“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.” This is a quote by R. Buckminster Fuller, some simple words to summarise the entirety of what the truth of today’s technology is, where it came from and where it’s going to go.
Irregardless of whether one has the intentions of making someone else’s life easier or of taking innovation to a whole other level, technology has undoubtedly become the secondary nature of today’s world for all the wrong reasons. No matter how hard we try to find a corner where no form of technology exists, it is simply impossible, which is worse when realizing the fact that most of the existing technology is for the convenience of lazy and dependent people. I’m not referring to the advancement of technology as something that is necessarily detrimental to humankind, but i am saying that so far the majority of it is simply pointless when compared to the possibilities and necessities the entire civilisation.
The world is so much more vast than what people perceive it to be, there are countless people who are starving, people who are traumatized by war, people who are suffering from incurable sickness. Instead of helping these people with our scientific knowledge, we choose to simply build absolutely useless scrap.
Escalators, weight-loss machines, air conditioners, these are some of the many things that instead of pushing people forward into the future, has actually pushed them back in development. Humans aren’t given such great intellectual potential just to fall over backward into something that gives us an excuse to be lazier, more dependent and especially more ignorant to the needs of those that are suffering. We have the capability of doing so much more than just building scraps that help us reduce the amount of physical effort we use in day-to-day life.
As the ones who are more privileged to have technology, we have to open our eyes and realize that we need to be doing so much more with our gifts. Rather than focusing on how to be more beautiful and less fat, we should be pooling our resources to innovate for the 1 out of 9 people without clean water, 9 out of 10 people without pure air and 1 out of 9 people without enough food. These innovations are the ones that actually matter, the ones that we should be putting effort into to help the rest of the civilisation out.
To conclude, technology is a basic privilege that every single one of us should get to enjoy, however it is obvious that many of us aren’t that lucky and probably will never be, unless we realize what honestly matters to most of the civilisation. We can’t change what we’ve done in the past but hopefully, in the future we can understand the importance of making technology for the right reasons, especially creating to assist the ones that are helpless. There is so much out there that doesn’t meet one’s eye, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore and pretend as if our appearance and weight matters more than their lives.