The times have changed

There is a lot of fog in the minds of people who claim to be intellectuals. They can’t visualize the importance of new ideas and the veracity of thoughts to transform basic foundations of humanity into a vibrant value system, in coherence with the present-day requirements.

The concepts they follow, in the present-day times, have the genesis that could be termed as ancient, given the speed and proportion with which the world is growing. Hiding behind the thoughts and philosophies proposed few centuries back cannot be an escape root to face the present day challenges which are plainly different. The old ideas have lost their influence and are facing relevance crises.

In the age of Artificial Intelligence when human indulgence is facing the challenge of obsolescence, the mechanical ways of resolving human issues is gaining huge acceptance. Instead of applying mental attributes to solve a human problem, the robotic emotionless solutions are gaining popularity.

The values and systems put in place through robotic interventions are meant to follow the logic of economic prosperity, profitability and accumulation of resources rather than social welfare, social justice and the concepts of moral human values.

The antiquated philosophies propounded by the philosophers of the past are the outcome of human thinking based on human behavior, value systems, justice and welfare of the overall social order. The importance would be attributed to the emotions involved in every action and reaction to a certain situation.

The abstract values of computing numerically would not define the outcome of a particular situation. There was a tailor-made solution to every problem not a generalized computer aided reply to every issue. But the times have changed, and the intellectual domains have not been able to extend its growth on the proportionate terms to the technological advancements.

The scientific advancement in all fields has more or less been driven to achieve materialistic outcomes, to make the life of people easy and comforting. More efforts are incident on the ways to establish a life for humans that is more sedentary, more materialistically attractive, less physical work, more of returns, intellectually comatose and politically blind.

This phenomenon is leading to an age of dimwits watching machines driving them to the limits of their irrationality and imprudence. New age intellectual limits are gravely influenced by the lowly calibrated social media reels, skewed opinions on the issues of importance by those who have not even flipped a page of a book in their lifetime. There are huge rational gaps in handling issues that directly or indirectly influence humanity because of this monstrous growth of machine-driven pseudo-intellectualism.

Multiple solutions to every problem seem to be at fingertips, howsoever imprecise and inappropriate they may turn to be. Every other person becomes an expert in a jiffy on the subject of choice on which millions of books, studies and experiments have failed to develop expertise in actual sense. Real time issues concerning humanity at a larger scale that normally should take long routes of contemplation, thought process, research and experimentation are left to the mercy of machine based data interpolations and extrapolations.

There is a level field, no class differentiation in terms of intellectual capacities is any more visible on the face of it, at least in the new minds who are supposed to take reigns of running the world in future. The development of intelligence quotient and logical reasoning is stymied due to the clutter of wrong information available from unauthentic sources.

Books have become redundant and any dependable logical solution to a problem is considered to be available through chips controlling artificial intelligence. The importance of emotional quotient is sliding down at a fast pace in the new dispensation.

People with better mental faculties are forced to remain in the shadow. They have failed to keep pace with the speed and accuracy of chip based intelligence. In the recent times there has been absolute vacuum in the places held in past by philosophers like, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, Freud, Foucault, Weber and countless others.

These people looked at the world through the eyes of people who needed to be shown the path to tread upon. They brought up a systematic approach to social, political and economic issues, showed disciplined and philosophical ways to be cultured and refined members of the society. But the present-day philosophers are the outcome of knowledge deficit, wrong interpretations, fast and insensitive developmental background.

They are the products of readymade information boom, using fingers to tap the button in place of writing on paper, reading on kindle in place of real books, if at all they read, having learnt to resort to plagiarism in the most unethical ways, having played dangerous games earning credits on every killing during their formative years and valuing materialistic accomplishments as a means of growth and development. In such scenario, what are they expected to deliver!

There is a serious need to blend technology with human values. As much a need for automation and automated utilities is there, an equal need to incorporate the concepts of morality and ethics in the human value system remains. The use of machines could be limited to the fields that make life better, healthier and easier but in the fields where human intervention cannot be swapped by the machines due to moral, emotional and ethical parameters, the human hand should not be dispensed with.

Like the mother’s love cannot be compensated with the best of machines on the surface of earth, emotional upheavals, the sinking of heart, tears of happiness and tears that well up with an agonizing stimulus, feeling of separation, longing, beating of heart or adrenaline rush cannot be handled with curated mechanical responses.

Human interface is difficult to be replaced with the mechanical interface. Human responses cannot be predisposed and predicted in the ways chips in the machines work. The complexities involved in human interactions can only be dealt with the human interventions, which involve a balance of heart and mind.

By Sy. Sajjad Qadri