GADGET GALORE (02-May-2020)

This Albert Einstein quote says: “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”

I have worked in the IT industry for many years and for a decade worked for the largest technology company in the world.  When I worked there, there was a time period during which the corporate policy did not permit us to bring in phones with cameras into the workplace.  Even if we did, we had to seek written permission to click photographs inside the premises.  This was a safety measure to protect our client’s data confidentiality.

The world has indeed progressed at a fast pace and technology is now ubiquitous.  Driverless cars have become a reality!  World in the near future will fully accept the sensor technology, otherwise referred to as the IOT world with devices, vehicles, appliances, homes, and a few other items networked and connected with embedded sensors, software, electronics, even analytics to draw intelligence and insights.  This is the smarter world envisaged by the tech pundits.

Today in every home we leverage Bluetooth and WiFi technology to connect gadgets. During the early days a WiFi router connected two phones in a jiffy.  As connected gadgets grew exponentially, the bandwidth choked leading to friction, a sacrificial member purely circumstantial.  Akin to a common phenomenon across families, at our home too as our kids grew up, they demanded bandwidth, among other things.  Sweet home became ‘khara-spicy’ and before it could spiral down, we effected a bandwidth upgradation.  Router was upgraded; today we are all set with our own gadgets, blue-tooth connectivity, wireless speakers, wireless headphones, cables running wild, but then sometimes with misplaced possessions.

This incident happened recently.  Our speaker placed centrally in the family room suddenly picked up loud music and started to play.  At the dining table, I had turned on my laptop to get some work done and was annoyed that someone was not being sensitive.  I screamed at them for their total apathy, and realized it fell on deaf ears, or should I say headphoned ears!  With headphones on they concentrated on their hand-held gadgets and did not even flinch.  Reality hit me then, a YouTube video streamed inadvertently from my laptop on Bluetooth played the ear-splitting music.  So much for being sensitive!

On another occasion, my wife and daughter were sitting at two ends of the sofa watching their own personal choices – a spiritual talk and a USA teen show, respectively.  Unwittingly in the mix of wires they had the wrong headphones on.  My wife watched a spiritual guru on her screen but heard teenage conversation from the TV show, while my daughter was baffled to see the boy and the girl on her screen with a voice-over oozing spirituality!  The home minister insists that awareness is critical; but this may have been a nirvana experience!

People have tried to use a TV remote control to open a door in their habit of changing channels sitting planted in front of their television set for extended hours, photo pinching (the act of zooming in a digital photo) a picture that appear in an old album or a newspaper, and so on and so forth. 

The smarter world of gadgets has unsmarted us and turned us into idiots; Einstein has the last laugh!