Automation, a curse or a blessing?

Creation has a great attraction for us as human beings. Attraction is a natural thing, unless it becomes too powerful a pull. Each one of us probably knows certain objects or processes with which we are in love. In love meaning that these things absorb all of our attention. And as we all know, love is blind.

Especially technical gadgets have an identifying effect on the male part of humanity. At a young age they start out with their meccano sets, or nowadays with their technical Lego. And now, with the arrival of the computer, a kind of technical all-round toy for all ages seems to have come into being.

When I was a teenager, many of my peers were fully absorbed with building their own radio. With youngsters today this inclination has been replaced completely with their own ‘personal’, a hobby set for seemingly unlimited enjoyment.

When I was in my twenties, many members of my age group were obsessed by awesome, powerful, fancy cars: a symbol of power in the physical world. This sense of power is shifting since the growing popularity of the computer. After the mechanisation of muscle power by means of cars, lifts, forklifts and such, it is now time for the conquest of memory and thought. One might say that after the domestication (or cultivation, if you like) of the mineral world, the vegetable kingdom and the animal world, it is now the turn of the mental world. And the same ‘personal’ is a powerful weapon in this process.

When I reached my thirties, many of my peers were working hard to get hold of management jobs, in which communication plays an essential role. Key words here are: power over people, knowing everything, wanting to be informed about everything. This process ran parallel to the development of networks (LAN, WAN, VAN), which give our ‘personal’ unlimited range.

Now that I am in my forties, I find many people of my age to be in an automated ‘prison’, a whole system of instructions, procedures and programmes that rules their entire life.

The computer, in short, and especially the ‘personal’, is a magic box with possibilities that grow along with our psychological development. If Eve were to seduce Adam again today, she would not need the apple of the Tree of Knowledge; in this cerebral world she could just walk into a shop and buy the Apple ‘personal’: a surrogate for our own minds.

Automation, or playing with computers, is exciting and therefore addictive. This addiction is the curse of automation. Personal addiction, because we are caught in a web of technical contrivances, and addiction in the sense of becoming enslaved by automated labour and social processes. The choice is ours: Will we be masters of our own destiny or will we be the slaves of the physical world?!