We react and adapt: a circle of cause and effect driven by a survival instinct since a stick with a sharpened bone attached was considered the latest technology.
We create systems that run our lives with liquid smoothness until they do not. There is an unavoidable catastrophic breakage, and we stop for a moment, sift through the debris, find the faulty part and fix the flaw. We strengthen the bolt, rewrite the code, or find the vaccine, and we are moving again like the plane crash or pandemic never happened.
All systems go.
This pandemic-induced pause in life is a human tragedy with accompanying grief and loss that is raw and painful. We all feel it, whether we can acknowledge that right now or not.
At the same time, the pause in the rhythm of our former everyday life is a chance to stop and ask questions about life, which we were too busy to ask way back in the good old days of 2019.
Communication technology such as, for example, my new smartphone, which inspired these words, has found its way to the core of our lives, and has an omnipotent impact on how we think and act.
As a child of the 1970s and clunky landlines with their aptly named “dead signals,” I’m continuously impressed with the quickness of telecommunication’s satellite technology. Our voices used to crawl across the earth through thick steel lines, now they’re beamed to space and back in under a second.
Is the influence of our phones an awesome enhancement or an insidious detraction to life? Or are they just an inevitable part of the evolution of technology that began years ago, in a cave, with the control of fire?
English science-fiction writer and prophetic thinker Arthur C. Clarke famously stated: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
His statement, which he made in his 1973 essay Profiles of the Future, was meant to be a law like gravity or the Vancouver Canucks not winning the Stanley Cup.
Joking aside, the first telephone call in 1876 must have been a magical moment for humanity only 145 years ago. The crackling tone of Alexander Graham Bell’s words were just the human voice transmitted electrically through a wire stretched between Boston and Cambridge.
There was no magic involved at all, just science. However, the experience of the first telephone was, I imagine, “indistinguishable from magic” for everyone at that moment.
The reaction to high tech as magic reoccurs regularly throughout human history. Merging of our biological beings with our technological inventions, at some point, brings a sense of unreality.
The iPhone in my hand, as well as the COVID-19 vaccine, which, hopefully, will soon be in everyone’s bloodstream, are products of science-based technology, which is neither good nor bad, only as inevitable as the rising tides.
The realization that we have control over a flame of fire to the probability of moon-based space tourism in a half century, technology is not only indistinguishable from magic, but also from us.
Robert Skender is a Powell River freelance writer and health commentator.
