“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology,” remarks Edward O. Wilson. Mr. Wilson adeptly identifies one of the biggest problems with our latest god-like technology: the computer. The computer, or more broadly the computerization of society has happened at such a rapid pace that our primate brains have not evolved for the new behaviours it affords.
In the past, when a student moved to a new city to pursue higher education or a daughter left the household to go live on her own, there was a spike in emotion amongst the family. Everyone knew they wouldn’t see and be able to talk with their loved ones for an extended period of time. This scarcity of time brought out a lot of emotion. In the modern world though, this no longer exists. As soon as the student lands in the new city, they text their mom saying the plane landed safely or the daughter Facetime’s her parents to show them the new house. This confuses our Paleolithic emotions who then expect more from these distant relationships. Even though they are across the world, now we expect them to call everyday or get sad when they don’t. The joy of waiting for a letter in the mail from your loved ones is long gone and has been replaced by the anxiety of waiting for a reply from your significant other, who hasn’t responded in the last hour.
Attention is another emotion that we desire and need from people. You can see the modern mismatch at the dinner table when a mom is yelling at a teenager to put the phone away. By making these information machines so accessible, so mobile, we find a strong need to carry them everywhere. However, this steals attention from our relationships. It hurts when your friend checks his phone’s notification when you’re telling a story. It hurts when your dad doesn’t catch the ball because they’re on the phone. We crave attention from our loved ones, and the ubiquity of computers has stolen that attention from us.
Computerization has also impacted our feeling of connection with others. Our Paleoithic brains feel closer to people who are similar to us – people who share our beliefs and values, people who we “vibe” with as Gen Z may put it. In the past, you were only exposed to the people in your community and the beliefs they had. It’d be difficult to find anybody who had very similar thoughts to you in all levels, and so you’d adopt the beliefs of other people. This easily led to homogeneity and cultivated a shared identity. With the Internet though, it is easy to find some article that validates a very niche thought you have. And it increases this feeling of every person being different. This makes it harder to connect with others, because you think that “they’re not like me”, and that someone like you doesn’t exist.
Finally, another emotion that we fail to reconcile is boredom. With current technology, no one is ever bored. There is always more content to consume. As artist Bo Burnham puts it, “Can I interest you in everything, a little bit of everything, all of the time”. This leads to a failure to feel boredom; which then extends to us not being able to sit and do nothing. If we’re in line waiting for food, we have to pull out our phone and consume something. This is terrible, since boredom is incredibly important for clarity of thought and creativity. Your brain needs a chance to organize all the input it's receiving! Imagine constantly eating and never letting your stomach digest. If our brains were that powerful, then they might be suited to current technology. But they’re not! Our primitive brains need boredom and computerization has robbed us of it.
These problems are not trivial to solve because arguably there are benefits. Although mobile phones have stolen immediate attention, they enable us to give attention where previously not possible, like recording memories and sharing them. Being able to access information anywhere allows us to be a lot more productive. Also, people becoming homogenous with their community instead of adopting a global perspective and sharing their own ideas is arguably a worse future for society’s progress.
In this short piece, I only touched on our Paleolithic emotions mismatch with our god-like technology. There is so much more to be said about medieval institutions, and how the government cannot keep up with the business models of big technology companies. We walk around and exist in this fairly new civilization, and should think more about the challenges of interfacing with our primitive emotional systems.
Dhvani