Has technology made us less empathetic?
I have been thinking about this question for the last month and have discussed it with a few people.
Empathy is not required when things go well. It is required mostly when something does not happen as planned because someone made a mistake or because something that you expected to happen, did not happen.
Essentially, when your prediction about something was wrong. In a way, what happened was unpredictable.
Technology is magical though. It reduces unpredictability to such a level that it things almost seem inevitable. If you use the right formula in Excel, it will not make an error in applying that formula. If you press send on your Gmail account, it will reach the id that you have entered. If you schedule something on Google Calendar, it will ping you at the appropriate time. If you share something on social media, it will be on your account.
It is this sense of inevitability that makes technology a good thing to depend on.
The only challenge is creates (in my opinion), is that we get used to the inevitability. We get used to things happening a certain pre-determined way at the pre-determined time, with the pre-determined efficacy.
Humans are not like that. We make mistakes. We are sloppy on some days and amazing on others. Our quality of work sometimes varies based on external circumstances. People are on a spectrum of ‘very reliable’ to ‘not reliable at all’ but none of us are ‘perfect’.
The question I am thinking about is “Am I becoming less okay with mistakes made by humans because I am becoming used to the ‘perfect’ that technology offers me everyday?”
This hits harder now because our in person interaction with people has reduced dramatically and our reliance on technology has gone up exponentially. It makes the difference between technology’s efficiency and human being’s inefficiency even starker.
I am only bringing this up now because I want to remind myself and you all that humans make mistakes. We always have and always will try and reduce the number and intensity of our mistakes as we become better versions of ourselves.
It is important that we remember this when we feel frustration because someone made a typo or a calculation error or forgot something once in a while. Our pursuit of becoming better/reliable in our work should not erode our pursuit of becoming a better person. =)