Technology is the religion of the twenty first century. Technology will provide a solution for all our problems. Really?

Actually, oftentimes technology doesn't solve problems but is the problem. Every new technology changes culture, in ways nobody can foresee and nobody really notices at first, because it happens gradually.

What was the problem television had to solve? None, it was invented for entertainment. But it created a new type of person, mesmerized by the moving image, seeing things he or she didn't see in their everyday life - and things he or she shouldn't see. Kids, for instance ‘enjoy’ the adult secrets of sex and violence as popular entertainment on television. Read Neil Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood, to understand that childhood was a relatively recent invention, which came into being as the new medium of print imposed divisions between children and adults. And how these divisions have eroded under the barrage of television, which pitches both news and advertising at the intellectual level of ten-year-olds.

What about that other briljant invention, the car? This enabled people to travel and relocate more easily. Very nice. As a ‘side effect’ it completely destroyed the livability of cities, children for instance being unable to play on the streets and meet others. And produced such an enormous amount of air pollution, that lots of cities are life-threatening to live in. 

Consider this: in the 1920s, as cars slowly began to overtake streets, US courts routinely ruled that “a child has an absolute right to use the street, that it’s the responsibility of everyone else to watch out for the child. The parent does not have to be there.” Motorists pleading innocence at the time were firmly rebuffed: “That’s no excuse. You chose to operate a dangerous machine that gave you, the driver, the responsibility.”

With deliberate efforts by the auto industry – including ‘educating’ children that the street was not a safe space for play – streets became the exclusive domain of cars, reduced to nothing more than arteries for transportation. In this transformation, something vital has been lost. 
Read this article by Stephanie H. Murray, What Adults Lost When Kids Stopped Playing In The Street

Lots of inventions in fact dehumanize people. A recent technology promises to surpass all previous efforts in this respect: AI. Now even thinking supposedly can be outsourced. It's pathetic - man desperately wanting to play God. No matter how complex the language models and the amount of data you'll feed them, there will never be any substance to anything generated this way. Because that is all it is: generated nonsense that ‘looks real’.

With technology it's possible to navigate through live almost without any social interaction. And that seems to be the whole point of it - because people have become scared of people. Now you have, to name a few, cashierless stores, online stores, sex dolls (had to mention that one, has to be the ultimate experience - my God…), invisible head phones (so you can navigate the city without being part of it), mobile phones (same story), television (so you don't have to go to the scary cinema, football stadium, theatre, concert hall, etc etc) and Deliveroo (so you don't have to go to scary restaurants).