Searching for Purpose...
For all intents and purpose, today is the day I was born. For the past two years, life has been shit. And I have given into the shittiness by letting depression dictate my life. I lost the love of my life on May 31, 2021. We met three years earlier to the day. May 31, 2018. At 10:26 am. Eastern time. Not that I am fucking counting. There was some other shit that happened around the same time. But that’s a story for another day. But the bottom line is my life has been shit, and I have let it be shit.
But that ends today.
But to look forward, I got to look back. And here is what my rear view is informing me. In 2002 I was an undergraduate engineering student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. For someone who nearly failed high school pre-calculus, and never took high school calculus, I somehow did extremely well in my studies of computer science and electrical engineering. So good in fact, that I got offered admittance into Tau Beta Pi, the prestigious engineering honor society. Now, before you think I am looking to have my ass kissed, let me cut to the chase. Part of the “initiation” process was to visit an art museum, walk around, and then write about what I saw. Pretty fucking weird as a requirement to gain entry into an engineering-focused organization.
But now, after twenty-plus years of working in a variety of engineering and technical management roles, I realize the genius of that requirement.
As I write this blog, the world seems like it is careening into an inescapable abyss brought about by the embrace of technological progression at all costs. In short, our societal embrace of STEM, our love affair with technology, and our drunken affair with college-for-all; are destroying our collective humanity. And with it, the potential eradication of the human race, or the very least, the human spirit.
The culprit? Technology and technologists.
We no longer question the implications of the second and third-order effects of what we build. We fail to remember that while technology is amoral, people are not. They do good, and they do bad.
But good versus bad is an oversimplification of the point. The world is not black and white. To be absolutely clear, I do not believe that we are headed to a “Skynet”-esque apocalypse of human versus machine.
I believe that we are headed to a human-versus-human apocalypse precipitated by our embrace of technology to the point of losing our fundamental humanity. We will destroy each other because technology is a wall that prevents us from seeing our fellow humans as such. And it is a problem that crosses personal identity divisions, spiritual and political ideologies, socioeconomic divides, and any other such lines of demarcation we so invent to make ourselves feel justified in our biases by finding our “tribe”.
Technology beats us all by enabling one of the most fundamental tactics of war. Divide-and-conqueour.
And we, humans, are allowing it to happen. To paraphrase the Hindu scripture, “Now we have become Death, the destroyer of our world”.
And that brings us back full circle. I refuse to continue to be a part of the problem. I want to be a part of a solution that not just enables our survival as a species but to usher in a humanist renaissance.
Medical doctors have the Hippocratic Oath, which states in a straightforward manner that a doctor’s first obligation is to do no harm. But STEM fields have a much broader impact on society, and yet it is quite apparent that a large portion of STEM professionals, chiefly digital technology and engineering professionals, do not follow such an oath. Let alone even stop and think about the impacts their creations have on society, let alone our individual humanity. My diagnosis is that while technological innovation does provide goodness to the individual that the collective impact is negative on both society and our shared humanity through the previously discussed ‘divide-and-conquer’ nature of the technological pursuit. The simplest impact is the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the wealthy and the not-wealthy. First, rich people can buy more technology faster and reap the benefits before most (think BitCoin, electric vehicles, solar-powered homes, etc.) But of even greater concern to me is the walled-garden isolation that technology allows the wealthy to embrace. For all their flaws, the robber barons of the 20th century did pay for the construction of public benefitting projects such as libraries rather than rocketships to Mars. And the financial divide continues to manifest itself as a physical divide, so too will the divide of our shared humanity.
The path we are on does not have to take us to dystopia. We have it within ourselves to course correct. As an engineer, I have been part of the problem. The pain and suffering of the last two years have opened my eyes to that fact. The woman I loved, and lost, opened my eyes that I was prioritizing being a technologist over being a humanist, that being an engineer was more important than being a human being.
No more.
The future is what we make it. And we must do better.
So I say the buck stops with this generation
.
I will help to unfuck this world. I will put my humanity first. I just need 8 billion of my fellow humans to do the same. To be very clear, this is not a crusade against technology or innovation. Rather, it is to emphasize the creators of and the users of technology to consider the impact technology has on our collective humanity. To build and use technology in ways that bring us together rather than divide.