Now that time crystals are here, none of that matters. Let’s all do a happy dance! 😄 /s
I must say, there are a lot of people who will do that “Happy Dance” (as Freeper PTBAA alluded to with the justified sarcasm) and there was once a time I would have done it myself, and quite happily, too.
Damn it.
I feel like a simple idiot in retrospect. For so many years, I naively looked only at the possible good that came from technology.
I looked at it digital technology the way many farmers back in the 19th Century looked at newfangled Combine that combined reaping and threshing into one action...it cut back on work...it took in the harvest faster in less time with fewer people...what could be bad about a Combine? Sure, there were those who thought “I’m sticking with my horse drawn reaper and thresher! No damn newfangled bull-hooey for me!” but I suspect most farmers saw the promise in a combine and the ease of hard work and time savings. Many would save all their money or go into hock to buy one.
But I made a grave mistake looking at digital technology that same way. A combine is ill suited to a duality of purpose...its upside was massive, and the downside...much smaller.
However, digital and related technology DOES have a duality of purpose. When I say duality of purpose, I often use a claw hammer as an example. With a claw hammer, you can build a beautiful house with it, or...you can bash in the brains of another human being.
I now see digital technology in much the same way, and while absolutely it does have a large upside, it also has a massive downside which I had not only disregarded my entire life...I did not even have the imagination to conceive of it.
And not just a downside of societal and human relationship proportions, such as a family at four having breakfast in a hotel where all four, instead of talking and interacting with each other, have their faces glued to their smart phones.
An evil downside.
An evil downside where a modern government like the Chinese Communists and the United States can take tyranny and persecution to new levels and places that even East Germany (who was the master in their time of an efficient tyranny with the detail and thoroughness that it surveilled and persecuted its own citizens) could never have dreamed of going.
Coupled with AI, cheap data storage, high speed networks, and surveillance cameras, coupled with an unsuspecting (or indifferent) citizenry, we may already be far down that road that Winston Churchill only hinted at in 1940, of an “abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”