A hopeless generation

The modern version of the human race which has become totally besotted with each and every technological innovation that is placed on their respective altars has succumbed to an idol not unlike the gods of antiquity.

It doesn’t seem to matter that these technological wonders hardly ever live up to the initial hype surrounding them, or get usurped by yet another innovation that seems better than the one in the hand or comes with unintended consequences that are not obvious at first.

In my lifetime the people of this planet seem to have lost the ability to change gears in their cars (automatic gearboxes), lost the ability to back their cars (rear vision cameras), lost the ability to spell (spell checkers), lost the ability to write (keyboards or all shapes and sizes), lost the ability to count (calculators), lost the ability to drive on the left side of the road (median barriers), lost the ability to navigate without help (Google maps), lost the simple art of taking their shopping trolleys to a return bay, and if they do manage to get there, separate the small ones from the larger ones (God help us) and are losing the essential knowledge of how to grow your own food (ridiculously small sections and too many techo distractions (you will struggle to look after a vege garden if you have to check your emails 77 times a day whilst keeping up with a plethora of must have social media posts).

It now seems that we no longer need the ability to gather information from a multitude of sources and summarise it into a coherent essay/presentation.

AI will do it for us in a few seconds.

The trouble is we have no idea where the AI ‘‘operator’’ gets its ‘‘facts’’ from.

This looks like a rabbit hole the likes of Lewis Carroll himself never contemplated. But, nevertheless, we will enthusiastically take it onboard, and before long believe that it will increase productivity and make us all wealthy. Yeah right!

Geoff Orchard, Ohaupo