My life profession is electronics design engineering. I have spent essentially my whole life obsessed with electronics technology. And with that, my answer is a big Yes, I agree that technology is going to far, or in my opinion in a dangerous direction. I apologize in advance for the following rant!
I began to realize the “too far” thing in the early 1980’s when I started to see advertising being used to induce false opinions in their target customers. The opinions being created was to change the people’s mindset to believe their products to be better even when they were really seriously inferior. I was dismayed how effectively the advertising worked – essentially to cult levels. That was also about the time when engineer pride in their creation’s real performance, quality and lifespan began to fade in favor of “cool factor”. To this day, I detest “cool factor” and “gadgets”. I feel that designing products for the sake of “cool” is shameful, both of the engineers that design them and the people who are attracted to them. I see attraction to “cool” gadgets to be immature and childish.
I also despise designs that I call “solutions in search of a problem”, which is typically in the “cool factor” category or just engineering for the sake of engineering without a real purpose.
I also do not like engineering technologies for the purpose of enabling laziness or engineering for maximizing greed – designing intended fail rates into products AKA planned obsolescence or failures just after warranty periods. I am impressed with designs that are not intended to fail.
I don’t really fear things like Sophia the robot. I believe that consciousness is a matter of circuit complexity and the level of complexity needed for anything we would consider to be conscious is very far out of current or even near future human engineering reach. Artificial intelligence is just as stated. It’s artificial. It looks like real consciousness and may fool many, but it’s really just an improved version of a clockwork automaton (see the movie, Hugo). That doesn’t mean, however, that AI is benign. It can be used for catastrophic destruction. However, if it is used for such destruction, it will be at the hands of the designer and programmer, not the consciousness of the AI, robot or whatever.
My fear, however, is that technology is presenting a tragic hazard to our humanity. Has anyone seen The Borg in Star Trek episodes and movies? From an engineering perspective, that is my fear of where I see us (human race) currently heading towards. We already have the beginnings of the Borg “Collective”. We call it the internet. The human to internet interface is Facebook. The most common Collective interface hardware are smart phones. Everywhere you go, you see people with their faces glued to their “collective” interface smart phone oblivious to their surroundings. Elon Musk has proposed making smart phones implantable. And the purpose of Facebook (the Collective) is not just to influence, but to program mindsets, interests, opinions and ways of thinking - where our minds no longer belong to the individual, but to the corporations programming “us”.
Another example, a bit closer to home is how the humans are depicted in the movie WALL-E, where laziness enabling technology has become complete as well as being perpetually tied to the “Collective”. With little to no consciousness outside the “Collective”.
I am very proud of the truly useful, practical and beneficial technology that humanity has engineered, but now I am disappointed in where it is currently headed.
