One of the things that really rings true for me in Talbott’s “The Future Does Not Compute” is the theme of personal responsibility. It is very tempting in my interactions to blame others for my problems and to judge others for their shortcomings. But I strongly believe that you can change the world by changing your intentions and taking responsibility for your choices. And I believe this will be even truer in terms of choices regarding technology. As technology makes it possible to influence the entire world with a single email you will need to consider the choices you make even more seriously.

The challenge is that technology left to itself encourages taking even less responsibility for our choices. Technology does not contain any inherent values and if we take technology as our guide we are also eschewing our values. For example – when you receive an email at work, how much time do you take to consider the actual person who sent the email? Do you think about their human spirit, their values, their emotions? In most cases I don’t have the time or inclination to do so and I suspect most others are in the same situation.

I have a theory that when Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence get to the point where we can project an image of ourselves that completely mimics our physical incarnation (perhaps in all five senses) we will find encounters with these incarnations still fall short of the real thing. There will always be something missing – always something about face to face that is more intimate, more human. It may take getting our technology to that point for us to realize that it is not better communication technology that we need, but better communication period. Technology that “facilitates” communication can actually lead us away from that as it tends to drive towards fact oriented conversations that are disconnected from the human spirit. I realize this is not always the case, but in general it is something that I feel I must fight in my technology mediated conversations.