Prototype Human

Man Vs Machine. It’s not a new topic. Countless articles, songs, books and movies have tackled this issue. From the days of the Terminator and the industrial metal band, Fear Factory, up to movies like Ex Machina. All have doomed man to an unimaginable end whereby the created defeats its creator.

I didn’t write this song because I was influenced by the aforementioned. I wrote this song because I was influenced by people around me. Friends, colleagues, and family members, all hooked to their devices and their little machines. We feel lost and (pun-intended) disconnected without them. Our phone tells us what to do, what to wear, who to meet, what to watch, when to have time for our kids… Our phones tell us how to live. The “I”phone is replacing the “I”. We have become another prototype, another machine; we have become Prototype Human...

…And an inefficient one, I might add. We will never be able to compete with the machine in terms of efficiency, productivity, and information storage. It will take us more than a lifetime to learn what’s stored in wikipedia whereas the web will provide us with whatever information we need in a couple of clicks.

What gives us the advantage, SO FAR (and I say this with capital letters) is our humanity. I feel this is slowly disintegrating into… nothingness.

How many empty, meaningless dinners you’ve had with your friends where each one of them was glued to their phones checking absolute rubbish? How many irrevocable, memorable moments you’ve missed with your partner, child, or parent just because you couldn’t miss a stupid post about someone falling from his skateboards? How many days have you wasted from your life sitting behind a retina-screen checking pictures of blue skies; and if you bothered to look outside your window pane, you can actually see it clearer with your eyes’ retinas.

I don’t want to sound like an old tree-hugger dinosaur that portrays technology as the ultimate villain. Because it’s not. We are. We are the ones that are not doing justice to ourselves. We are the ones allowing technology to control us, not vice versa.

Technology is created to make our lives easier and, if utilized properly, it really does. It is much easier to send an email to someone in another continent, than to go to the post office and mail him/her a letter. It is much easier to book a flight or a hotel from your phone than to go to a travel agency. it is much easier and cheaper to communicate with people using the latest communication apps. Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to accurately detect and cure diseases in us that might baffle the human doctor.

Technology can facilitate our lives and, accordingly, make us focus on the things that really matter; human connection, nature, family and friends.

The machine will become more advanced. It will become faster. It will store more memory. It will become 5D, 6D, XD. It will be able to talk. It will be able to drive. It will process infinite commands. It will predict earthquakes. It will cure cancer. It will become godlike… But it will never possess one intangible thing we have… A soul… and that makes all the difference… Don’t let it fade away.