BEING HUMAN IN AN INCREASINGLY DIGITAL AGE
By: Jesudamilare Adesegun-David
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Humanity, Love, Choices, Digital

Drinking Deeply of Nature’s Fragrances because Human. Image Credit: Pexels.com

I have been an intensely private person. Some years back, I could be in my rented apartment for days and not come out, not even for sunshine. I either had fast-paced, adrenaline-inducing, page-turners in steady supply or I was locked in for extended periods of meditation and reflection on my existence as a spiritual entity. However, a burning desire to foster change, to be the change I wanted to see in my society soon led me to take the first tentative steps out of my shell into the “real world” where actions spoke louder than words or for that matter, thoughts and dreams and visions. It proved scary at different points and my mouth would go cottony dry as I spoke with some while at other times, I would be chasing around that perfect opening statement to catch some others’ attention. The successes that followed after the initial travail of navigating unfamiliar terrain soon got me to a point where my apartment began to serve as a melting pot for conversations, celebrations, joint reflection, prayers and communal meals.

Fast forward 7 years and the above metaphor began to play out again. There I was, a Nigerian, in a closeted part of the rapidly developing Giant of Africa. Life was laid back. Fences are scarce around the buildings we have here. One could easily walk the distance to the most important places to him in the community and he wouldn’t break any sweat in the process. There I was, in Ogbomoso, content with having a basic phone that I could both make calls and receive texts with. From time to time, I surfed the net. Yes, I did that with my laptop at cybercafés. I was content basically with calls, texts, Yahoomail and Google (my passport to every single website I needed access to). But that wasn’t going to be enough for one who sought to really effect positive, systematic change in a rapidly evolving world. I soon got swamped with such questions as, “Are you on Whatsapp?” “No.” BBM? No. Facebook? No. When I said “No” at the mention of Facebook, my head would involuntarily hang itself. Was I some antediluvian or what? I got some curious looks. How could I explain to those questioning me that I opted out of Facebook for five years because I began to get so distracted? Some waited long enough to hear me out though. However, at the point where sending texts became almost impossible since the people I was discussing ideas with were sometimes half-way across the world, I found myself taking those first tentative steps out of my shell once again.

It was first a Blackberry. Then, Whatsapp, Skype, Facebook, About.me, Edmodo… and the list keeps growing. But almost immediately, I wanted to retreat into my shell again. Why? There was this battleground of privacy staring me in the face from every corner. It was either this website required me to keep imputing personal information or the other preferred I signed in with my email account and a short disclaimer would just conveniently be some inches below which informed me that by signing in with my email account, I was granting access to my mails, contacts etc.

Here the dilemma holds me in a vice-like grip, threatening to throttle me at times. Is access worth a flinging open of the doors to my life for some nameless, faceless entities, bots, then humans, to scour every detail with a fine-tooth comb until those personal, sacred constituents of my life were reduced to some bits and bytes stored in data barns in faraway lands?

I’ve wondered at the hidden costs of being in the loop via social media. The internet definitely creates a dilemma for an intrinsically private person as I am. The cultural context of my ancestry and nation also helps to strengthen this aversion to being dissected and laid bare for perfect strangers to routinely examine and decide if I should be shared with a company claiming special powers in combating balding in men — now, I am just 30 and my hairline has already significantly receded! — or to have ads from immigration “experts” doing jigs on my email’s homepage just because recent mails coming and going from my box have such trigger or key words like visa, ticket, and trip in them.

However, there is apparently a connectedness that having the internet and the technologies that give access to it, all at my fingertips, enables for me. I am capable of holding conversations with people from far-removed continents simultaneously. I am able to schedule a Skype interview that enables a greater grasp of my personality that goes beyond just my Nigerian voice. The pros outweigh the cons on a micro-level for me, possibly because I have not been the victim of hackers who hacked their way into my phone’s photo album and posted photos of me bare-chested online. Remaining with a micro-level thinking however proves inadequate because a person faced with realities of the world we live in learns to agree, through experience, that, “If it could happen to the other person, nothing stops it from happening to you.” And so, I have had to look beyond myself and think on the macro-scale, of global trends, to be able to understand how the digital age could affect me in the not-too-distant future. The cloistered life that still holds sway in Ogbomoso would soon give way to rapid digitization what with the current exploits of the Computer Science graduates of the sole Higher Education institution the town-city boasts of.

Beyond even all of that which relates to personal computing devices and infrastructure, I have had to make myself put into consideration the many lives saved by digital implants, procedures and technologies. I have had to think of families that have been spared the pain of losing their loved ones earlier than they should have. Again, I must think of the number of terrorists who will be stopped in their tracks because of CCTVs and GPS triangulation and flagged searches and conversations on Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. I must think of those who are paying heavily for cryonic treatments in the hope that they could get the chance to live again. So much positivity is held out also on the macro-scale. So many benefits. However, we have a Catch-22 situation on our hands. A dilemma. In the pursuit of good, comes the discovery of evil as well. Albert Einstein knew something of this pain. His innocuous seminal thoughts opened up the portals for some other men to fashion death-dealing bombs that have killed men on scales never before known in human history.

Deep reflection has made me come to the conclusion that humanity’s greatest challenge far as the digital age and the progress made so far are concerned would pivot on the answers we have to these questions: At what point do we draw the line? What should be the limit to our seeking to continue pursuing digital advance? What boundary are we to collectively decide we must never cross?

These are difficult questions. However, is there a location on earth that would be large enough to contain us all in a global town hall meeting? A place where we could all have our say and cast our votes? Or is all we have to do just to hand the responsibility over to the UN or G20, knowing fully well that diplomatic organizations never get to reflect the deepest dimensions of our humanity because of all the bureaucracy that obtains. I can belch among my friends with the intent to amuse but diplomatic organizations can’t afford that.

The question then is, what are some of those things that cause a sense of dread when thinking of the rapidity of digital advance? What makes me see that my privacy is just a little section of what calls for a deep look at our advances in the digital age? What makes me fear for humanity?

Here is one of those things that have made me begin to think long and hard about my personal outlook and consumption of all things digital.

David Passig, a futurist said it this way, In technology, a singularity is a future period [in] which the pace of technological change will be so fast and far reaching that human existence will be irreversibly altered. Brain power — knowledge, skills, and human personality quirks — will combine with computer power in order to think, reason, communicate, and create in ways we can scarcely even contemplate today.

He went on to quote Ray Kurzweil, who said in a Forbes interview, that, “We will ultimately enhance our intelligence very directly by merging with non-biological intelligence, sending intelligent nanobots into our brains, which will communicate with our biological neurons — they’ll all be on a local area network, they will be on the internet. We will have direct brain-to-brain communication; we’ll be online all the time inside our brains.”

But it seems these men have not thought to take permission from “we the people”. They have not taken permission from me in determining what help I want with my brain’s computational powers. Would I want to lose my identity as a human even if it means better computational powers? Faster results? Less drudgery? No, not for one minute!

However, quite uncannily, everything seems to be pushing for this greater adoption of technological replacements for all those things we have always done as humans. The crave for “faster, cheaper, easier” has served as the checkmate for our emotional-rational construct as humans. What do we do then? We need to know that a negotiation must be entered into now. Technology has kidnapped humanity but it is yet to deal the death blow — perpetual enslavement. Either of three responses are ours but the ransom held out as the only other option for our independence carries a price tag that seems too steep for many to want to even contemplate.

1. Hand over our lives to technology to enslave, perpetually;

2. Wait on Governments to impose sanctions and legislations;

3. Commit technological hara-kiri by “dying” to technology.

Choosing the third option is really “suicide”. It would mean deliberately becoming anachronistic. It would mean delineating boundaries we would never cross. It would mean that only over our dead bodies would some certain advances get imposed on us. We’d be “dead” men walking. But we will be humans once again. We would be the mythical phoenix arising from the ashes. And I choose to be human. Being human means laughter, tears and sniffles. It means eye contact, searching for meaning, holding hands, strolling together and waiting to have the other person share her thoughts rather than knowing it beforehand. It means a preservation of individuality and uniquenesses. It means intuition. It means forgetting where I dropped my car keys and thinking for several minutes before that ecstatic “aha!” moment that reveals where I left it! It means metaphors, hyperboles and idioms. I see I would need to start afresh to determine how I would USE technology and not have technology USE me. The costs are steep. “Faster, easier, cheaper” though gone out of the window leaves us for the first time with the unfettered joy of being human. Of cherishing our conversations. Of speaking one on one with an employee to understand the reason for his recent tardiness rather than sending him to a Bot-Counsellor, of caring enough to recommend a few days of rest…

These, among others, trumps any digital advance — to be fully human!

PS. This was written some years back though I modified some details last year. However, there has been no major change from what was written. If I were to write on this topic again, I will have to speak much about AI and the quantum advances it’s been experiencing till date and how that affects our humanity.