The Future of Human Race in the Hand of Technology
During this digital era, moreover with this pandemic situation, we can notice how important technology is for us. Everyone is working for an online option for everything. From work, school, communication, shopping, to basic human needs like food and healthcare are facilitated through online platforms. This world is moving at a pace we can’t always keep up with. Technology’s rapid growth is a real thing, it is happening. One blink and you have a new application, another one you got a software upgrade, the next day there’s a new gadget launching announcement.
One of the most important areas of innovation and advances in technology is probably artificial intelligence (AI). AI brought us to a more complicated system and offers a lot of possibilities for future growth in facilities that make it easier for us to live. It helps us in many ways, from solving easy problems to deciding a more complex judgment. The algorithm is watching us, learning what we are interested in, for then in the future deciding what to recommend. It provides us a whole new different lifestyle, changes the way we live, and benefits us in a lot of aspects.
With AI, humans are enabled to do a lot of things in a short time, they have the capability and resistance that human does not have. These expanded capabilities they gave makes it easier for humans to get the data we need more quickly and accurately. By now, it is not only used in private sectors like retail and finance, but also in public sectors like national security and public services.
While technology like AI may offer leverage, on the flip side of the coin, it can also teach humans to be less human. Nowadays, we tend to do more indirect interaction with others than actually communicating from heart to heart in direct conversations. The problem we are facing with this growth of tech is not only the possibility of AI replacing human jobs, but also in the moral of the humans itself. AI may cause massive unemployment in the future, and this will be a really big social problem. There is also a potential growing gap between the rich and the poor, leading to rising levels of political and social instability.
Determining that this issue is something that happened in a modern society, we can use the VUCA approach to indicate the problems we are facing. VUCA itself stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
- The volatility aspect of this problem lies in how extremely fast technology can bring us forward. It is growing exponentially.
- Uncertainty, on the other hand, means that the outcome of this problem can’t be known beforehand, we never know what future technology may offer us, and we also cannot use past experience and data for the upcoming problems.
- We can see that this technology growth issue is really complex and it involve a lot of aspects, from social to economy and politics, everything is affecting one another.
- The last aspect is ambiguity, and this can be explained by how this issue has more than one interpretation, it is a double-edged sword, it can either benefit us a lot, but in the wrong hand, it can also threaten the whole human race.
Why we should pay attention to this potential issue? Because technology is not something we can just evade, it is inevitable and we have to live with it. We have to face it. Like what a professor of Oxford University Nick Bostrom said in an interview,
“The near-term effects are just overwhelmingly positive. The longer-term effect is more of an open question and is very hard to predict. If we do our homework and the more we get our act together as a world and a species in whatever time we have available, the better we are prepared for this, the better the odds for a favorable outcome. In that case, it could be extremely favorable.”
What we can do as an individual is to be educated and well-informed about the technology we’re using, the systems we’re running. We also have to be extra careful with our personal data because we never know when our own data will threaten our lives. Preparing our future plan from now can help us avoid being unemployed in the future. We have to be aware of what may get overtaken by technology and find a way to make ourselves outstanding.
Let us not let technology consumes our values as a human.
Yunita Aghniya Rahmani // Keluarga 139
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