It's Time to Wake Up

We are a technological society. Technology enabled us to rise from upright apes to fly to the moon and send our robot creations to explore other planets. From the club to the lever to the steam engine to the Hubble Telescope, our technology has defined and shaped the human experience. As much as we have created our technology, we are also created by our technology.

As we move into the twenty-first century we are offered the promise of a technological wonderland around the corner. The prevailing belief is the new technologies will solve all of our problems in the workplace and indeed, in all area of our lives. It might fairly be said that faith in technological progress has become the religion of our culture.

But are we too enthusiastically optimistic? Is there a downside to technology to which we must awaken before we commit our future? Is there a danger that we are giving up some essential human values and needs in order to serve the needs of our technology?

We're at the very beginning of the electronic revolution and what is coming towards us is breathtaking. Soon there will be smart houses and smart cars; lawyers, doctors, accountants, mechanics, teachers and other skilled professionals will likely go the way of secretaries and middle managers, replaced by an expert system; soon most of us will telecommute to our jobs, isolated at home and communicating with others indirectly with e-mail and the like, as virtual corporations with tiny staffs will replace those we are familiar with.

Everyone is so enthusiastic about the "gee whiz" technology that performs such awesome tasks so quickly, so well, that we often overlook the human side of the technological revolution.

In the 1980s, the researcher and social commentator, John Naisbitt, coined the term "high tech-high touch" to offer us a way to coexist with the new silicon-based world. To counteract the very real problems of the human-machine interface, he suggested that we should seek to balance our technological orientation with one focused upon human needs, symbolically referred to as "high touch".

Unfortunately, his warnings have been essentially ignored and our future is being created by one dimensional techies who don't have sufficient grasp of the human dimension. The silicon world of bits and bytes and nanoseconds are new and quite foreign to the human experience. This is especially true as our bodies haven't changed in any noticeable way since our ancestors lived in caves. And since Naisbitt wrote about high-tech, high touch in Megatrends, our culture probably had to deal with more change than it would have experienced during the entire historical period encompassing the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the Industrial Revolution.

It is the great blindness of the technological imperative to believe that we can safely ignore the effects of technology upon the human body, mind and spirit. And this blind spot may indeed prove to be the undoing of the vision of a better world through technology.

Are we to be but appendages to machines or are the machines to serve to us? Are we going to be "dumbed down" by our machines, living fragmented, alienated lives cut off from meaningful contact beyond terse e-mail communications, or are we going to be "smartened up" by the judicious use of these remarkable new tools with extraordinary potential. Unless we ask these questions we may just find ourselves in a technological nightmare not unlike some of the science-fiction dystopias we are familiar with.

We ignore the human dimension of technology at our own risk. As Stephen Talbott, author of "The Future Does Not Compute" writes, "No one will find a solution to the problems of technology - or to any other human challenge - except by first coming to terms with himself and moving personally toward wholeness". Until we have a strong sense of who we are and what we need to thrive, we are at the mercy of inanimate machines whose interests are quite different from ours. Let us wake up before it's too late.

Eli Bay, the founder and director of the Relaxation Response Institute in Toronto is a corporate trainer, professional speaker and host of two award-winning public television series teaching practical stress control He can be reached at elibay@elibay.com or (416) 932-2784.