Is something beyond technological success lostIJ

Only 10 years ago, Apple created a revolution in the mobile phone market with its iPhone. Three months before that, Facebook opened up to the world community, launching a new movement in social networking. Twitter too made its arrival a decade ago. So did the open-standards platform, Android. And Kindle too. The world's first cognitive computer, Watson, began to be developed in 2007. Around the same time, the world's largest chip manufacturer, Intel, hauled the basic building block of the information age. If this was frenzied pace, what has followed thereafter is astounding. Today, we have cars that drive on their own, cows that are milked automatically, and garbage that is remote-controlled and cleared. You can walk past a signage and the brand owner of that signage can tell whether you walk into the shop that the signage displays details about, and make purchases. Sensors the size of a child's shoe-box fitted on to precious cargo in high seas can relay to a control room thousands of miles away the progress of the journey — and even record humidity and temperature levels. And why just cars, even planes fly and fire on their own. Genetic engineering is ‘creating' new lives out of a handful of samples of chemicals. People long dead have been preserved in the hope that someday cryogenic technology will help them bring back to life. The famous Moore's law is at play. We are, in the words of the new coinage, “in the age of accelerations”. There's no stopping. If so much has dramatically changed in the last 10 years in the area of technology which has impacted human lives so hugely, more revolutions are underway. It's no longer a case of what can be achieved; the question is: How soonIJ Gordon E Moore, who holds a doctorate in physical chemistry and after whom the law of accelerations has been named, is perplexed by the rapid advancements. In a conversation with author Thomas l Friedman, he said, “ Someday it has to stop. No exponential like this goes on forever.” May be, but today is not that someday. The horizons of human mind are expanding. If it's not our planet, then it's the solar system whose mysteries need to unravelled. If it's not this solar system, there are others beyond; the recent discovery of a star with its own bunch of planets that have possibilities of life on them, is the new find. Moore's law is certain to outlive Moore.

But as the human mind races towards newer and more impossible (this may no longer be a fashionable term) conquests, shouldn't we pause to wonder whether humankind's core values are keeping pace with themIJ Gravity may bind our solar system and beyond, but human ties are bound by care, understanding, sensitivity and empathy. What sort of advancement is this when three-year olds are raped and their heads smashed to avoid recognitionIJ When people use and discard relationships like toilet paperIJ When men snuff out the life of a girl child because of genderIJ When women kill their little children to claim money from a welfare stateIJ When a person is shot because of his race, skin colour, caste or communityIJ The age of technology has also become an era of selfishness where one's own interest overrides everything. It's fine for men to create robots, it's another to become robotic in emotions.