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Technology provides direction and meaning to our lives (really?)

Last week, I attended a meeting of small business owners where the topic was business leadership. The presenter introduced herself as somebody with decades of experience in that topic. Before the presentation, the speaker said it was her first time in that particular area of Denver, in spite of the fact she has been living in Denver for many, many years.

Before anybody could say anything, and perhaps looking at the invisible question marks on the faces of the audience, the presenter explained that a recent change in her life empowered her to expand the geographic area of her presentations. Now, she said, she was able to go to places that before she will never venture to go alone.

After a brief pause, the presenter said that just a few weeks earlier she had bought a new car and that her new car included an onboard system to help the driver. Thanks to that system, for the first time in her life, she did not need her husband or her son to drive her to a new location (“new” for her, of course.) The onboard system was now safely guiding her to those new places and back to her home or office.

In other words, this expert on leadership limited for many years the area of her presentations only to place she already knew or where a member of the family could take her. Now, thanks to the new technology, she found independence of movement. (And now, I add, she will probably find herself constantly depending on the new technology.)

The “confession” of this business leader brought back to my memory something that my grandfather once taught me: how to read and memorize a map. Before GPS technology was available on cars or phones, one of the options to get to a new place was to study and memorize a map. And many people actually did it study and memorize maps.

If no map was available, then you had to get directions from people, trusting their answers included enough information for you to find your destination. But now, trust in people has been replaced by trust in technology. And memorizing maps (or other information) has become obsolete.

Perhaps the “confession” of the above mentioned presenter is a metaphor for our modern life. It seems that, for many people, life without technology is limited and that, thanks to technology, life gets directions, meaning, and purpose.

I had many questions for the presenter, but her class was not the time or place for a philosophical conversation. I wanted to ask her about the possibility of the onboard system being unavailable or providing wrong directions. After all, that is a proper question, because it is possible for technology not to be available or to provide wrong answers.

I never asked those questions, but I am almost certain the presenter would have said that technology will always be there and will never be wrong, unlike what happens with old maps and obsolete, unreliable people.

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