2020 - You have broken my heart!

So, we are in 2020, now what? That what I’ve been asking myself in this iconic year, in fairness I expected more, a lot more. Now am not saying I wanted flying cars (but I do) or batteries that last 1000 years on 1 charge (yes please) but I expected more from technology and how it improves our lives. We see a lot of “breakthroughs” on social media, but nearly all are just videos or cool 3D models, and many are just plain lying. Not sure how many times I have seen a story that starts with “And a scientist accidentally discovered….”. But none of this has come to fruition and most likely never will.

I know what you are thinking, technology has changed so much of our lives, what are you talking about? Well, in my mind nearly all technology advances of the last few decades have mostly been focused on our human laziness and greed. They have focused on making it easier for us buy something, whether that’s a physical product, or a service like a taxi or a hotel stay. At the same time, it has reduced a lot of the cost and so we can get things cheaper. Is this what the brightest minds and the deepest pockets been focused on over the last 20 years, yes, that’s pretty much it, easier and cheaper, laziness and greed.

What is generally considered innovation has been mainly focused on software and circuits – apps and consumer electronics. With very few of these innovations having a significant impact on our lives and in many cases, they end up having a negative impact, whether that’s exposing children to bad actors or people getting addicted to social media.

At the same time, we are destroying the world we live in so that we can produce these new “innovations” to help us cope with our laziness and greed. Of course, there isn’t many billion-dollar Unicorns made from trying to save the planet, but there are some that are creating the illusion that we can escape this world and live on a new one. Or more precisely, a privileged few can live in a stinky concrete bunker on a poisonous new planet like Mars. Why stinky? Have you ever tried to air out a home on Mars? Not sure it’s as easy as opening the windows and mopping the floors.

So, 2020, you have let me down, you haven’t delivered on a young boy’s dream of being the year of an amazing technology utopia, quite the opposite in fact. But there is hope, hope that the world will turn its attention to focus more on the important issues of our day, the humans that lives on this world and the system that supports us, our mother Earth. My faith now rests with the year 2030, please don’t break my heart like 2020 did!