Our Choice to be the Living Dead
I can bet that many of you must have heard of famous movies such as ‘The Walking Dead’ or ‘A Train to Busan’. What is common in both of these movies? The obvious answer is ZOMBIE. As a kid I was extremely scared even by the thought of a Zombie, a dead person living, killing, and rotting. I think everyone was scared of them when they were kids. I used to think, about what I would do if there was ever a zombie apocalypse and how would I save myself as well as my loved ones. As I grew, with each passing day this fear started to fade away from my memory. With each passing day, I realized that scientifically something like this can't happen until recently it all came to life.
We all have become zombies; the only difference is that we are living and not dead. We all have become the victims of a digital zombie or a sombie. Coined by the University of Sydney, these zombies are those who are so engaged with digital technology and/or social media that they are unable to separate themselves from a persistent online presence. These 'zombies' can be found almost anywhere, with eyes on their smartphones, scrolling endlessly on social media feeds, hunting for mythical creatures, laughing or crying without any human interaction, and more.
But in real-life, zombies can take other forms: living humans with all their glory but detached from the living.
Digital Zombies don't eat brains like their counterpart. Instead, they feed on light emitted from screens.
You must have witnessed a lot of incidents in real life where people bumped into a pole or fell off the footpath just because they were too busy to look up. Or scrolling Instagram feeds while having family time, or going to a concert show and being too busy to capture it on your phones rather than enjoying it.
According to a survey that had been conducted, it is stated that every 1 in 5 student is smartphone-addicted from a young age. Parents provide their kids with ipads and smartphones from an early age, submitting their kids to a digital babysitter who will take care of their kids while they finish their work. What they don’t understand is that the outcome can be catastrophic. It is asserted by scientists that such high usage of technology by kids will lead to an underdeveloped right hemisphere of the brain.
There was a time when students were assigned research papers to complete which could only be done while sitting in a library and going through multiple books because internet penetration was not as much. Although technology has been created to make our work simpler, it has in so many ways caused an equivalent negative effect as well. Today’s generations prefer to chat over text or a chat room rather than personally talking to each other. They prefer talking to a stranger in a different nation at 3 AM the morning but are afraid to talk to their classmate. The rise of mobile has allowed us to take our digital addictions on the road, connecting us to the global web no matter where we are. It has also created social pressures to keep up with our peers, leading to a platform full of metro riders compulsively checking their phones every few moments, afraid they might not be the first to see and respond to a friend’s Facebook or Twitter post.
The fact is that if AI has the potential to make healthy humans into Zombies or create a dystopian world, it also has the power to create a better world if we work properly.
If the world would have embraced machine learning, eliminating most if not all Digital Zombies. In one way or another, ironically, society would revert to the simpler life, where people can look at the world around them as they walk down the street. Not just this, but an individual might witness growth all around them in such a case. Be it personal development, mental development, social development, improved relationships or an upgraded quality of life.
But another possible future, where technology might take a much bigger role in daily life, with automatic cars, so that users can scroll on their smartphones without the need to look up. Or a world where footpaths will have sensors to alarm the users to prevent them from crashing into objects or one another, all while gazing down at their devices.
The future is uncertain. We are the ones to shape it. The technology in itself in not bad, in a way it is the biggest boon to mankind. The excessive use of technology is what making the negative effects much clearer than the positive ones. Technology is built on humane. Humane tech is a term that refers to the goal of achieving technologies that aid humans in key human goals instead of exploiting humans for profit. The struggle for humane tech can also be construed as a movement to ensure that technology is contributing to the common good instead of harming human citizens in various ways.
By Akanksha Singh & Rijul Arora
