Can technology help us build a better future?

Question from the Internet:

“Before we were ignorant and now we know everything with the internet, how could we live before? Will the accelerated progress continue now that we have the information at hand?”

While I share your optimism about the future, it is based on different foundations than yours.

The fact that now we have a global, virtual network, database, and information is “at our fingertips” is of course great. But the main question is where the information is from and what we do with it.

All of our data, information, “facts” are based on our inherently egocentric, subjective consciousness, perception of reality. We examine, research, and assess everything according to 100% self-serving, self-justifying, exploitative calculations. We gather and process only the information, data that is important for our totally self-centered “pleasure/pain” software, and whatever information, data we collected is used for the same reason.

Everything we ever created, invented, revealed is used for “infinite individual profit”, for weapons against others, our whole motivation — knowingly, unknowingly is the success, survival at the expense of others and Nature.

If we blindly continue using our instinctive nature, motivation then all our technology will be used only to destroy each other, ourselves, and Nature.

OUr good future, continuing positive development does not depend on future technologies. It depends on learning how to use what we have in a positive, collective, mutually responsible, mutually complementing manner, similarly to how Nature uses its resources to create and sustain life.

We have to change our calculations, intentions upside down, shifting from a totally egocentric, subjective approach to a totally altruistic, collective, and objective one.

The benefits we would gain are impossible to comprehend from the dark, introverted viewpoint we are born with, although the immediate, tangible benefit of collective survival is becoming clearer by each day. Without that above-mentioned “Nature-like” mutual integration, mutual responsibility and mutually complementing cooperation we can’t even assess, comprehend the mounting global problems let alone solve them.

The rest of the benefits — a qualitatively much higher sense of collective existence beyond all the limitations our selfish ego imposes on us — will be clear when we secured our human survival — together.

And when we build the necessary human network between us all our technology can facilitate, strengthen that human network since we will use it with the right purpose, intention.