Fate of Humans

 

I remember the small back camera my first phone had. It was a 1.3-megapixel camera. That was enough to excite my adolescent brain, and I took loads of pictures with it. Now, a typical phone has two back cameras and a front camera, all with double-digit megapixels. Feature by feature, phones have evolved- they’re larger, faster, and can do more things.

Phones or any other products aren’t alone in this. From a microbe invisible to the naked eye, we evolved into the being we are today. Every subsequent generation of the microbe brought change. For organisms, the evolutionary process was driven by the conditions of nature at that time i.e. if the change was suitable to the conditions, it persisted. For products, it’s driven by human behaviour. What new features of a product persist depends on our preferences. In a way, we are to products what nature is to organisms.

With time, the might of nature upon us has diminished. We were meant to live inside caves, to hunt. But, human civilization wrote its own destiny by learning to manipulate nature to some extent. We mixed stuff from our surroundings, created concrete and made a stronger, larger, and more attractive shelter for ourselves. Unfortunately, most human progress came at the cost of polluting the environment in different ways. Our exponential progress went hand in hand with nature’s destruction. If products follow a similar pattern, what does that mean for humanity? Will products control us one day?

Unfortunately, they’re already doing that. Look at Facebook. Its algorithm manipulates our emotions so that we spend more time in it. It makes us feel angry so that we can vent our anger in the comment section. In fact, our perception of reality is formed by Facebook to the extent that it facilitated the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Despite knowing all this, we can’t do much, not even the US government. 

I think it’s inevitable that humanity will lose power over time- and it will be lost to their creation.