These days, we live in an age of convenience. If we want to listen to music, we simply use our phone and find the song we want. The same also goes for food, entertainment and social interaction.
With the astonishing rise of social media and other technologies, came the fall of human connection and morality. Nowadays, a person’s own value of their life can be measured by how many likes their post on Facebook has or by how much skin they’re willing to show in a picture. Go to any place with people, and you will see their eyes glued to the small screen on their hand, more interested in what someone a thousand miles has to say than the person sitting in front of them.
“It has become appallingly apparent that our technology has exceeded our humanity,” said the genius known as Albert Einstein. The more we focus on advancing our technology and creating ways to excel human evolution with machinery, we begin to lose sight of our own humanity and become disconnected as a species. As we’ve seen in every single sci-fi movie, the evolution of technology can either help us grow, or completely annihilate not only us but also everything on Earth.
That notion may be slightly exaggerated but there is some truth to it. We’ve seen what technology can do to provide for us; however, in recent history, we’ve witnessed firsthand what it can do to cause massive amounts of death and destruction. It is also that fear that keeps people awake at night, knowing that one day, humanity will lose all sense of value and become as cold as the metal of the atom bombs that fell on the unsuspecting residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a warm summer day in August 1945.
It’s an inevitability that humanity will continue to evolve along with the technology that surrounds us, and it will be a sad day when we allow ourselves to become part of the machines we’ve created. As a species, we strive for greatness in order to achieve the sense that we control our own fate. Regarding technology, we use it as an end to justify the means; we use it to do good in order to repent for past atrocities. Other groups and factions use it to further their own agendas, uncaring of the collateral damage their environment sustains, such as North Korea going on the warpath, testing its own arsenal of nuclear weapons, threatening to plunge the world into chaos and reduce our civilization to ashes.
Only we have the power to stop the key from turning, to stop ourselves from allowing the very technology that we made to break our society. “Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty,” Einstein said.
