- My five years old grandpa learns to flail a spade in the field for the first time with his jellyfish hands big enough to grip just a pencil while my great grandma kneels frozen, star-gazing at her son completely ignorant of the madness in the West. In the West, every clenched fist is trained to kill, every innocent heart is threatening to quit, every beautiful mind is an experiment lab to test chlorine gas, guns and grenades. Technology, is a weapon to kill. Future with Technology , is unquestionably, the extinction of human race.
- Earthquake hits 8.4 in Nepal crushing tens of thousands of houses under ten thousand bodies. My grandpa, exceptionally, survives clinging on to the branch of a slingshotting tree. Unawareness lives through and through. Technology, is a crumpled ‘dharahara’, a jhankri for the wounded and a grandpa who thinks that the world rests on the fishtail of a mermaid and earthquake is nothing but the mere fluttering of her tail. Future with technology, is a hilarious dream.
- Humanity is put under a severe test one more time. Even the neutrals are fully loaded and my grandpa is recruited in a war ship in India where he thaws with the solitude of the sun rolling in the empty sky every day, the air heavy with the scent of death and despair. Technology, is the hailstorm of plummeting aircrafts from the sky. Life, is the exact number of uranium atoms required to turn a fully grown human body into the finest sand of Hiroshima desert. Future with technology, is a nightmare to the child who survived in the bunker the night a Tankov bombed her home to dust.
- It is not the advent of computers in the west that granted my eight years old dad a privilege to go to school but the death of his untreated elder brother from a dog bite, who used to go to school. The mission schools and hospitals are the only hope of social change. Technology is the chalks and talks in the school to know about the alien world, a bus ticket to college hundred miles away. Future with technology, is dancing even with the world, insurmountable miles ahead.
- It is a seven-year-old me trying to make sense of the idea that a plane hit a building in America, while my teacher had told that an aeroplane is built to fly in the sky with people inside. Technology, is my television set with twenty one channels but always stuck on the one that shows a round rolling earth on the top right before which I wonder if everyone just stay perched on top of that ball because people might fall on the bottom. Future with technology, is a chocolate roll in a roller coaster to my imagination.
- My dad is cured of a serious TB case, along with thousands through out the world who survive of illness, fatal a decade ago, or millions of epidemic that, otherwise, would have wiped off the entire race.
Technology is my computer where I keep surfing about large hadron collider and amazon rain forest, and a LM324 hearing aid I soldered for my partially deaf grandpa. Future with technology is the only way I can survive.
Today my hundred years old grandpa keeps decrying that technology has invaded human’s natural way of living, that he would still prefer walking to vehicles without realizing the impossibility it imposes upon his withered feet to walk hundreds of miles. My social studies teacher once held a debate about technology being a boon or a curse to humanity. And I still shudder at the number of bodies that found no grave in the world wars, but I do not blame technology for it. Because I cannot ensure that if I offered a chisel to everyone, all of them have a bookshelf to build, some might as well stab it into people’s heart to kill. But it does not conclude that a chisel kills people, just as an aeroplane does not crumble a building. I would like to believe that hatred weighted the same amount when they dropped atom bombs in world war II and when Genghis khan conquered the East.
People say that technology kills one of emotions, murders the green from the nature and sets us apart from the rest. While I say that my grandpa had been living with the green but I have been bleeding with it. I write about trees like a love letter to a ghost, I wish, could talk to me back. I know, from technology, that they deserve the earth more than we do. So I think my grandpa was wrong when he said the earth rests on the fishtail of a mermaid , I think it rests on the mercy of the green. I still do not understand the metaphor when Sarah Kay says in her love poem that we will inhale the exhales of each other, while literally it would be possible just with the trees and I do not understand that one person can make no change to save the green. Because if my voice is loud enough I can, through technology, make the whole world feel for it the way I feel it, in the touch of a screen, in a flick of a second. So technology for future is indeed making each other feel for the world that we live in, the people we live with.
So where will the future of Technology take us? Every time I think about the future, I dream of a flying car in my garage, transparent solar panels with organic excitants for my window, a supercomputer with self changing OS, an artificial fiber actuated exoskeleton for working, and lots of trees around, I love them. Most people fear that Terra nova and Terminators are the only fate inevitable given the current direction of technology. But I doubt if the future can ever be predicted that way. I think, from retrospection of our footprints , that we are learning to live with technology, we have seen the worst of it and the best of it.
We have learnt from our mistakes, enough to pull ourselves inside the ethical barriers of technological misuse. Otherwise why would we ever have Asimo’s three laws of robotics ages before any robot of that sort can ever be imagined. We have learnt to award those who use it in favor of people and punish those who use it to harm. The world have, indeed, become a safer and a happier place to live because I think my life has been better than my father’s and my father’s better than my grandfather’s. And there is no objection to the fact that we have been aware of every important thing there is to know abut. Like we don’t hide in the basement in a Tsunami or climb a tree, like my grandpa, in an earthquake.
I feel defeated every time I see a teenager brandishing her tab to her mother making a face that says don’t-touch-its-our-kind-of-stuff. Technology is a generation gap meant only for this generation which makes a mother feel abandoned in her own house by her kids busy on their screens. My grandpa says its only for a techno savvy like me and I am compelled to believe it every time I see my father struggling to understand the meaning of a website, how things flow over the internet and how his cell phone works. And I ask him to leave the details to me and just use it, just like I don’t understand any of his books on linguistics but still can speak a language.
Some people say technology is an alien hypnotizing the present generation seizing their world of reality, while we keep making apps upon apps hoping that someday it will get to the hands of that farmer in Gorkha who lost everything from the new pest in his field. My grandpa was staring at the red sun just like on that ship, brooding over the loneliness of forever floating over the endless blue ocean under the endless blue sky the evening I surprised him with the hearing aid, he, sure, thanked technology for being able to hear once again after years, the chirping of birds in the background of my shouting grandma.
So technology for future is not just flying cars and holograph, its everyone of us with problems with impaired ears or broken hearts, or that kid, like my dad, in Karnali whose only reason for not going to school is lack of fund, but still confident that either there is a technology of some sort to address the problem, or at least a bunch of us more than willing to make it our own problem.
