It is true that digitization brought knowledge to our doorstep. Nothing comes without a cost, and for technological advancement, a student is having to pay rather morally. With the boom in the Artificial Intelligence sector, the world has been hit by a typhoon. It is now compulsory for students in classes as small as the 4th, to learn and excel at concepts like coding. What saddens me is that while we understood the requirements of IT during the two years of Covid, we could not emphasize enough on humanity even after decades and centuries of having lived. We are at the stage today where a child would know more about a machine than they would know about the psyche or the partition.
The very humane aspect of us is lost in the web somewhere. The negative effects of this are very easily spotted. People from across the world are more connected than ever, yet so far and distant from the people they share their rooms with. The psycho-social need for love//belonging of a human is not being fulfilled anymore. People, especially students across all fortes, are stuck to the screen. We all know that the formation of ideas starts from as early as you start influencing children. At the ages of 10-11, they are being taught the real progress is from robotization, not from humanization. The ABCs of C++ is wiping the ABCs of social sciences, which is the sole reason for social beings.
I do not intend to call computer skills wasteful, for that is simply not true. However, I do intend to call the sudden urgency and hype for it, hazardous to human existence as a whole. How do we help this? Listen to the child. Bring them closer to the roots. If you are making them read Steve Jobs and Trump and Bezos, introduce them to Virginia Wolf, Rabindranath Tagore and Oliver Twist just the same. If you emphasize science and IT, talk about the significance of emotional quotient, compassion and love just the same. If you want them to build robots, ensure that they can make someone a better human being first.
“Without technology humanity has no future, but we have to be careful that we don’t become so mechanised that we lose our human feelings.” -Dalai Lama