We can define “technology” as… entities, both material and immaterial, created by the application of mental and physical effort in order to achieve some value.
This value, we strive for, is comfort. By creating ‘tools’ or as I call them ‘extensions to our bodies’ we try to make our life easier, more efficient and so of a higher quality.
We could look at the early humans and see that they were using primitive (stone) tools to ease their life during the hunt and say “this is were it all started”. But I would like to go one step further and say that our body itself is technology!
Let’s assume that all life started from a ‘one cell’ organism whose life, mainly, consisted out of absorbing and dumping. After having done so, for a long time, these cells realized that by joining together as organisms they could split the ‘workload’ and have a more comfortable life.
Finally these organisms started to mutate and organize themselves to execute specific functions. So started the creation of stomach cells, liver cells, brain cells and so on... to work together in a (human) body as we know it today.
But it doesn’t stop here, it is a process that is in a constant evolution. We, human beings, are actually experts in this laziness. Some of the greatest innovations were developed by people who were to lazy or got bored doing a particular task. After having done such boring tasks over and over again, the most lazy ones among us questions themselves “There must be an easier way to do it. How?”.
Even Bill gates once stated: “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job, because, he will find an easy way to do it”. After I mentioned this quote to my boss, I got fired. It seems he didn’t understand underlying logic.
More even, if we look to animals we notice that the most active ones, bees for example, have a very short lifespan. While on the other hand the most lazy ones, elephants and turtles, get very old!
This put you at thinking, right?
We, human beings, have the capacity to invent things to make our life more comfortable (~lazy). I started thinking about this the very first time I really paid attention to somebody working with a bulldozer. It was magically how this gigantic thing was in sync with the movements that worker made. It obeyed like a slave.
Now, thinking about slaves, I am not sure if machines/technologies are slaves to us or we are slaves to machines/technologies. Think for example of a GPS. Is the GPS our slave? Or are we obeying the GPS?
The main problem that we, human beings, have is that we are very limited by our bodies. We are imprisoned in it and it has its limitations. No one, with an arm length of 76 cm, is able to grab that cold beer, in the refrigerator in the kitchen, while sitting in his lazy chair, in the living room. No one, with a leg length of 95 cm, is able to make steps bigger then 75 cm. No one is able able to run 100 km an hour, No one is able fly, no one is able to dive for more then an hour, but…
We have our brains (and with it, our dreams) to create extensions to our bodies to make us achieve the ‘unbelievable’. We want to move faster, so we create the engine. We want to fly, so we create the airplane.
But here lures a danger around the corner. Some extensions might bring our lives in danger. Think for example of the many car accidents, airplane crashes and so on that happen. Sometimes they just happen because of failure but sometimes they happen, on purpose, initiated by hackers.
There are several technologies, somewhere in a dusty drawer, that never took off because of this reason. I think for example of bionic arms or Virtual Reality. Until now we could never tell for sure that the signal, send to the arm, was not compromised (and make, let’s say, the user punch himself in the face) or that the ‘virtual’ reality was not altered so that a player for example falls from a building causing him to experience a real heart attack.
But now, with Blockchain in place, these technologies can finally take off and with it, we will be able to create much more challenging body extensions. This will bring us, human beings, to a next level of ‘super humans’, a new species I would say. Just like life evolved from a one cell to the complex body as we know it today.
For now, let’s remain lazy and keep on dreaming!