The progress of laziness

Ranjan Yumnam *

The greatest inventions that radically transformed human civilization are wheels and electricity. Look at any technology, you will find that it is just a rip-off from wheels and electricity—or just an extension of these two mother inventions. Without them, human progress will sputter to a halt.

What are cars anyway? They are mechanized bullock carts on wheels powered by internal combustion. Smartphones, the epitome of modern technology, would not have seen the light of the day without electricity to recharge its battery from.

In one way or the other, technology has saved our time, shrunk the distance, improved our health, entertained us and made our lives better.

Besides all these advantages, technology has made us lazier, sedentary and is perhaps harmful to us in some profound ways.

One ubiquitous example of a modern piece of technology that has made us lazy is the remote control. You may call it a paragon of convenience but remote control is also one of the greatest laziness inducing tools that have ever been invented. In the hands of a practiced couch potato, it is even magical. You may not be able to move mountains or change the river course, but you can jump from one TV channel to another, command an equipped door to open by itself and manipulate any compatible device miraculously with nothing more than some invisible infrared rays fired from the remote control. If you are a powerful person, a remote button can launch a nuclear missile. You can also detonate a powerful IED, for a maximum impact, in a public place from a safe distance, in which case you are a coward, asshole and terrorist all rolled into one.

Even the plots of movie stories are being scripted and churned out by algorithms. Human editors are becoming redundant and less efficient than automated news aggregators. One great example is Flipboard. It's the heyday for capitalists who want to make human labour obsolete and rule the world.

This is not a wild guess. The inventors of Google are already talking about a future in which cars drive by themselves; smartphones predict our itinerary, wearable computer documents every bit of our life and robots replace men for carrying out most of our daily chores. They are walking the talk too. Google has acquired a slew of robot companies in the last few months, including Boston Dynamics and working frenetically in realizing its ambitious project of world domination.

Already the prototypes of these possibilities are being tested. Newspapers have reported encounters of eerie looking vehicles fitted with cameras traversing through streets in San Francisco without human drivers.

However, the rock stars of the moment are our smartphones which have become our personal assistants, even better than the ones in flesh and blood. My android phone sometimes makes creepy notification that shows distance between my office and home and predicts the time when I would be reaching home, thanks to a prescient app called Google Now.

Now this reminds me of an amazing movie "Her" which is also a favourite for the Oscars this year. 'Her' offers us a cinematic glimpse of a future in which today's rudimentary mobile software would have evolved into a more realistic, mature and understanding personal companion. The movie revolves around the life of a writer whose life has become dependent on the operating system called OS1 for all his needs and ultimately fallen in love with it, which is played by the beautiful voice of Scarlett Johansson.

This is a future, which is very much within the realm of possible, and we will be there soon. A clumsy beginning of that future may be right in your pocket now in the form of iPhone or Galaxy S4. Not long from now, the nature and rules of courtship will change. We will skip inconvenient but necessary dates and proceed directly to intimate romance with operating systems which will be more amenable to our every wish than a human nymph would ever be. No more chasing play-hard-to-get types with flowers; no more awkward silences in the restaurant; no more figuring out an appropriate time to kiss—our impulse would be our sweet reality. If you are a movie buff, watch Don Jon too, the most irreverent movie of 2013 that captures the struggle of a man addicted to cyber love over his real girlfriend, incidentally played by Scarlet Johansson again.

In the not too distant future, if love awakens us, it will be in a sofa. This is how technology will even make us more sedentary and fat.

Already, there are so many options available to us to remain indoors and stay put. The last book I bought was from Flipkart, an online retail; the Anti Virus software for my PC and notebooks were ordered online; air tickets were booked in the same manner; my favourite movies are downloaded or streamed and all these were accomplished without even putting a feet down from my bed. I feel like I am king of the world.

By the way, who needs to go to a book fair to buy books? Not the hyper connected youths who have access to all forms of content in the internet. In fact, physical books are facing an existential crisis from the onslaught of ebooks thanks to smartphones and tablets. Even the future of newspapers is in doubt as digital online platforms are becoming the preferred way of consuming news by the masses.

So, I was rather amused that the recently held Imphal Book Fair was unfairly compared to the popular Sangai Festival. One was about a dying industry swallowed by digital avatars; the other was about food, delicacies and razzmatazz of fun and frolic and exotic experiences that cannot be enjoyed digitally. So, don't cry me a river over the sparse visitors at the Book Fair. It was a foregone conclusion. Yes, there are ideas to make it more exciting and pull people like a magnet to it but that's for another day and article.

To sum it up, sloth is increasing by the day as innovative technology pervades our lives. We no longer meet friends, we Facebook; kids don't play outside; they battle monsters in iPad; some people don't go for shopping in brick-and-mortar market, they browse through offers in online stores; most of us have stopped going to banks after they made personal banking available through internet.

The critical question is: With the progress of science and technology, is humanity not at risk of losing its true essence? Are we going to be all glued to our devices and become slaves to a state of conformity engineered by Silicon Valley and their ilks? What about real human bonding and warm hugs? What about some real appreciations instead of stupid likes on FB? What about getting your butt up and doing some exercise? Isn't it hard, all of these?

Technology has dulled us and for the sake of convenience, speed and perfection, we have let ourselves fall into a trap of lethargy.

But all is not lost for humanity. Whatever the conspiracy hatched by the tech titans to turn us into unthinking consumers of their digital wares and control our lives, we won't stop being human. There are some things about human beings that machines cannot replace. Computers can't give birth to child and would never have that ability. Robots won't engender and match the warmth of human touch and they will never be able to exude feelings of heart that only we can understand and reciprocate. Clever chess software can beat us, but it won't know how to shed tears of joy and much less feel pathos of defeat. Granted, Google is more intelligent than us, but can it fart?

It's a shame that we have been outsmarted by our own creations. We are imperfect. It almost always turns out that our heroes have feet of clay. We goof-up. We fall. And fail. We are emotional. We are slow. We err. But are not these the very weaknesses that made us human in the first place?

So here's my moneyshout: I am a proud bumbling human being and thank God I was not some Japanese robot installed in a toilet to wipe bottoms.

Just a lazy thought!



(Views expressed are personal and do not represent official position)

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam , a frequent contributor to e-pao.net, wrote this article for The Sangai Express. The writer can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com
This article was posted on January 03, 2014.