By Prof. Terhemba Shija
There is always a criminal dimension to every aspect of civilization. If those geniuses or inventors of the various equipments, instruments or devices of technology ever thought they were solely on an altruistic mission, they probably were mistaking.
The contrary results often appear to trail every good intention of technological breakthrough. The early invention of large ships and the maxim gun by the Europeans led them to economic prosperity and political conquest other territories around the world. But it also led to the worst form of barbarism, the slave trade and a fatal moral dent on the religion they had delivered with a straight face.
Today, more and more countries that think of themselves as civilized, keep amassing tons upon tons of weapons of mass destruction befitting their status as an economic, political and imperial power. But these are instruments of death, not life. Their net worth aggregate several thousand times the budgets of other countries that could have brought food, shelter, education, water and reasonable health care to all communities of the world. We are on edge with one another and might one day wake up or even fail to wake up to witness a total nuclear winter.
One of the fastest growing areas of modern technology is in telecommunications. We enjoy the use of communication gagets for their ever increasing efficiency and the status they confers on us, without giving a thought to the criminal dimension of this technology, until some other users take control or even manipulate them to perform beyond the imagination of the inventors.
The case in point is the alleged cyber or electronic attack on thousands of the pager and ipad devices used by the Hezebolla in Lebanon as reported earlier this week. These are electronic devices we love dearly and sometimes cuddle them like babies. The pager is particularly hung by the waist. It is difficult to imagine the catastrophic effect of a device tied around your loins exploding like a bomb even if you manage to escape death Then two days later, many more thousands of ipads exploded again in unison with more devastating results of casualties and injuries.
Nobody saw it coming. Twelve people instantly lost their lives in the pagers’ attack. More than three thousand others were reported critically wounded, and I believe it was a euphemism for the loss of genitals.
How on earth did anybody sit at night to craft this monstrous attack? For surely, the Lebanese could not have bought these electronic devices from their prime suspect and enemy, Israel, neither could they have had trade deals with companies with links to their zionist neighbours.
How could anyone have imagined that a benign electronic piece like a pager or ipad you have used for several years could all of a sudden turn into a bomb? Who could have imagined that the Israeli nation, fingered in the conspiracy could have access to the entails of several electronic devices it did not invent or manufacture? Are material and moral values really good bedfellows?
Many people may not think this way, but I suspect that it would not be God, but technology that would eventually destroy our world. In the first recorded mega technological project in history, the construction of a giant skyscraper into the limitless space, it took a pentecostal deluge from God to cut the sons and daughters Adam to size. The project was abandoned but the human race acquired a new world order of constant disharmony and a deceptive philosophy of the survival of the fittest. In the end, it looks likely that civilization might consume us with absolutely no survivor left.
If several thousands of people could wake up one blasted morning and find themselves so painfully castrated, it is possible that several plagues of that magnitude sooner or later await several other communities in the world either through blindness, or sterility, or loss of limbs and so on. God Himself appears quite exasperated with man’s technological adventures, particularly now that we have practically assumed his position and cloned a superior human prototype known as Artificial intelligence(AI).
A certain English novelist, Mary Shelley, foresaw this scenario over 200 years ago at the dawn of the enlightenment era. She wrote a science-fictional novel titled, “Frankenstein” around the character of one Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant student who creates a human specie in his laboratory using specimens of other parts from the mortuary. This experiment succeeds and a giantic human being emerges, but, ironically, instead of being grateful to its maker, it gets out of control, kills all of Frankenstein’s family members gradually until it leads to the scientist’s frustration and eventual death.
This obviously sounds hideous, but shows we are in a midst of a thrilling tragi-comic story depicting the standoff between creators versus their creatures; God versus man; Man versus AI, as amply demonstrated by Frankenstein versus his monster.
Let’s not laugh at the castrated Lebanese. Their fate is the fate of our collective existence human beings. It is definitely beyond armed conflict between Lebanon and Israel. The AI, like the Frankenstein monster is on standby to dictate and direct precisely the next monstrosity from any criminal mind in conflict.
For now, let’s hope and pray that our world would be compassionate enough to send enough plastic surgeons to help restore the mangled phallus of the Lebanese and stop the war.
Prof. Terhemba Shija is a Nigerian academic, poet, novelist, critic and politician and lecturer at the Nasarawa State University, Keffi. He contributed this piece from Abuja, Nigeria.
