In days of old it was pretty easy to recognize the village idiot. He’d be the one walking a little erratically through town, talking to no one in particular.
“Ah, that’s what I’d do, I’d kick him to Sunday, that no good blah blah blah…”
The best plan was usually to swing wide and not make too much eye contact.
Those folks still exist in society; if you don’t believe me just take a walk down State Street any weekday afternoon.
But these days, more and more of us appear to be walking erratically and speaking to no one in particular.
This time the culprit is technology.
Who among us doesn’t carry a cell phone in a purse or on a hip?
Now, thanks to something called a Bluetooth, a device that fits in your ear and connects wirelessly to your cell phone, many more of us stagger down the street taking conference calls.
“I told him to get that order in. If he doesn’t, I’ll kick him to Sunday, that no good blah blah blah…”
Then there are the Crackberries, people so tuned into their Blackberry portable assistants that they can miss a nuclear explosion taking place the next table over.
Make no mistake, it’s amazing stuff that can put a cell phone, scheduling assistant and Internet access in one device no bigger than a calculator.
But how many times have you seen someone just miss walking out into traffic, all the while hunched over and poking furiously at a little machine with a stylus in hand?
The fact is that I couldn’t even make this point to you without technology. Computers are revolutionizing how we live, work and interact on an almost daily basis.
But you have to wonder what price is paid by our humanity to gain those advances as we watch people blather private phone calls on busy streets or step in front of cars while checking email.
Maybe the science fiction writers are right.
Maybe human beings are destined to become slaves to the machines of their own making.