The ICT Board’s deadline has come and gone. The number of people that have come to the NAILAB for assistance drafting and submitting their ideas in was beyond my expectation in every manner. There were more ladies than gents! If you know me I am definitely no chauvinist, but that was very impressive. You go girls! One thing that struck me though was the enormity of the innocent yet potentially destructive naivety we have as young folk on the power the technology we have aptly embraced has to destroy as it has to create.

Here’s an extract from ‘How The Mobile Internet Could Change Everything’ by Luke Allnutt. Read it carefully..

“In the future, old forms of repression — closing down publications on trumped-up tax charges, beating and imprisoning critics — will exist side-by-side with the new — infiltrating opposition movements through social networks or government-sponsored
cyber-vigilante campaigns.

Just as dissidents find more innovative ways to beat the system, so the governments will fight back with both increasing sophistication and the same old brute force. The mistake both the utopians and neo-Luddites make is by giving too much credence to the idea that technology can fundamentally change human nature. For every article about how Twitter will save the world, a cyber-fatalist will argue that smartphones have turned us all into zombies.

Both are wrong. It is not technology per se that has the power to change the world (for good or bad), but rather the innovation and creativity of the people enabling and using it.”

Let me talk like a grandfather would to his grand-kids. “My children, watch yourselves. From among you there will be those that champion great good and productive solutions to the problems you will increasingly face. But let me caution you, for from among you, the problems you face will find their creators, champions and beneficiaries.

The day we learn that it is not the tool, but the wielder of the tool we should be weary off, we might last a little longer as a people, a purpose and a planet. So, you, what do you have there?..