The magic word in today’s world is “technology”. In the recent wars, whether it was the Pakistan-India four-day war, the forty-month-long war in Ukraine or the Iran-Israel twelve-day war, one thing was mentioned the most and that was war technology. This technology plays a central role in drones, missiles, intelligence, cyber warfare, etc.
Consider, there have been revolutionary changes in war strategy. Now, instead of clashing on the ground, armies are fighting in the air, using drones and other similar weapons that are controlled by various technologies from thousands of miles away from the target.
A computer is enough to deliver these weapons from air to air or from air to ground. Then the use of technology has also increased the rate of accurate targeting. Some call it electronic warfare, some call it artificial intelligence and the brilliance of IT, but the result is the same. Humans are decreasing and mechanized weapons are increasing.
One of the reasons for this prelude on the use of technology in weapons is the month of August, which is closely related to this issue. 80 years ago, atomic bombs were dropped on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August alone, killing more than 200,000 people and leaving 1 million people with lifelong radiation exposure. This nuclear technology changed the concept of war and peace in the world.
This not only brought about changes in politics and economy, the mutual relations of the countries also took a new turn. Those who were enemies for centuries, became firm friends. These nuclear attacks completely changed the concept of peace in the world. But this technology did not stop at the atomic bomb, but it made nuclear power plants, discovered cures for cancer and other deadly diseases. You will hardly believe that the most nuclear power plants in the world are in Japan, yes, the same country, which is the living lament of nuclear disasters. There can be no two opinions about the fact that technology has become a powerful force and it is influencing every sector of the world.
Could anyone have imagined that a time would come when a person sitting in a remote mountain village of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa would talk for hours to his loved one thousands of miles away in Canada through a device worth a few thousand rupees and not only talking, but both would be looking at each other. But we are seeing all this happening with our own eyes.
Thousands of miles have become meaningless and the world is in the palm of your hand. Maintain relationships or earn by doing business in every corner of the world through mobile phone, computer or internet. Fight or go to the happy life. Whether it’s getting free treatment at home or making environmental protection possible, technology helps you do it all.
Even now, without going to school, college or university, knowledge and skills can be learned at home with the help of this technology. The question is, is there any change in the quality of human life due to technology-based changes? People who keep a close eye on history and technology claim that the amount of change in human life in the last one hundred years was not possible even in the last thousand years, but these changes have brought many challenges with them.
Since technology is a product of man’s mind, now it depends on him what kind of life he wants. We get to go to many seminars and conferences, where almost all the experts emphasize that “adopt technology, move forward.” Politicians, rulers, even the common man now seem to say “technology, technology”. However, while people seem content with this changing world, many are also harassed and nervous. Why is this the case?
Over the past century, a few technologies have had a revolutionary impact on the world, ranging from the ruling class to the everyday life of the common man. Nuclear technology has been mentioned, which while causing destruction, is also helping to solve energy and health problems. On the other hand is space technology, which revolutionized the field of communication. This technology also played a major role in the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the last century, as communism was defeated in the ideological war fought through it.
The Soviet Union disintegrated into Russia, and the “Iron Curtain” against Western democracy, against which it had erected, collapsed. Quiet revolutions took place in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, resulting in regimes, not governments. The Soviet Union collapsed despite being a superpower and having stockpiles of atomic bombs. Asia’s largest country extending to Europe, a state with nine time zones in terms of area, was scattered like dry leaves in this communication invasion, which spread its magic through the homes of Eastern Europe and Central Asia via satellite.
This space technology has brought man to the moon and Mars. The secrets of the universe were revealed to him, which are making it much easier to understand and deal with the universe. Well, the jar we are trapped in, which is called “education and research”, is only a means of earning a living and getting a job, otherwise we are still far away from the real door to understanding the world or entering space.
We thought the conquest of the moon and space was the last step, while the technological revolution took the world from nowhere. Consider the Internet itself, which gave birth to artificial intelligence from information technology. Now the developed nations of the world are bringing out new technologies that IT, IL, smartphones, computers, laptops and drones are their by-products, the governments are struggling to deal with their good and bad effects.
Now the armies of the world have come to know how helpless the gun in his hand is, that now the task of targeting someone can be taken with just a click, even from a harmless phone like a pager, and can cause havoc, which was never imagined.
It seems, these conventional bombs, missiles and planes may come into use in numbers after some time, but their effectiveness will be less than that of a smart mobile phone. The same IT is also working in improving the quality of human life. We saw during the corona epidemic that it used to take ten to fifteen years to invent a vaccine. The global epidemics of TB, malaria and plague etc. continued to make people helpless, but the corona vaccine was invented in only one and a half years and not a single country, many countries achieved this success.
Medical experts say that such revolutionary speed has never been heard or seen before in the history of medicine. New and innovative systems are being introduced in business through technology. such as e-commerce, faceless banking and financial digitalisation. Opportunities to earn from home are increasing and unconventional methods of employment are emerging on this basis. It helped to allay the fear of machines replacing humans. Nowadays artificial intelligence chatbots and robots are also commonly mentioned, which are also being widely used.
There is no doubt that IT has also created serious social problems. It is heavily exploited by negative thinking and criminal mentality. In fact, earning wealth in easy ways has been a major weakness of the human mind. Thousands of young people of Pakistan travel illegally in boats and end up at sea. People listen to false and true stories on smartphones and visit different countries. To be seen, the social media posts have a big hand in this, in which the youth are robbed by showing them a dream.
When the government makes laws against the misuse of social media, prominent intellectuals and human rights champions rise up against the government’s decision. Technology has also harmed governments and economies. Also, it has a big hand in fostering cult politics, which we are witnessing in our country as well. Social media technology has destroyed social values, promoted hatred and violence. Even if there is no need for laws, then one should be prepared for political, economic instability and dictatorships.
Technology pioneer countries such as America, Europe and Great Britain also have restrictions on various types of social media use and legislation has also been made in this regard. “Tik Tok” is about to be sold in the US, YouTube and Facebook are being fined in Australia and Europe. In underdeveloped countries like ours, where education standards are low, the use of technology needs to be closely monitored, as miscreants are increasingly using it for financial fraud and blackmail.
The world is changing and technology is its driving force, while it is also a fact that developed nations are leading the world in this field. One of the reasons for this is their high academic quality and also that these nations have well remembered the lesson of “greatness in hard work”. The lesson of history is that the poverty of nations in the world is an unforgivable crime. Our problem is that we engage too much in political rhetoric, but rarely do the work. Perhaps we blindly believe in the “golden touch”.
Little do we know where the world is heading and where we stand. Any country that doesn’t know how to control sugar prices even in modern times, talking about high technology is pure folly. We first misused social media platforms, shot ourselves in the foot and now we are trying to fix it from town to town, even though we have all the tools at our disposal.
In this regard, there are examples of freedom of opinion countries like America, Europe and Australia, then what is the fear while making laws? Our intellectuals have been champions of century-old human rights, but they do not know the mental distraction that children under the age of sixteen are suffering from social media platforms. Looking at the situation, it seems that technology has not been able to “spoil” us and perhaps we are still obsessed with living in the past.