Why we can't afford to keep blindly adopting new technology
Showcasing some of the recent trades humanity has made by blindly adopting new tech.
You have developed marvellous technology, but inwardly you are still very primitive… and unless you transform inwardly, you are going to destroy yourself. - Krishnamurti
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Welcome to edition #7 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:
The unconscious trades we’re making when we adopt new tech into our lives
This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.
Perhaps I have too much time to think these days.
Too much time in solitude.
I’m alone in a modest, one-bedroom apartment in a small town in India.
My days are spent practicing yoga in the morning, meditating and then plopping myself down at my favorite coffee shop to think/write.
In modern life, this is a very rare thing to do and I realize how much of a gift it is to be able to completely unplug from the world.
The idea behind my writing is to help people ‘wake up before their wake up call’ on an individual level but lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about the wake-up call that humanity needs as a whole.
Sometimes I feel that I may be losing touch with reality but most of the time, I feel like I’m finally seeing things for how they really are.
With a little space you get the benefit of perspective.
Luckily for you, most of my thoughts remain as scribbles in my little cafe journal.
But some of these observations I feel called to share.
I’ve gone back and forth on sharing my thoughts on this topic because I don’t want to come across as the crazy, hypocritical guy yelling on his soap box.
This topic encompasses a world that gave me a lot, one that I built my entire career on and invested in heavily over the last four years.
That is the world of technology.
Let’s dive into it.
for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠
First off, I want to say I am not anti-technology or anti-AI. And I’m certainly not anti-capitalism. It’s the best human organizational system we’ve come up with so far.
However I’m not convinced that this system is equipped for the technological shifts we’re about to go through.
And for all its benefits, we have never actually seen late-stage capitalism play out. It has certainly shown lots of positive early signals but we haven’t seen the end of this experiment yet.
Over the last 100 years, advancements in technology have:
dramatically increased life expectancy
eradicated many deadly diseases
led to unprecedented decline in extreme poverty
Increased food output by 50% per person
allowed us to see the world around us
expanded access to knowledge/opportunity
ushered in the least violent era ever recorded
But it has come at a cost, we’ve also seen:
a sharp increase in anxiety, depression and loneliness
a decline in attention span and cognitive depth
major disruptions in our sleep patterns
real-life social interaction falling steadily
our dopamine being hijacked for profit
a rise in body image disorders
a breakdown of meaning, presence and attention
a loss of embodied life in favor of digital life
an erosion of patience & emotional regulation
misinformation, polarization and tribalism explode
None of these negative consequences are new to us.
You and I are the live guinea pigs in this experiment so we all feel it and see these things on a daily basis.
But it seems as if we’ve collectively put our head in the sand and I can’t figure out why?
I believe that the above are symptoms of a disease of sorts or a global addiction brought on by technology. And it’s become fairly clear to see that this is a progressive disease. Meaning this is not something that’s just going to go away on its own. A progressive disease, left unchecked/untreated, only gets worse over time.
Now I don’t believe this is some huge, global conspiracy to turn us into anxious, fearful digital slaves that are unable to do anything without the aid of technology. Even though that is one path that we could be heading down.
We simply traded our time and attention for efficiency, productivity and distraction again and again. And of course, when it becomes obvious that humanity is willing to make those trades then the market will create companies that are willing to facilitate that trade for us.
However, again and again, the trade ends up doing the opposite of what we hoped it would. We’ve now seen a few of these things play out and I think it’s important to at least understand the trades we are making. I’ll outline a few below as I see them.
A few of the recent trades we made:
Trade #1: Search engines
To gain more knowledge, we traded wisdom and memory.
The internet is a beautiful thing and as it exploded, we needed a quick way to organize, sort and search through the troves of knowledge. That’s when search engines entered the picture. It felt like magic. Anything you ever wanted to know was now just one question away.
In the early days, search results would be a little vague and you’d still have to scour through blogs, news articles, wikipedia pages, etc. to start to formulate your answer. You were very much a part of the process. It forced you to connect your own dots and make your own connections. Over time, with the introduction of ads, our search results started to get skewed and we only saw what the search engine wanted us to based on who was paying the most.
People and companies also started to understand how to optimize their content to reach the most people. They would predict our questions so that we no longer had to read multiple sources, everything we wanted was now on one page. Which was great. It sped up our knowledge acquisition but, at that point, we started trading depth for volume. We were no longer part of the process and so the information we ‘learned’ came fast and cheap.
Have you ever heard someone singing in a language that they don’t speak?
They may know the song/words but they don’t know the underlying language in order to fully do it justice. That became us. We ‘sort-of’ knew the answer/headline but we did not understand any of the underlying themes behind it.
And now, since we were inundated with knowledge that doesn’t connect in our brains, we had trouble sorting/storing all these fragmented facts/opinions. And why should we commit it to memory anyway? We’ve got a second memory, in the form of this search engine that can store everything for us. If we forget, we can just ask it again.
I’ll admit that I have probably googled “the difference between accept or except” close to fifty times throughout my adult life. Back when answers were harder to come by, you would only have to hear/read something once and you would take the time to comprehend it fully and store it in your memory.
Ask yourself: has your memory gotten better or worse since 2010?
And think of the last time you looked for an answer, do you think you could teach it to a room full of people without the aid of technology? Do you really understand it?
Evolution of the human mind has taken 300,000 years to adapt but through the over-reliance on just this one piece of technology, we are creating mental adaptations to our memory and our comprehension levels in a single lifetime.
Trade #2: Digital (Google) Maps
To save a little time, we traded spatial awareness and our ability to navigate our environment.
When Google Maps came out it was amazing. We all become the best navigators on planet earth and now we’d never have to be lost again.
We gladly gave it all of our attention while getting from point A to point B so we could get there more efficiently. No more scouring big maps or printing out pages on Map Quest. For a while, it lived up to its promise and we could get anywhere quickly/easily.
But as we became more and more reliant on it, we stopped giving our attention to our surroundings. We stopped noticing street names, distance/time travelled, landmarks, the spatial relationship between where one neighborhood begins and another ends, etc. Then one day, we woke up to find that our direction skills and ability to navigate our environment completely atrophied. Without a digital map, many of us could barely make it home.
It seems trivial but this is not a small thing. Humanity’s ability to navigate our surroundings/environment is one of the key elements that has allowed us to survive/thrive for thousands of years. It’s not crazy to predict that in one to two generations, this skill of navigation might be near extinct.
Trade #3: Social Media
To distract/entertain ourselves, we traded our time, the present moment, real connection, our attention span and our mental health.
This is the most insidious one. Remember when we thought we were trading a few silly photos for increased connection with friends/loved ones? We got that one wrong. There have been a handful of good things that have come from social media (mostly on the creator side not the user side) but I think it would be very hard to steel-man a case for social media being a net benefit to humanity.
A few years back I was sitting at a beautiful restaurant in Portugal overlooking the Mediterranean Sea as the sun was setting. And there was a group of four adults beside me with their six children. Each of the four adults were scrolling on their phones and the six kids all had tablets with big headphones in. At the time, It felt straight out of Black Mirror but now that’s normal.
What were they watching? Influencers showing off their beautiful travel videos? TV shows about funny, quirky families laughing around a dinner table? Even in the most beautiful moments, we now prefer someone else’s fake reality to our own.
Screen time (mostly spent on social media) has jumped from ~four hours in 2010 to seven to nine hours today. Last I checked, we are all still mortal so time will always be our most valuable commodity. If we’re lucky we get a very short, eighty to one hundred years on this planet so trading time for just about anything will always be a bad trade.
Yet somehow our brains have been hijacked into trading the miracle that is the present moment for funny cat videos or conspiracy theories. This trend is accelerating, not slowing down - how much more time is even possible to trade away?
Trade #4: ChatGPT (or other consumer AI products)
To make our lives easier, we’re trading our ability to think both critically & creatively and complete basic tasks.
This is humanity’s latest big trade and we’ve adopted it faster than any technology to date. We’re still seeing how it’s all going to play out. I can only observe how it’s beginning to impact me and the people around me. I’m sure there will be consequences that I cannot even fathom yet.
The reason I don’t use AI to help me with copywriting, or even proofread, this newsletter is because I know as soon as I start doing that then my own ability to write and proofread will begin to drop dramatically.
We’ve already traded our wisdom, our memory, our ability to navigate, our time, our attention span and our mental health. And we’re about to trade away the two most fundamental human skills: critical/creative thinking and basic task completion. What does that leave us with?
People say that technology frees up our time to focus on more human things, but I wonder what human things are going to be left?
It’s not a foregone conclusion but from the trends I can see, it will only free up our time to distract/entertain ourselves more. And what are we even distracting ourselves from?
From a world that has become too overwhelming and too overstimulating which is largely due to what? Technology.
Our Next Big Trade: AGI, Quantum Computing and Neurotechnology
We’re about to trade away our natural evolution for synthetic evolution.
These three technologies are no longer relegated to sci-fi.
They are all are coming and they are all coming faster than any of us thought. Up until this point, I think the trades we have made are reversible or we can mitigate the downside to some extent. This next trade we make will be irreversible.
These three technologies combined will unlock capabilities in humans that we can only dream of and inevitably, to reduce the friction, we’ll embed the tech right into our vision and then embedded it right into our brains.
If we can learn anything from our past trades, there will be negative consequences. This will put humanity on a completely new evolutionary path, forever intertwined with technology. Dependent on it for basic human function.
And is that what we want? Perhaps it is. But I don’t see any of us making a conscious choice. Are we all just too tired to care, have we become hopeless, are we now just passengers on our own planet?
We can’t lose hope. We have agency. Humans have fought for a brighter future since the dawn of time. Where is the debate? Where is the discourse?
We cannot simply sleep walk our way into becoming Gods.
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I don’t think anything that I am writing here is overly new or novel.
And the hypocrisy of an ex-tech exec and VC who has built, sold and invested in technology for most of his career writing all of this, is not lost on me.
It goes without saying, that I can point to hundreds of incredible AI/tech/software companies that are improving the lives of workers/consumers. I think that’s what makes this conversation so difficult, it’s incredibly nuanced. For every positive advancement we make, that same advancement can be used negatively. And vice versa.
My whole point here is:
Right now all of our major societal changes are being driven by technology. A new technology is invented and it molds/shapes our society and behaviour, whereas I believe it should be the other way around.
Humanity should decide the world that we want to live in and build technology that brings us closer to that reality. Just because we can build a new technology does not mean we should.
It’s much easier said than done but I believe that figuring this out is one of the most crucial tasks of our time. If we don’t, we will all wake up in the not-so-distant future in a world that none of us recognize or want.
It’s an incredible difficult conversation with no easy solutions but we cannot shy away from hard, uncomfortable conversations right now. We don’t have the time to waste. The wheels of capitalism and the exponential nature of the technology we have released is not going to wait until we’re ready.
I will do my best to explore some potential solutions in my next edition.
for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘
This is from the account @freedom.from.the.madness on Instagram.
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Student: I need to do something with my life.
Teacher: Why do you feel that way?
S: Because as I am now feels insufficient.
T: Why do you feel insufficient?
S: Because there is comparison operating: who I am vs. who I think I should be.
T: Why is there a “should”?
S: Because society installed in me an image of what it means to be worthy: success, usefulness, recognition, becoming “someone”.
T: And why do you need that image? What happens if you let all that go?
S: Then the future dies. I feel worthless, static, no movement - not becoming anything.
T: And why is that a problem? What happens if ‘becoming’ ends? What happens when there is absolute stillness?
S: I will be nothing. Without action aimed at “somewhere”, the doer dies. And without the doer, the entire structure of my identity collapses.
T: And what happens when you are nothing, when there is no doer trying to control and act in life?
S: When I am nothing, I merge into everything; life is no longer an object that’s separate from me. I become life itself. What remains is what was here before the story started. Breathing without ambition. Seeing without distraction. Existence without a destination. Life without justification.
T: Hence, when you said, “I need to do something with my life,”, you were really whispering: “I am afraid to stand still and let the false fall away. I am afraid of the death that brings me back home - to wholeness.”
S: So the feeling “I need to do something with my life” is not a call to action. It is the moment that awareness forgets itself and mistakes a story of incompleteness for truth - the story of a separate somebody who must prove and earn the right to exist.
T: Exactly. You don’t need to do something with your life. Life is already being done as you. The exhaustion you feel is not from overactivity or inactivity. It comes from carrying the false burden of being a “doer”, a somebody who believes they must earn the right to exist.
You don’t need to become anything to be allowed to be here. Actually, that is the only way to truly be here. And here is peace. Here is freedom. Here is love. Here is beauty. Here is all that you seek when the seeker dies.
And the moment you turn away from this into becoming, the moment you separate yourself from existence, you become incomplete. You look to the future. You look there. And there is struggle. There is conflict. There is competition. There is effort. There is illusion. There is an endless thirst that no worldly thing can ever satisfy. Because our thirst is spiritual in nature, not material in nature.
There is nothing to be found outside. Yet everyone is drunk on something. For some, it is money. For others, fame or power. For some, family. For others, experience. No matter what we do with our lives, there is an emptiness still lurking beneath it all. Every worldly path eventually ends in pain. King, Queen or Billionaire - it makes no difference. And that is exactly what the pain is trying to teach us: to be still, and to turn our gaze within.
The one who seeks a future stands apart from life and calls the distance purpose.
The one who lets the future fall stands within life and calls this moment love. Where the one who strives becomes silent, the Way reveals itself without direction.
Where the hand releases the future, the present opens as eternity.
Where the doer ends, fear ends. Where fear ends, only what is remains.
Where the Doer falls into stillness, the Beloved stands uncovered as all things.
Seek no arrival.
Desire no becoming.
For the one who seeks is the veil, and the fall of the veil is love.
That is not something you become. That is what you already are.
latest.podcast.episode 🎙
In my latest interview I sat down with Chris Walker, CEO/Founder of Encoded.
In this conversation, Chris shares his journey of trading stress and burnout for freedom, clarity and purpose.
Special Offer: Our partners at Dreamfuel are doing something big to help teams kick off the New Year right. They are offering a free mental performance coaching for your entire team at your annual kick-off or RKO.
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Thanks for being here.
Like everyone else, I’m just trying to figure it out. I certainly don’t have the answers. The only thing I have right now is a little more space/time away from the madness that is modern life.
I welcome conflicting points of view, comments or challenges to anything I write. Healthy discourse/discussion is a dying art in our society and I think it’s incredibly important.
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Scott Barker
“First we build tools, then the tools build us.”
— Marshall McLuhan
*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)
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I used to know all my friends’ phone numbers. My family too. I still remember many of them. The only phone numbers I know by heart are my husband and two grown sons. Crazy, eh?!