise how we receive it and to what extent that acceptance goes. It was not a matter of questioning whether we chose to believe technology would have a beneficial influence on our progression. It was a matter of answering when we would accept technology as a savior. If you look at it from an utterly non-biased perspective, we never had the opportunity to believe or not believe whether technology will be our savior. It was forced upon us. We never chose even the smallest of the agreements and never had the chance to question these agreements. We agreed with the information passed to us that technology will have a more prominent role in our evolution. And it did, rightfully so.

The time has come for us to question the answer forced upon us of whether our application of this digital knowledge is the right path to take to ensure the continuity of our specie.

Technology is no longer a dream, a concept presented to us through sci-fi movies such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and Stanley Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey. Still, it has instead become an inevitable reality, making us wonder whether there really is a dark side of technology, or are we the ones with the dark side of our technological implementation? One that was forced upon us by various factors to ensure the continuity of humanity, even if that means humans and machines striving to become, one day, independent of one another.

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