Digitalisation Should Serve Our Concrete Reality
We work in an industry of real things: timber and its products. I am grateful for this.
And it’s important to remember, as our worlds of work and play become increasingly digitalised.
Our timber trade’s values are rooted in earth, nature, and people. As we wrote last year, “Our industry is a warm-hearted one. People choose it because they love nature and want to work hard but at a steady, unhurried pace. Their values are timeless and include integrity and courtesy. They enjoy seeing the physical fruits of their labour.”
These values mean a tremendous amount to our Dolphin Bay team. How, then, do we perceive the increasing digitilisation and automation of our work and play?
We would do well to remember that technology’s ultimate purpose should be to improve people’s lives, work, and real-world experiences. Technology exists to serve reality, not vice versa.
Consider electricity. Humankind builds huge, complex, and expensive power plants, but their ultimate purpose is very concrete: to turn a turbine so that people have light and energy. Or consider modern farming: it has become extremely sophisticated, all to grow and pluck vegetables or nurture livestock for us to eat.
A third example: self-driving cars. Regardless of how they do it, their function is the same as the horse and carriage our ancestors used: they get us from one point to another. Yes, the method is dramatically different, but the function remains unchanged.
Our horse-riding ancestors would be dumbstruck at our present-day technologies. Yet while technology has changed almost miraculously since their days, human needs have not. Is our technology serving those needs, or befuddling them?
Does technology improve our work, relationships, and experiences in the real world? This is the crucial question to ask when we are confronted by a new digital tool.
The trap would be to become beguiled by the sophistication of the digital world, seeing its function rather than its purpose as the endpoint.
Does it help to serve our real needs – for meaningful relationships, meaningful work, and an understanding of our lives’ purpose? If so, it is worth our time. If not, it is a red herring, even a drug.
The history of industrialisation and mechanisation has taught us, time and again, that with the assistance of technology – from motor cars to automated timber treatment plants – we are able to put in less effort for greater outputs.
Automation has many dark sides. One is that it can make people lazy, leading them to think they don’t need to be responsible for or attentive to the quality of their output. That will not serve us well. Technology is a helping hand, not a handout. Its systems will always need to be imagined, built, managed, maintained, and fixed – at least as we understand it.
This has certainly been our experience as we are rolling out the Pro-Treat family of products.
What do new technologies mean for the human beings, whom they are meant to serve? This is the crucial question to ask whenever we’re considering a new digital tool or device.
To decide well, let’s re-orient our attentions to the real world – the source of our happiness – by intentionally making things, growing things, meeting with real people, and grounding ourselves in tangible experiences. That is where we find meaning. At a minimum, let us find comfort that growing things or making things will not be replaced by AI, which does not have hands yet!
Source: Dolphin Bay
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