Feeling like an island unto myself, it’s more and more difficult to establish genuine connection as we race through the digital world of devices and split attention spans – is it me or is it the times?

I look out through this vast digital universe accessible from my fingertips and wonder what is being given birth to as we hurl ever so faster into this conveyor-belt world ruled by technology and the media.

The uncomfortable thing about my experience is that I am watching this as both a spectator but also a participant almost like from outside and from inside. It’s weird because I’m all for technology and media but I feel that the proportions in our lives are way out of whack and while I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly is going on, I certainly think there are impacts brewing of which we are not distinctly aware of.

Don’t you feel like something is missing from your experience in the twenty first century? Could it be the voice of a generation clamoring for a change?  The voice of our time?

We are all looking for authenticity and at bottom I think that this is a spiritual longing.  Calls for change are an echo from within that we still feel as a cry edging us to rediscover our source. I say the malaise of the modern world is a call for us to re-imagine our core, a plea for re-awakening our spiritual imagination.

Our broken external politics which are casting an anxious and uncertain future may be just the symptom confronting us that we are broken inside. If you add to this a digital-mechanical world emerging everywhere which reinforces cold-hearted empty experiences and produces mindsets with split attentions fragmented into broken moments, no wonder we feel unmoored.

Could it be that we are at risk of losing our humanity, of having our identity stripped away from us? How do we regain our footing through this uncertain future bound to accelerating change?

I feel like a wounded soul – how do we get free?  We have lotions for split hairs, is there a potion for split souls?

Please stay tuned. 

The post Modern World – Where To? appeared first on Finding Spirit in the Digital Age.

The three articles:

• Boston Scientific’s 2mn video on its functioning bipedal robot (a must-watch).
• Inside Mexico City’s new Surveillance Center.
• Is Predictive Policing Ethical? (page no longer available)

While the articles arguably showcased separate technology streams involving robotics, pervasive visibility and data science, it’s easy to see how these technologies might connect and feed off each other in the future.

The larger meta-point from this reflection became a question: how much influence do we really have over where technology is leading us in light of these emerging convergences?

When I watched Atlas, Boston Scientific’s bipedal robot, I could hardly believe my eyes and several thoughts entered my mind:

• Is Atlas a proto-RoboCop in the making?
• Could this be the future of ‘who’ will provision or manage Amazon warehouses in the future?

When I read about Mexico City’s recently built militaristic bunker which is a NASA-like Orwellian surveillance control center for that vast metropolis, I could only imagine:

• Where is privacy headed? Had a London-style pervasive surveillance come south of the border? The article raised key questions about “the nature of power and the roles of humans and technological vision.”

The article on the ethics of predictive policing may need some explanation since I’m not sure how widely understood the term “predictive” is. Predictive in the context of data science means applying statistical methods over big datasets and building program algorithms that find patterns and correlations over people patterns.

I can tell you that this article definitely conjured up visions of Minority Report as seen through the lens of machine learning and data science rather than psychic viewing.

Son of Big Brother?

We now live in the age of “big data” where everything we do is increasingly being tracked and recorded through the long reach of cameras and digital interactions.

Every interaction through laptop, tablet, phone, device, wearable, sensor, appliance can now be a data point captured and stitched for eventual analysis and tracking.

What happens when these technology streams get increasingly interconnected through emergent cross-pollination of tech streams seeking innovation, creative outlet or economic gain?

• What happens when robots and drones come at the service of surveillance centers or the police in general?
• How far will predictive analytics further illuminate patterns hidden in people data then to be used to enhance law enforcement control? Our economic behaviors online are already being stitched in the background for prospective marketers. Our actual location behaviors are now also being tracked through our phone. 
• When does the pervasive connectivity allowed by tech turn into a surveillance political economy? 

I would argue that we have very little influence as individual citizens in the society we live in today over our cultural-economic evolution. While we reputedly live in the West’s free-market system, it’s not hard to imagine a slow drift into a controlled political economy happening without our being aware of it if the natural forces at play in technology convergences come to emerge in force.

What to do?

It’s hard to predict the impact of these technology convergences which are not necessarily bad but expose us to the risk of remaining as passive participants, uninformed of the consequences of the evolving tech forces in our economy. Who knows what emerging properties will blossom from these to our detriment as free agents? 

The first step, of course, is to become aware that technology unwisely applied runs the risk of stripping us of our humanity by progressively depriving us of freedom and of the natural diversity that comes with being human.

We must seek to imagine our future otherwise it will be defined for us and most likely against our will.

What do you think, do you have a feeling around this? 

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