People and Technology

People have never been very good at using technology. They have never said "We are this way now, but let's try something new, to see what its effect on us will be." We just let any technology that comes along change us, whatever way it wants to. And after it changes us (as it always does) we don't bother to notice what those changes have been.

Technology is in control of us - and not the other way around. At least that's the way it is now.

But if we go back to the beginning, millions of years ago, when we first became human - things were different. We now say we were hunter-gatherers. We had language, and this gave us the ability to look around us, and adapt to the conditions in every part of the world. We were clearly in control of our little world, but we were only one species, out of many. We were still animals, if somewhat unusual animals.

But then we became Civilized. And became something different altogether, as the Wikipedia entry shows. This is when Technology began - our most important invention.

I am not much of a historian, and will skip over the next few thousands of years - and begin in 1936, when I was born, but fast-forward from that, to 1980, when the Computer was born.

This I can remember clearly - and I can remember what our reaction to that was - we went insane! We didn't know what a computer was - but we knew it was a big deal, and we rushed to get on the newest bandwagon. Every company in existence, wanted to use it to make money. Instead, it put most of them out of business, and changed the rest, permanently.

And, as usual - we didn't stop to notice this. A few of us did, but most did not. And this has created a huge gap between Computer People - and everyone else.

Most people in the world, saw that the way the world was, was not in their interest - and opted out of it. There was even a song for this: Stop the world, I want to get off!

Since they didn't want to control the world - new dictators arose, to do this for them.