Knowledge, machine and modern man
Dr. Michel E. Abs
Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches
The United Nations has designated the 28th of September as the International Day for Universal Access to Information.
How dangerous is the expression “information” and how dangerous are the dimensions associated with it, whether at the technical level or at the level of its human consequences.
We read or hear daily articles and lectures about information, informatics, artificial intelligence, computers, software and applications, and these concepts invade our world and our daily lives, in addition to violating our privacy.
The importance of information, knowledge and codification is not the subject of controversy. This need has accompanied man since the beginnings of civilization, when the cuneiform letters were first invented in Sumer, Mesopotamia. Blogging reaches as many subsequent generations as possible.
With the progress of civilization, the material of codification developed and we saw the emergence of the Phoenician alphabet from Byblos, Byblos, Ugarit, Ras Shamra, both of which are Phoenician cities on the Canaanite coast that connects Gaza with Antioch.
The human obsession with preserving knowledge - information - continued to develop, generation after generation, through sculpting and printing, up to the peak invention, the machine that changed the face of humanity called the computer.
Since its first use in 1956 in the United States and until it took its modern, highly advanced form, this machine has gone through many stages, in which many researchers in the world participated, most of them working in companies located in Silicon Valley in the United States of America. Those who are familiar with the history of the progress of this knowledge machine cannot but be impressed by its development and the contribution of scientists and companies to this path.
The computer and its derivatives, and here I put all the rest of the inventions that control our daily work, from the smart cell phone to the tablets that were called “tablets” after the paintings discovered by archaeologists in the first civilizations in the Antiochian Levant, which includes the Levant and Mesopotamia. Excavations are still going on there, and the discoveries are still astonishing historians and archaeologists.
The primary importance of these devices lies in the fact that they are able to store huge amounts of information in increasingly smaller places. The primary importance of these devices lies in their ability to sort, analyze and distribute an increasing number of information in a record time and for a record number of beneficiaries. These devices have increased human productivity dozens of times, much more than what the industrial machine did to humans during the Industrial Revolution.
The crux of the issue here is knowledge in the service of decision-making.
Taking a decision without knowing in order to form an opinion means working without a method or knowledge. No sane person can take any decision in life, no matter how small it is, until he has taken note of even part of the issue. As for taking a decision without elements of knowledge, it does not fall under the category of risk - because risk also requires knowledge - but rather in the category of adventure, which may have unimaginable consequences.
The problem that must be addressed, albeit briefly, lies in the technological gap between the advanced industrial world and the poor or developing world. The limited capabilities in obtaining information, its good management and its good use, makes that the countries classified as developing or poor remain behind in keeping pace with the civilizational progress. This implies that their decisions come insufficiently studied and documented, even improvised, whether on the level of private business or those related to public affairs. In addition, this technological gap is widening day by day and it is difficult for technologically backward societies to catch up with technological progress.
Modern devices are called smart because they store a huge amount of information that they recruit to carry out what we entrust them with. It is not smarter than the man who invented it, but its path is different from it, as it is not subject to emotions, passion, or forgetfulness. The intelligence of these devices is closely related to their memory and the information that a person has stored in this memory.
These devices have changed the face of humanity and brought about a tremendous development in his fields of work, from medicine to management, passing through scientific research. There is no doubt about its importance in relation to the life of contemporary man. Without it, the Internet would not exist, this vast knowledge network that covers the globe and provides man with knowledge he did not dream of by engraving the first cuneiform letters on a pottery plate, even though he laid the cornerstone for it.
Technology is running around and humanity is running behind. This is what can be deduced from the reflection on the control of technology on the life of modern man. We say control, and we do not mean by it a negative meaning, because the effect of technology on humans has many positives that outweigh the negatives, and the medical field itself is sufficient.
It is obvious that the expansion of technology areas in our lives has been reflected in the behavior of modern man, whether in social relations, work relations or otherwise, but the question here lies about the ability of man to make good use of what God has given him of natural and artificial resources. It is human wisdom that determines the value of the benefit or harm that can be obtained from the use of any resource or element. The water that we should drink daily in order not to become dehydrated can harm our body if we exceed the reasonable amount that it should absorb. The same applies to food, medicine and anything else.
As for the other problem raised by critics of information technology, it is related to human privacy towards society and its institutions.
The only answer to this matter is that man himself is the one who draws the limits that he allows his surroundings to reach. Every human being is a guardian of his privacy and he alone is able to determine its scope. As for publishing privacy on social media pages and then complaining that someone criticized him, this is out of naivety. As well as for those who launch campaigns against a person or a subject.
This technological system is a double-edged sword, and every mistake that a person commits in it or through it will be reverted to it multiple times because of its wide spread. Therefore, it is necessary to act carefully and wisely.
As for the decisions that organizations make through artificial intelligence, the same logic applies to them: these devices help in decision-making, but they cannot replace human humanity with their automated decisions.
When systems become the priority in decisions, humans have derailed these technological advances. The heart, feelings, and values have a place in human decisions, and if they are emptied of them, man becomes a machine.
Then the blessing becomes a curse. Then the technological gap between the industrialized world and the developing world becomes a blessing, so beware!