Utopia

Utopia

No-one knew exactly when it must have started. Like any cultural change, it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time.

People had behaved as they had always done since the beginning of humans.

Breathing, eating, sleeping, loving, dying, surviving, learning. That’s the big one…learning. Without learning how can the human race progress?

If you don’t learn from your mistakes, how can you stop from making those same mistakes over and over again, because there will come a time when evolution takes a leap and you’re left behind to become extinct? At least that what Darwin said… It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.

And how do we adapt to change?

Through learning. Man, and woman for that matter, are programmed with an in-built need to learn. How did the first caveman make a fire for himself on those cold pre-historic nights? Whether he stumbled across a way of striking a flint with another rock and it sparked, igniting some leaves, or rubbed some sticks together and they caught fire doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he remembered how to do it and did it again and again. Over time he learned the best way to do it so he could have fire whenever he needed.

Learning and knowledge are the two important factors here. He learned the best way to make fire, gaining knowledge, and passing it on to other cavemen…and cavewomen.

As time moved through the ages certain civilizations seemed to have an understanding about how important knowledge and learning were, not only to their own people but to the betterment of the human race.

The Greeks for instance. They developed new ideas for government, science, philosophy, religion, and art.

The Egyptians. Their technology included the ability to build large construction projects such as pyramids and palaces, simple machines such as ramps and levers, and a complex system of government and religion.

The Romans. The language we use today was developed from them. The Romans spoke and wrote in Latin and many of our words are based on Latin words. The calendar, the census, laws, and the legal system, road building.

That’s just three amazing cultures but there are, and have been, many more and they all prospered because of learning and knowledge. They knew that without these fundamental tools the future was bleak with little chance of survival.

So why and how did we forget this? Was it some evil force cursing our people and turning them against education, making them rebel against anything new like a throw-back to that fascist regime in the early 20^th century. Hitler’s Nazi party to be exact. They would burn books they didn’t want people to read.

Mind you, they weren’t the only ones. Ever since books have been written there has always been some-one or some-group of people that didn’t want other people or groups-of-people to read what they had, or felt the books contained some awful power that ordinary people couldn’t read just in case they rebelled against the very people that didn’t want them to read those books in the first place.

No.

It was technology. Technology I hear you cry, but it’s here to help us. But is it? Technology is fantastic… but up to a point. Where would we be without mobile phones, or computers, or television, or electricity? I grant you, these things on their own are great for helping us communicate, or to relax, or doing all of the wonderful things electricity allows us to do. But what if we take it to the next level. What if things get to a point where technology actually starts to alter the way we think and behave? Is that good? Is that what technology should be doing?

Early in the 21^st century, everything was moving along great, just as it always had. Every few months a new model of TV with more and more functions would come on the market. Plasma, LCD, 3D, LED, OLED, Wallpaper TV, Flexible OLED, Holographic TV. We gobbled them up, and why not? If our viewing pleasure could be enhanced when watching the latest HollyBollywood blockbuster, why shouldn’t we have the latest and biggest TV? No reason at all. And don’t forget the mobile phone. 3G, 4G, 5G….and so on. Screens that never smash or break, and if they do crack, they repair themselves. Smart watches, smart clothes. Whatever next…smart people?

People all over the developed world were enjoying the speed at which new gadgets became available. It was like a New-Gadget Toy shop for anyone that could afford to join the innovation highway. Anything that could make your life easier was not only being invented but being sold in record time. Everyone would run to the stores for the latest new smart device or the newest phone with the most functions. It became a circus, and the developers and manufacturers saw a market that could be almost self-perpetuating. Every time they released a new version of their product it was snapped up by their loyal followers. And each manufacturer seemed to have its own groupies. If you always bought type A phone, laptop, tablet and TV you never strayed into buying type B….that would never do!

Very quickly it became apparent that the manufacturers had to find cheaper and cheaper ways of making their products so they could not only be the first to the market with their new products but they were also competitively priced. So, firstly they were manufactured where they were designed but when demand grew they were made in developing countries around the world. But as is the way with capitalism and supply and demand, it wasn’t long before the developing countries were pricing themselves out of the market with the labour force demanding more wages and so the manufacturers would move on to the next country they could exploit and so on until eventually there were no countries left capable of manufacturing the electronic equipment at the right price. There were always a few countries capable of manufacturing the goods at the right price, but the governments were so corrupt and unstable that the manufacturers soon learned it was best not to deal with these places…if you valued your life!

All this happened within the first couple of decades of the 21^st century and it soon became clear that the normal means of making the electronic equipment had to change.

In the background to all this, a huge internet search engine company had been developing a driverless car along with other car manufacturers and they had now, finally got it right. For the first time, you could get into a car, tell it where you wanted to go, and off it went. It felt very strange being driven around with no-one at the wheel but it didn’t take long for everyone to get used to it and it soon became the only way you could travel on the roads. Unless you took one of the driverless coaches which didn’t take long to spring up as companies realised they could get people from A to B without having to pay a driver…and so make more money!

One of the world’s largest consumer electronics companies based in California’s Silicon Valley was the first to develop a manufacturing process that revolutionized the way they made their products. Every single part of the manufacturing process was performed by computers. Once the final design had been agreed, all someone had to do was press the “Start” button and within minutes a new gizmo came off the end of the production line, fully tested and packaged in its own little brightly coloured and GPS tagged box.

Now there’s nothing wrong with the company wanting to make as much profit as it can. Without the profit, it can’t pay its workers and then there would be no jobs. Without jobs, our society collapses and people starve. Not to mention that’s how war starts.

The problem was that this company, without knowing it, had started something that would change the world forever. Not with its products, but how they were made. The designers had made the computers able to solve small problems. They were artificially Intelligent…or AI…and if the product they were making didn’t work correctly or didn’t fit together well, the computers were able to fix the problem. Great I hear you say…but think about it. That meant that not a single person was needed on the production line, or in quality control, or in the packing department.

With the advent of the driverless car, delivery, and courier companies were quick to jump on the bandwagon. So when the product left the factory it was delivered to the customer’s door without being touched by a human being anywhere along the entire manufacturing process. Now, again, what’s the problem, I hear you say. If we can get the product we want, as cheaply as we can and as quickly as we can that’s great…isn't it?

Well…it is and it isn’t.

People loved all the products that were rolling off the production line. A new product every week. It wasn’t long before you didn’t have to leave your house. You could get everything you wanted delivered to your door in record time. Food, drink, everything was delivered by the driverless vans. TV gave the people everything they needed. They didn’t have to go abroad or to the coast for their holidays, or go and visit their friends because everyone was now watching TV with their Actual-Virtual-Reality, AVR, flush-fitting, unobtrusive, unbreakable glasses.

Actual Virtual Reality made such a huge impact. It was like you were there…so why exert energy by moving when all you had to do was call a friend up and chat like you were in each other’s living rooms. You download the latest software for any destination in the world. You could walk with polar bears at the North Pole or swim with dolphins in the Pacific Ocean just as if you were there…only you weren’t.

The biggest issue was with the young people that hadn’t experienced life before all this technology came along.

At least most of us oldies had experienced what it was like to work. To get up in the morning, get ready, and actually travel to work, come rain or shine. We had to go to work to earn our living, and if we didn’t show up for work, we had to explain why we hadn’t turned in and if the excuse wasn’t good enough you might lose a day’s pay…and rightly so. We knew what it was like to have to get up at a certain time, catch a train at a certain time, start and finish work at a certain time. Hell, even go to the loo at a certain time. We knew what it was like to work with our hands, to work so hard you were exhausted at the end of the day. It didn’t seem good at the time but when you look back on it now…it had a funny feeling about it…a feeling of…well…fulfilment I suppose. A feeling that we had actually done something. Learned something. Been part of something.

The problem for the young people was they hadn’t, and couldn’t experience any of those feelings. Technology had progressed so far that they didn’t have to think hard about anything.

When we were young we were led to believe technology was here to save the world. It helped us live forever and travel to the stars. It would make our lives so much better that we would continually embrace any new leap in design and welcome every new product.

Now… that happened for a while but it soon became apparent to some of us that why would someone want to live forever if all they were was a blob of goo in a jar while their thoughts were locked in an un-feeling mechanical metal Mickey?

The other problem that really took a lot of oldies by surprise was how quickly the young people evolved into nothing more than shallow, empty beings with little or no knowledge of anything.

That hurt. Technology had progressed so fast that oldies were almost incapable of keeping up with the speed at which new products became available. Also, young people developed their own language which grew out of text speak. The way they communicated using their phones in the early days. They developed it into a new language which was based on English but was much easier to type and put together…for young people anyway.

That meant that the oldies were virtually unable to communicate with the young people…which helped to speed up the rate at which the young people became completely entranced with anything new and further separated them from the older and wiser people around them. The oldies were unable to give them the benefit of their experience and wisdom gained from knowledge and understanding because they couldn’t talk to them.

The young people’s lives were swamped with technology which meant they didn’t have to think for themselves, which, in turn, meant they didn’t learn anything. They didn’t have to get out of bed, apart from to eat and go to the toilet, and there were gadgets available so that they didn’t even have to do that. They could get everything they needed by using their AVR glasses and tablets/phones. They could eat sleep and work without moving from their bed.

Now, on the point of the young people not learning. That was the beginning of the end. Because technology had taken over their lives, they were more embroiled in the technology itself than with learning. If they needed to find out something…I don’t know…when man first went to the moon, all they had to do was look it up online. There’s nothing wrong with that except if they know that they can do that again and again and again, what they’ve just found out doesn’t go into their brain…it doesn’t need to. So over a period of time, and that’s not a long period in a young person’s life, they very quickly become just a shell of a person. They can read and write, talk, look things up, but without them learning anything how can they become a true person. Yes, they’re a human being but a human being with nothing inside. A human being with no soul.

That’s the problem with not learning and gaining knowledge…you’re empty and incomplete.

Over a period of time, these young people grew older, started to get jobs…jobs that oldies wouldn’t recognize as jobs because they could do everything without having to move from their beds, let alone go out of the house.

Everything was completely automated even the growing of crops and the rearing of animals was done by electronic and mechanical machines. Robots. Machines to till the land and sow the seeds. Machines to tend to the growing plants and vegetables. Machines to harvest the crops. Machines to inseminate animals and rear the young. Machines to kill the animals. Machines…machines…machines.

Even machines to fix machines.

And all the time these machines were allowed to do what needed to be done, all overseen by the young people from their beds. The same people with little or no knowledge of life.

Oldies were cast aside and became almost forgotten, even though they had the knowledge.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that over a few generations, the oldies were now the young people grown old. When they couldn’t see well because they had cataracts, or started to go deaf, they themselves were cast aside. This created an underclass of old, helpless, uneducated sick people that had to try and care for themselves. But because they had little or no understanding of how to fend for themselves, in a world where everything had been done for them, they couldn’t survive and there were huge areas of cities where old people just died and littered the streets.

It was terrible.

The next few generations of young people developed machines that patrolled the streets looking for dead bodies to sweep up and put into sanitized boxes to be sent to the city incinerator but some young bright spark soon worked out that although this process was efficient, it wasn’t cost-effective and with the worlds dwindling resources it would be much better to put all the bodies into a machine that could extract all the heavy metals and other valuable minerals leaving the remaining leftovers to be sold as fertilizer and spread over the land to be ultimately fed back to the people. What a horrible thought.

The world was now being run by successively younger people with no knowledge of life, and old people dying, being mashed up and fed back to the masses. Now if that wasn’t a recipe for disaster I don’t know what was.

And yes, you guessed it....it wasn’t long before people eating the human soup began to fall ill. And don’t forget… that was mainly the young people, the older people that were forced out generally ate anything they could find. Sometimes it was the soup but generally, it was animals like rats, dogs and cats or vegetables they could grow in the gutters of the ghetto.

The symptoms were strange. An infected person would first become absent-minded and after a while, they would start to lose their hand to eye co-ordination and drop things or not be able to use their phones or tablets because their hands and fingers wouldn’t work properly. Then their body would become almost completely paralysed and it wasn’t long before they died. All this would take less than about 6 months, so it was very quick.

Panic swept across the high-tech world, but the young ones with all their technology had no idea what was causing the outbreak. They knew how to swipe a tablet or push a button but they had no understanding of the real world.

Anyway… just about everything was done by machines…what did they know about biology?

The robots took care of that.

They came up with all sorts of theories. Maybe it was an air-born disease, so everyone wore masks and had micro filters installed in their air conditioning units. That didn’t work. Then some bright spark thought it was transmitted by touch so people would keep two metres apart and not let anyone close but they soon realised that didn’t work.

All this time they had still been eating the soup or it had been added to just about every type of food you could think of. Bread, cakes, cereals. It had been fed to livestock so all the cows, pigs, and sheep were infected and dying. It had been spread on the fields as fertiliser so all the farmed vegetables were carrying the disease. Day by day they were poisoning themselves and they couldn’t see it.

Slowly everyone…and I mean everyone, started to die. The young people who controlled everything with their technology were disappearing fast and this meant there was no one to control the robots and machines that worked the farms, fed the livestock, sowed the seeds in the fields, delivered food to the tables of the people. The machines started to break down so fast, the machines that fixed the machines couldn’t keep up and they too started to break down.

It was the end. No more food, no more electricity, so no more gadgets. The end.

But…you see….it wasn’t the end for everyone. Away from the cities and technology, hidden deep in the interior of the country, there were a few families and very small villages.

In these oases, there had never been any electronic technology, apart from maybe a toaster or a kettle to make tea or coffee…boil some water. The water was clean, the food was good. People lived simple lives. It was hard during the winter but if they stored enough food during the summer to keep them going through the winter they were ok.

So you see….I knew it was the best thing for me and my family….no technology…just the simple life for us. Here we are along with a few other families, living as we have done for years. It may be difficult sometimes but at least we’re alive…and safe.

So…is there a moral. I’m not sure. But I am sure of one thing….Don’t let technology rule your life.

The End – or the beginning