Living in a technology driven world?

If the outside world is transforming faster than you, it could mean the end of your organisation. The warning words of a lot trendwatchers, futurists and technology experts. We also see a flood of startups that are especially tech-driven. But what will actually be realised by all of these predictions? Extend Limits wants to draw a realistic picture of the current and future developments. In our opinion the ‘unilateral utopian technology driven world views’ are not part of them. Yes, technology has and is going to have a lot of impact, but there is so much more. And this is what the tech industry is ignoring.  

The following presentation is from GeneratieXYofEinstein and provides a nice contradiction to many utopian stories we hear of acceleration and the sacred belief in the technological solution. As humans, we seem to lose contact with each other and we see our existing belief such as God, the government and established institutions, fail. We seek for a new faith, and technology seems to be it. The question is whether it could truly fulfil its promises. Until today, this is nothing but the opposite. Yet we choose technology because it is the easiest way out. We do not have to face our problems, social structures and so on, because technology solves it all.

At Virginia Commonwealth University, Audrey Watters entered a beautiful proactive speech that also had an anti-establishment mindset around technology. The text of this speech can be found here. The slides are also worth watching. The closing words of Audrey Watters can be read below.

Now, I don’t believe that there’s anything inevitable about the future. I don’t believe that Moore’s Law – that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years and therefore computers are always exponentially smaller and faster – is actually a law. I don’t believe that robots will take, let alone need take, all our jobs. I don’t believe that YouTube has been rendered school irrevocably out-of-date. I don’t believe that technologies are changing so quickly that we should hand over our institutions to entrepreneurs, privatise our public sphere for techno-plutocrats.

I don’t believe that we should cheer Elon Musk’s plans to abandon this planet and colonise Mars – he’s predicted he’ll do so by 2026. I believe we stay and we fight. I believe we need to recognise this as an ego-driven escapist evangelism.

I believe we need to recognise that predicting the future is a form of evangelism as well. Sure gets couched in terms of science, it is underwritten by global capitalism. But it’s a story – a story that then takes on these mythic proportions, insisting that it is unassailable, unverifiable, but true.

The best way to invent the future is to issue a press release. The best way to resist this future is to recognise that, once you poke at the methodology and the ideology that underpins it, a press release is all that it is. (Tekst: Audrey Watters)

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