The seduction capacity of technology is such that we have lost our ability to criticize it. We have incorporated it into our existence in such a way that we would not know how to live without it: our lifestyle would not be possible without its applications. It is our great ally and accomplice. And it has not yet reached the peak of its possibilities. Albert Einstein wondered why scientific technology, which saves work and makes our tasks easier, brings us so little happiness, while he replied that it was all a matter of time and knowing how to use it wisely.
The German scientist said this in a world without personal computers, or the Internet of Things, or smartphones, or artificial intelligence. Another contemporary of Einstein, like George Orwell, warned us that “technological progress is allowed only when its products can be applied in some way to diminish human freedom.” Orwell’s great merit is having raised freedom in opposition to technology. In the end, however democratizing the latter may seem to us, it is a business of a few large companies that rule the planet and rule over our lives.
Big tech announces more fascinating toys every day. If the AI ​​has the ChatGPT as a gadget that manufactures a customized speech or poem for us, Apple has just dazzled us with the Vision Pro extended reality glasses, which introduce the user to any imaginable universe and allow them to move around it. If Twitter managed to erase the barrier between truth and lies, AI blurred the line between the human and the algorithmic, and Apple aspires to eliminate the border between the real and the virtual.
We are going towards an Orwellian happy world, where freedom is compromised and the truth is a chimera. That the European Commission has raised its voice to try to bring order is a demonstration of the dangers that it can entail. Technology is like the serpent Kaa from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, a powerful and fantastic character who solves everything with his cold, methodical and calculating intelligence. The rest of us are as helpless as Mowgli. I hope the story ends well again.
