In 1973, the Chipko Andolan began in the hills of Uttrakhand. Sunderlal Bahuguna, his family and villagers hugged trees in the forest and prevented them from being cut. Their love for the forests and nature was from a deep sense of understanding. They knew that without forests we cease to exist. Today, we are in the midst of yet another movement- a discord revolution (pun intended) engulfing everyone and everything in its wake. But, instead of trees we seem to be hugging something else, everywhere we go.
From the time we wake up, till we finally hit the snooze button, we are ensconced with and wrapped around a gadget. We need our Mobile Phones, Tabs, Fitbits, to micro manage every small detail of our waking and sleeping lives. Earlier it was only the library where one could find solace, an escape to find solitude. But, today restaurants and cafeterias, alumni reunions are engulfed in deafening silence, and lit by the blue screen. The rhythmic poetry of clackety-clack of fingers, is music to most ears. Animated exaltations can be overheard over Insta perfect reels whilst conversations and social skills seem to be conveniently left at the door.
Acrobatics in the elevators and metro trains are the norm. The convoluted postures are to catch a ray of hope, the elusive signal that can transmit, receive and view the green ticks on the phone. Monsoons and snow are no longer excuses to get wet but to run for cover and protect our electronics from the damp and dust.
People have hundreds of friends on Meta and Snapchat and part of tens of groups on Whatsapp yet no one to share their fears and tears. We are busy posting and taking selfies. Yet, we have trouble maintaining eye contact. We have Siri and Alexa choosing our music and the lips that hummed a song have been silenced forever. Social conversations are awkward and short, yet our digital footprints have a thousand stories. We have lost the joy of sitting with parents and flipping old albums to reminisce, but our Instagram stories has a million likes purring about the mundane and everyday life.
We have lost our tongues and found Twitter (X) and hashtags worth 150 words. The tender emotions in a hand written letter, its nostalgia is all replaced by very evocative emoji’s that speak a thousand languages. We need therapy and counselling sessions and even that is planned and controlled by our gadgets. The bookshelves in our houses scream for attention while the kindle besides our beds purr with charge. We experience anxiety whenever we are in a low-connectivity area. The first thing we do when we walk into our houses is to not hug our pet, but run to the nearest charging point.
As per a Goldman Sachs report, AI shall replace hundreds of millions of jobs globally by 2030 with massive layoffs to be seen in the areas of customer service, administrative and clerical roles, entry level coding and programming, manufacturing, translation and graphic design and even healthcare workforce. With AI and Moltbots (the next generation of AI agents that can interact, collaborate, debate and many a times work independently), transformers and auto bot-controlled human shall soon be the stark reality.
Doctors and Psychologists have seen an alarming rise in people who cannot differentiate between real and virtual world. Ophthalmologist have seen an increasing number of young children aged as little as two years with vision defects due to extreme screen exposures. Development delays like poor language acquisition, lesser cognitive skills, hyperactivity and low emotional regulation have become a pandemic, that refuses to go away.
The brain truly seems to have gone defunct and may just become a vestigial organ in the next few generations. Man-made to machine ruled is just a hop, skip and jump. If we do not Ctl+Alt+Del !!