I woke up fairly early. The clock read 4:35 a.m.
The previous evening had passed quietly and uneventfully. I was not even interested in watching Reels or reading posts on Facebook.
The night had also passed unnoticed. The accumulated fatigue must have finally caught up with me.
I reached for the wrist of my left hand and… to my horror, discovered that an important part of my body was missing — my Galaxy Fit3.
At first, I thought I had not really woken up and that I was having a nightmare. But the nighttime sounds of the city coming through the open window were remarkably real, and a light breeze gently brushed across my face. Drops of cold sweat appeared on my forehead, and I realized that this was no dream: the band was gone!
Immediately after waking, the mind perceives the actual situation very slowly. The absence of the band echoed through my wrist as phantom pain.
The reason for the gadget’s disappearance, however, was banal and prosaic: the night before, I had forgotten to put it back on. The culprit responsible for this crime turned out to be the shower I had taken before bed. Body parts that are not protected against water are best removed before undergoing water procedures.
Fatigue, warm water, calm, silence, fatigue… The band had remained on the dressing table in the hallway.
In the past, I would not have paid attention to such trivial things, but now I was deeply irritated. The reason was the absence of data on sleep duration, wakefulness, REM sleep, deep sleep, and light sleep; on blood oxygen levels. There was no daily sleep score at all — the one the Health app gives me!
The feeling reminded me of flying blind: when you have to rely on instruments, but the instruments are malfunctioning. Except that the only faulty instrument was my imperfect human organism.
A thought entered my mind: this is how the results of evolution affect us. We become accustomed to observing ourselves with sensors and scanners. Everything is recorded, analyzed, interpreted, and the results are later applied.
Photo and video cameras, audio recordings, documents, communication, archives, databases, memory storage, data centers…
Smartphones, personal computers, laptops, fitness trackers, smartwatches. Communication, archives, databases, memory storage, data centers…
Apps, software, websites, social networks, messengers, communication, archives, databases, memory storage, data centers…
Artificial intelligence, content generators, smart devices, tools of cognitive enhancement — communication, archives, databases, memory storage, data centers…
Memory? Memory, memory. Memory! Memory, archives, databases, memory storage, data centers…
Sometimes we are afraid of progress. From time to time, Evolution terrifies us. Somewhere inside our shells, we are all conservatives. Somewhere in the external world, we are all Pathfinders, like Natty Bumppo: this world is mine and, at the same time, this world is ours!
We search. And when we find something, we take everything without discrimination. Only afterward do we begin to ask whether we need it or not. It happened with the digging stick, the wheel, gunpowder, nuclear energy… Artificial intelligence.
The answer is simple: everything that appears as a result of progress is absolutely necessary for civilization. But sometimes it becomes extremely dangerous. Not because it carries evil within itself. A digging stick can be used to smash a neighbor’s head. A wheel can run him over. Gunpowder can blow up his house. Nuclear energy can reduce him to radioactive ash.
But those very same tools can also be used to build. We can construct houses, launch enterprises, create powerful servers, data centers, and energy systems, and use them to power an entire civilization.
Why do the achievements of progress become dangerous? Personally, I do not find the answer difficult: to some extent, this phenomenon is described by the Dunning–Kruger effect. Powerful tools that emerge through the process of evolution can encourage people to exaggerate their own abilities.
Forgive this lyrical departure from the subject of our reflection, but I, undoubtedly, have also overestimated my own capacity for analysis. We are all susceptible to the aforementioned effect.
But let us return to where we began: the imperfection of the human organism. I become deeply upset when things disappear from my life that I have grown attached to as though they were parts of my own body. It is painful when there is no water or electricity, when the elevator does not work, the subway does not run, the internet is unavailable, communication is lost, or ChatGPT and Copilot start glitching. It does not merely irritate me. It cripples me.
Why?
Because I have been trained.
Yes, yes! Do not be surprised.
And who is the puppeteer who trained me?
Do not trouble yourselves with pointless guesses. I myself am that mysterious trainer!
Our thoughts are mistaken when they search for a helmsman on the captain’s bridge of Evolution’s sailing ship.
Evolution is a natural process that unfolds through separate events in spacetime. Human lives are among those events, each of them, in essence, a distinct event of its own.
Taken as a whole, our activity may resemble Brownian motion, but in reality it does not, because we are ordered within the local field of our own existence, within our individual field of interaction with the Universe. Only here can we allow it to influence us partially.
ALLOW IT!
I allow myself to use a smartphone, watch television, make use of artificial intelligence, and so on…
I personally train myself to consume the products of scientific and technological progress. But I can also choose to reject them.
You may say that not everything depends on you, but rather on external factors.
Perhaps…
But the final decision before any event in your spacetime will still be made by You!