Too Much Technology?

Guess who wrote this? I fear the day that technology will surpass our human reaction. The world will have a generation of idiots. We old timers are probably not quite old enough to remember when our country was considered Agricultural. Mom and Pop and their many children ran the farm. And the farms more or less ran the country.

That all changed and some of us city slickers were not too removed from the farms not too far away. I spent many summers on the old homestead with one hundred-twenty acres. We milked 15 cows, fed the chickens, picked eggs by hand, fed the pigs, cultivated with a single horse and with a tractor, mowed and hauled hay and ran it up into the barn on slings, all with no electricity, running water, no shower or bathtub. Today these scenes are becoming more and more rare surrendering to mega farming and a few gardens in the cities with the Industrial age followed by the Technical.

That quote accompanied several scenes where eyes and hands were busy with cell phones with no conversation or eye contact. And this is merely the tip (but an enormous one) of the iceberg of today’s technology which has found its way into a world with its arms open. And we are the beneficiaries as well as the victims. I marvel and envy the savvy of youngsters with their technological skills but my senior moment was quoted at the outset by a technological genius of yesteryear, Albert Einstein himself.

Apparently he had a senior moment of sorts as he envisioned the future. Let’s hope he overstated his concern but I suppose we will never know if he was right or not until something pushes aside the Technical. Or will that never be surpassed? If so, what will it be?

Sometimes it is a good thing we are not omniscient (all-knowing) isn’t it? It is even difficult for me to imagine my great-grandfather imagining the Industrial age much less today’s Technical era. I guess our senior moments can’t see too far ahead, can they? So, how could Einstein see ahead (he died in 1955)? Even so, it is an uncanny futuristic vision, is it not? Since I will not live to see the distant future, if he a secular genius, was concerned, perhaps we should not panic but look about us more carefully.