The Future

Technology has played a significant role in human evolution and has become one of the most important agents of change regarding human behavior. Technology has promoted certain forms of social and personal behavior encouraging individuals to leave behind some ways of acting, making them to become old-fashioned, and enabling new forms of interaction among persons. Although some people might have a negative perspective of technological advancements, on the other side many agree that technology has really improved our thinking skills and life quality of ordinary people by solving problems that have plagued us for many years and therefore allowing us to defy new and more complex challenges.  I believe that the present shape of the world is explained by all the technological devices that are available for us today.  Consequently if you want to guess how the world would look like in the future, you should try first to foresee the upcoming technological changes.

Of course we are experiencing tech advancements in many different fields. For example, with regard to transportation between cities separated by long distances or among countries, it´s likely that we will have, in a relative short period of time, the chance to travel using supersonic planes that will fly at higher speeds than sound and will hence reduce substantively the amount of time we invest today in moving from one place to another.  If we consider another area of development like exploration of the universe, we can also see some amazing progress. NASA is currently working on new technological devices that will ease the sending of humans to explore the solar system and collect valuable information. Thus we could expect that landing of humans on Mars will be accomplished soon.  On the other hand, the problem of energy and its relationship with environment is currently one of the most urgent issues in which scientist from all over the world have been engaged. The challenge of producing efficient power through a sustainable mechanism has been continuously addressed by governments, universities and research centers which have devoted important amounts of their budgets in order to move forward on this issue. As you can see there are many areas which will surprise us soon with astonishing advancements.

Despite of the overwhelming amount of technology improvements that we could imagine, I believe that there are two main areas which will lead the stream of upcoming technological developments.  One is related with the understanding of human body operation. Tissue and organ biosynthetic generation will enable the possibility of replacing an old organ or one severally damaged by a particular disease by a new organ fully designed and cultivated in a lab. The more comprehensive understanding of the process of cancer formation will allow us to prevent this widespread disease in a much effective way.  These advancements in biology in addition with upcoming discoveries in brain science that will reveal the present mysteries of brain operation will literally integrate the human body with computers. Blindness, deafness or even complete muscular paralysis would be solved with the help of microcomputers inserted somewhere in our bodies that will send electrical signals to the brain or allow muscular locomotion using advanced electromechanical methods.  In order to achieve these great triumphs over human nature new materials will be required and therefore the advances in nanotechnology will play a crucial role.  These new materials provided with amazing properties regarding electromagnetic conductivity and structural capabilities will have a broader range of application that will go beyond biology. They will be incorporated in industrial process which will become efficient and therefore in the long term a set of new products and services will be available for consumers at lower prices.

At the same time technology regarding integrated circuits will continue following Moore’s Law which states that the amount of transistors placed in a certain volume gets doubled every year. This means that both speed and process capacity of circuits will maintain its present growth at exponential rates and consequently integrated circuits will become more powerful, smaller and cheaper. They will be in some sense omnipresent and almost every object will have a card attached to it with a message such as: “Intel Inside”.  In order to continue with Moore’s Law quantum computing will be essential because it will allow the processing of much higher volumes of information. This constitutes the second key area around which technology will develop at very fast rates.

The capability of processing gigantic amounts of data through quantum computing and the ability to connect computers to our brains and bodies will have an enormous impact on our lives that will reach almost any human action. Communications will be dramatically transformed from holographic projections and learning processes will evolve in such way that memory as we understand it today will be useless. The availability of information as we are currently seeing it will continue its growth but we won´t need to be carrying any notebook, Ipad or smartphone with us because a microcomputer connected to the cloud will be attached to our bodies.  Working routines will be very different and remote work will increase. Therefore the whole structure of corporations will also change and smaller companies will appear. In the long term we will have to accept that each individual itself will be considered as a corporation. Even more, governments will progressively lose their capacity of taxation and thereby governmental action will begin to decrease.  As the entire world will be connected some native customs will completely disappear, languages will unify and free-market economies will be developed everywhere. The present notion of countries will probably be affected and will evolve towards a concept of universal governments. In such a world, how are we going to resolve our problems? Who will administer justice? There will be wars although any country will have the power of destroying the entire world? In some strange sense the future entails a contradiction regarding concentration of power. Technology will help to distribute it among individuals by giving them a sort of infinite power. It seems that as more technological advancements help us to solve our problems and improve our skills, higher ethical standards will be demanded in order to manage these amazing but potentially dangerous technological tools.   

A Perfect World

Suppose we lived in an imaginary world where resources were in some sense infinite. Only by desiring something we would obtain it immediately. If you wish a house with a swimming pool and a big garden it will magically and instantly appear in from of you only by simple thinking on it. If you wish to have your preferred meals served on your table you only have to wish it. But suppose also that there were only two restrains to which you were subject: you can´t magically create or destroy other humans and you can´t automatically improve your own sets of skills and talents. What would happen in this kind of ideal world? Would everybody live on their own planets with all kind of amenities but isolated from the rest?

In order to address such a complicated question it’s necessary to distinguish two types of actions in which the habitants of such a universe will be engaged. The first type could be called personal actions and the second are collective actions.  Personal actions will only require the participation of the individual interested in that particular action. For example if you wish to have an incredible car and drive it across an empty street at very high speed you will be engaged in a personal action. In the opposite sense, if you would like to teach something and someone else would like to learn it from you, both will commit a collective action. Which will be the role of collective actions in this rare universe?

It´s a clear fact that we need each others. We like to talk to someone else, have the need to love, to teach students, to learn from teachers or to have fun with friends.  In all these cases we should note that we will have to compete with other people´s skills in a similar way it occurs in our present world. The winners of such competition will be the most social-skilled persons and they will have the chance to accomplish their collective needs with the persons they want. The losers will face three main choices; they can turn into another kind of collective actions, accept to fulfill their social needs with fewer persons or initiate violence against the winners. Although there will be people more skilled than others it´s not clear who will win the eventual wars or conflicts that may occur because nobody will more skilled than the whole rest. This brings us to ask whether power could be concentrated in a few persons or whether concentration of power is indeed a consequence of limited resources.   

Therefore, in order to avoid the terrible consequences of the conflicts that might occur, it´s possible that a market around collective actions will appear. Every market needs a mean of payment and thereby currency will also exist in this imaginary world. People with money will be able to pay for collective actions and those who receive the payment will be richer in order to acquire other collective actions. By this way rich and poor will also have to coexist. Their form is going to be very different because they will have everything they wish except collective actions.

Following the entangled logic of all this reasoning we can observe that this imaginary world won´t be too different from the present because competition, hate and poverty will exist in both worlds. Here one might argue that by eliminating the two imposed restrictions it would be possible to achieve a perfect world where everybody will be happy and fulfilled. In such a world everybody will be similar to a god and, at the same time, there will be no good because everybody will be equal. Is there any way we can imagine the Utopia from Thomas More? 

The Pursuit of Happiness

This brief and informal essay was motivated from the reading of two well-known sentences. The first is the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which affirms: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. The second sentence was stated by a Russian philosopher and writer who developed a philosophical system called objectivism. Regarding happiness Ayn Rand once said: “Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values”.  

Both phrases illustrate that one of the main purposes of life is the search of happiness according to your own interests and values. Almost for everybody this statement sounds very reasonable because we all want to achieve happiness or, at least, that is what we normally hear from people’s wishes. This leads us to ask immediately what happiness is or whether there’s any way by which we can explain the meaning of this term. Have we ever met somebody that we could consider a happy person? Which are the main characteristics of happy people?

Before we analyze this complex issue it´s worth to say that we will start from a premise that for many may appeared very questionable. This whole informal analysis of happiness will be based on the consideration that happiness is a personal decision. Taking this into account we won’t make any formal definition of happiness but to describe those necessary conditions for making such an important decision. It’s important to recall that they are only necessary conditions and therefore having achieved them doesn’t mean the attainment of happiness. Instead, the lack of them is useful to describe what happiness is NOT about.

We will also use another controversial premise for this analysis which indicates that happiness is a long-duration condition. This means that happiness is not affected from everyday situations like receiving an awful new, having an accident, winning the lottery or being fired. Of course happiness is a condition that can be lost but this occurs typically over a long period of time. By this way, having pointed out two important assumptions for our analysis we will indicate two conditions that I consider necessary for happiness.

In the first place it´s important to underscore that happiness needs another human person. This requirement may be complicated to digest because it can be likely misunderstand as the need for somebody to love in a traditional or romantic sense. Far from this interpretation this condition suggests an internal and very deep bonding between the individual who searches happiness and another person or group of persons. Take for example a castaway living isolated from the world in a very remote island. Could he achieve happiness in those terrible conditions? Based in our argument our answer is an outright yes only if the actions of the character in our example are connected with an internal concept of another person distinct from me. In this sense he should think in god, his family and friends or even in the entire world and incorporate these ideas in his actions or intentions. The word thinking is not the proper one because it entails having a rational or conscious concept of other persons when our argument actually contends that you have to include the world, an entity different from yourself, in your thoughts, aims, actions and intentions.

Someone can argue for example that he is authentically happy by learning mathematics completely alone and therefore he doesn’t need the world for achieving happiness or maybe he could need it only for instrumental o practical reasons. Following our argument we would say that if he is learning only for himself it’s impossible for him to reach a long-duration state of happiness. Nonetheless, if he includes the world in his lonely studying he might achieve happiness. The expression “including the world” means that his search for knowledge will also consider, not as a declared intention, to share them with others by teaching, writing a book, explaining them to a fried, making predictions or designing a novel device. If he is looking for knowledge only to be accumulated in his mind or brain without the conception of something different than himself the most likely result is not happiness but sorrow. The same is truth if he is studying only for experiencing the ecstasy of understanding the world or contemplating the nature. Why scientists who have discovered a great issue are so elated when they are writing down their conclusions?

The second condition for happiness is to have dreams, aims or things you want to accomplish but recalling that happiness can´t neither depend on the particular goals of an individual nor in the achievement of them.  Our goals change over time (when you accomplish something you set another new objective) and they depend strongly on the environment (if you are a prisoner you might want to escape) and therefore happiness can´t be subject to these variable conditions. The only important thing is to have objectives and trying to achieve them, no matter if they´re grandiloquent or subtle ones.

The question about happiness is a very complex topic which has been addressed by different religions and philosophical doctrines. Some of them assert that defeating death and transcending time is a central concept to achieve happiness and others recall that pursuing pleasure and having a more hedonistic behavior would bring us closer to happiness. Whatever the truth is it´s a fact that in our lives we have met some people that we consider to be authentically happy. Which are their characteristics? Do they have dreams and have knocked down their interior walls? From where do they draw strength to surpass pain and adversity?

9 colors and flavors!

A few days ago, on Monday, finished the registration period for presidential, senatorial, deputies and local authorities elections that will take place at the end of this year in Chile. Regarding presidential elections, 9 persons fulfilled all the requirements needed to register their candidacy. By this way, in November all Chilean citizens that are also living in this country will have the voluntary option of choosing the next president among 9 different alternatives!

Despite all these options come in different colors and flavors, in my humble opinion they can be classified into four big groups. It´s worth to indicate that all these groups don’t’ constitute current political conglomerates and this categorization is only a reductionist approach for describing many diverse political realities

The first group could be called the liberal and conservative option because it encourages economic freedom and is rather conservative on a political and social level. It rejects, for example, same-sex marriage, drugs legalization or substantial changes on the processes for electing authorities. The second group is a bit more liberal on “value” issues and although believes in the power of free-markets to create opportunities it considers that higher taxes on firms would help to reduce social inequalities. The third group, on the other side, embraces a big tax reform in order to assure social rights for the people. For example, this group thinks that applying more taxes will allow the state to provide free secondary and undergraduate education for almost everybody. It has been said that this tax reform will collect almost 3% of domestic product. On a constitutional level, the candidates from this group believe that the current constitution is not representative of the will of the people because it was written during the military and non-democratic government in 1980. They suggest important changes on the constitution being the most important the elimination of the subsidiary role of state. Instead, the state ought to have a more active social participation, more closed to a welfare state. The last group agrees with this constitutional amendment but it goes much further. It also proposes nationalization of many important industries like mining. They argue that big corporations operating with Chilean resources own very large profits but don’t really help to improve living conditions of ordinary citizens.  Some of the candidates from this group have said that they wouldn’t have any problems in calling to national strikes or demonstrations if their proposals were rejected by the congress.  

In the first group we have only a female candidate, Evelyn Matthei, who was the labor secretary during the present government of Sebastián Piñera.  The second group has three members: Franco Parisi, Tomás Jocelyn-Holt and Ricardo Israel. The first two are running without the support of any party and the last is representing the PRI (meaning Independent Regionalist Party). In the third group we have Michelle Bachelet and Marco Enríquez-Ominami. The former was the president of Chile before Piñera and the last is a young politician that created his own political force, a party called PRO (from the word progressive). His nickname is MEO. Finally, in the last group there are three candidates more. All of them are supported by different and rather small parties. They’re Marcel Claude, Roxana Miranda and Alfredo Sfeir.

There are two big issues in relation with upcoming elections. In the first place, many political analysts agree that an authentic liberal option, defending both personal and economic freedom, is missing between the present 9 options. The apparition of various liberal think tanks and similar groups in recent years could be a signal that these ideas are growing between the Chileans. The second issue is the present difficulty to predict the results with more or less accuracy. During the current administration the congress approved automatic registration for elections and voluntary vote. This change makes it very difficult to forecast how many people are going to vote in the next elections. Historically nearly 8 million people have voted in previous elections but because of the recently approved law this amount could go up to more than 11 million. Of course, there’s also the possibility that nothing significant occurs.

Here is my bet: Matthei 36%, Bachelet 34%, MEO 12%, Parisi 8%, Israel 7%, Claude 1%, Sfeir 1%, Jocelyn-Holt 0.5% and Miranda 0.5%. The total votes will be very high, close to 10 million! If final results are similar to these projections we will have a second round between Bachelet and Matthei where everything could happen. As you can see this will be a very interesting semester for those who have fun with political circus. 

Somebody to Admire

Similar to Queen’s song “Somebody to Love” I believe that we all should have “somebody to admire” and, if we don´t, we should look for it. Don’t misunderstand me: you don’t need to know this person (or these persons); you have only to follow its opinions or public appearances with a truly emotional commitment.  

Most of us admire some persons that, in a special way, are like a kind of reference for us. Commonly we are interested in their opinions, have a strong tendency to defend their positions (which is more emotional than rational in most cases) and to incorporate them in our daily behavior. They may be considered as “idols” or “heroes”, even though such denominations may be possible too grandiloquent.  

In my personal case I have two persons that fall into this vague definition. They are the musician Charly Garcia and the economist Milton Friedman. Both had a powerful and similar effect on my ideas and behavior despite of the fact that they seem to be very different and for many persons even opposed characters. I had always heard about them, but I was almost 20 years old when I began actually exploring the world of Charly García and a bit more than 30 years old when I started with Milton Friedman’s ideas. The channel through which I have the opportunity to dive into the depth of their thoughts was the same: the great YouTube. This marvelous web tool deserves a special recognition. It has allowed me to hear full albums, attend to various courses, listen to different speeches and interviews and a lot more. It’s really a great tool for learning and having fun at the same time!  Therefore, my most sincerely respects regarding YouTube.

As I mentioned later, I met Charly García, of course not in a physical way, in my 20’s and listening to his music for the first time was simply astonish. It was a very subtle and elegant mix of classical music with elements from the popular world, specially, from rock, tango and folk.  The lyrics were mysterious and dark but charged with a strange feeling of hope. Without using sumptuous words and rather simple sentences very powerful concepts were illustrated in his songs. All these combined elements made the whole esthetical concept of “Say No More” very engaging. It represented chaos, critical thinking and beauty at the same time. It encouraged me to ask where the limits were and what would happen if we move them a little. These limits imposed by social behavior were arbitrary? The main and most important lesson of Charly was this sense of critical thinking and not giving any answers for granted.

The same effect was produced by Friedman’s ideas regarding free markets and concentration of power. I knew very little about economy and therefore was concerned with the general economic and political concepts explained by Milton Friedman rather than his contributions to economic science.  It was the challenging and simple questions proposed by Milton what draw my attention. It was not obvious that distributing wealth from rich to poor trough taxation was an efficient solution to poverty. On the contrary, that mechanism could provide more segregation and worsen the problem. The alternative of using free markets in which voluntary cooperation is promoted seemed very powerful in order to avoid the apparition of monopolies.  Besides the interesting content of his ideas it was really the way Milton presented them what struck me most. Everything was logically analyzed and, most important, supported with evidence and data. Thereby, the whole concept represented rationality and logical soundness. This perception moved me, on an emotional level, to pose questions and try to find simple answers from them.

As you can see, having somebody to admire can really affect the way you see the world.  You need to put aside your ego and let your emotions find a place where your own thoughts can develop in the most prolific way. 

Chile, Egypt, Democracy and the Monopoly of Force

Today, a national newspaper, reports the dramatic situation in Egypt. It informs that in Cairo the confrontations between the army and the supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi account for nearly 600 deaths since the coup of 3th July, according to data from the health office. In the city of Ismailiya, a city next to the Suez Channel, 4 protesters were killed by security forces that were authorized to use real bullets during the manifestations. In Cairo, relates the newspaper, all the access to the city have been shielded with tanks and one police was killed in an ambush. The military authorities have declared state of emergency and established a curfew from 19:00 pm to 06:00 am. On the other hand, the Muslim Brotherhood has called Egypt’s citizens to "peacefully" protest against the current situation.

In Chile, 40 years ago, we experienced a military coup organized by the armed forces in order to overthrow the government of Salvador Allende. Thus, as a country, we know for personal experience how painful are these kind of situations where democracy is broken. Thereby, we can´t avoid a strong feeling of sadness for the current situation in Egypt and we can only express the most deeply desires that liberty for the Egypt people is granted as soon as possible.   

I have read very little about political history in Egypt. Apparently, all began when King Farouk I of Egypt was overthrown by the Free Officers Movement during the Egypt Revolution of 1952. Farouk I was the tenth descendant of the Muhammad Aly Dinasty that ruled Egypt and Sudan for nearly 150 years. One year after the military coup expulsed Farouk I, and although his son Farouk II was trying to rule, the revolutionary government abolish monarchy and Egypt was declared a republic. From this time to 1981 Egypt was ruled by 3 presidents closed to the Free Officers Movement. The last of them, Anwar Sadat, ruled for almost 11 years, won the Novel Peace Prize for the treaty of peace with Israel and was killed in 1981 in Cairo during a celebration for the Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Channel. During his assassination many others were killed and there were almost 30 wounded, including who was going to be the next president, Hosni Mubarak. He was, at that moment, Vice President of Egypt.

As we know, Mubarak ruled the country for nearly 30 years and stepped down after the revolution of 2011. This revolution was a diverse set of demonstrations, riots, strikes, and violent clashes between security forces and protesters. It was also charged with Islamic, nationalist and anti-capitalist feelings. The power was taken then by a military junta that organized elections which were won by the Islamist Mohammed Morsi in June 2012.  His government was overthrown during this year by a military coup in response to large protests accusing Morsi for giving the control of the country to the Muslim Brotherhood, violating all kind of freedoms and human rights. Some experts have said that these demonstrations are among the largest political manifestations of human history. Today there is no rule of law in Egypt and the democracy has been broken.

In Chile the situation was very different but, as in Egypt, ended with a total destruction of democracy in 1973. During the 19th century and the begging of the 20th century, on the political level, Chile had a very strong presidential regime and, regarding to the economic organization, there was a free-market economy completely opened to foreign trade. Prompted by the earthquake of 1939, that leaved thousands of deaths, and also by the economic crisis of 1929, the political and economic system was replaced by a model of progressive substitution of imports. This decision was made by President Pedro Aguirre Cerda in 1940.  During his government he created a special state agency, the CORFO, in order to give subsidies, make investments decisions and create a welfare state.  Upon these dates the Chilean economy began to grow at smaller rates than the rest of the world.

Thirty years later, Salvador Allende won the presidential elections. Three candidates were running for these elections, none obtained a majority and Allende was formally elected by the Congress with nearly 37% of the votes. Although Allende always said that his government was a pacific transition to socialism, the reality was very different. Only three years after Allende assumed the power, in August 1973, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies issued an agreement describing all kind of constitutional violations incurred by the ruling parties and implicitly suggesting the armed forced to take part in the national situation. In September 1973 the presidential palace was bombed by the air force and the government was overthrown by a military junta led by general Pinochet who ruled the country for almost 17 years.

The real miracle of this military regime was that it encouraged a set of economic and political transformations provided to avoid the concentration of power. From the 70’s we have had a so called “social market economy” which has been very successful regarding the reduction of poverty and the creation of opportunity’s for the ordinary citizen.  In my opinion this is a very weird behavior of a military regime, even for a democratic government, because is very uncommon that people in power are willing to design mechanisms that will finally restrain that power.  

The design of a good social organization system is a very complicated topic. The role of the people that have the monopoly of force is crucial because the fate of a whole country will rely on them and their decisions when the society rules are broken. It seems that force is always going to be concentrated in a few persons and, therefore, the existence of controlled armed forces sounds like a good idea. However, which mechanism assures us that they won’t make a bad use of the power the people has given to them? Which is the best mechanism that discourages concentration of power and prevents us from walking a road that will end with democracy?  These are very complicated questions with very different answers that we won’t discuss in this brief essay. I only wish that forces that today are ruling Egypt will have the wisdom to give the power to the people and provide them with a much deserved freedom. 

Technology and Human Thinking

It's quite obvious that technology affects all dimensions of our lives. Technology impacts the way we think, our individual and collective behavior, religion beliefs, scientific advancements, economic and political organization systems and, even more, life itself.  In fact, the total world population relies on a big technological net that allows the production, distribution and sales of different goods and services to many countries and persons. Without the current technological levels the life on earth of 8 million people wouldn't be possible!

But despite of this evident fact, in order to address the posed issue, we have to examine the complex relationship between human thinking development and technological changes. 

Human thinking abilities are developed or changed from two sources. The primarily and most evident source is the strong need of individuals to solve their current problems. We could call this mechanism "the way life adapts to nature".  During the first years of human existence the basic problem was to survive and, therefore, individuals began to develop a set of intellectual abilities to solve this elementary problem. In other words, they changed their way of seeing nature in order to adapt themselves to the current environmental conditions and survive. This change in the way of thinking conducted to technological developments. At that time the technological efforts were probably concentrated on developing better weapons to hunt, improving the ways individuals protect themselves against nature and creating good systems of communication (language). Currently, these problems practically don’t exist because they have been solved by our predecessors. We can say that they provided us with the necessary technological tools to eliminate these problems from our daily lives. Today we have different solutions to a big number of problems.  

The dynamics of this evolution mechanism has two main consequences. In the first place, by solving older problems, it promotes the development of new thinking abilities that allow us to face problems that haven't been considered. Today we don’t need to "waste" time in solving a simple calculation because we can use a calculator to obtain a very precise result in less than a second. Of course we can always try to solve the calculation manually, but the existence of a calculator constitutes a very strong incentive to use it to solve other problems. In the ancient years obviously poverty existed, but it wasn’t a real problem because the real issue was to survive. Today, thanks to technological advancements, surviving isn’t a problem and we can concentrate our efforts in solving poverty across the world. The second effect of evolution and progress is the apparition of new and more complex problems which demand other thinking abilities. Consider for example the problem of energy. Today we need to develop new forms of energy that allow efficient power supply to multiple industries. In both cases human thinking abilities are significantly improved because we face a set of more complex problems; those existing but had not been considered and those arisen from changes in environment. Therefore we can observe a positive feedback between thinking abilities and technology; the first appears from environmental conditions and the second, which is a consequence of the first, changes the environment. 

There is a second source for intellectual development which is simply and natural curiosity. Intellectual activity not always comes from a desperate need to solve crucial environmental problems. Many people dedicate their entire lives to study things whose applications we simply ignore. Frequently, but mistakenly, we consider such things as unuseful. Take for example the development of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. When Einstein wrote this brilliant theory his fundamental motivation wasn’t to improve the life quality of the society or to solve a specific and urgent need but to understand the secret structure of universe and appreciate his beauty. Einstein gave simple answers to complicated questions that, years later, conducted to technological changes (today Einstein’s equations are used in communications through satellites).  Besides technological improvements originated from Einstein’s theory, the most interesting thing is that the answers provided from Einstein opened new questions which promote curiosity of others. These new, more complex and challenging questions demand improved thinking abilities. In this case we can also see a positive feedback: curiosity develops thinking abilities and the second promotes curiosity on more complicated problems.

According to the exposed arguments we can conclude that technology will always improve human thinking abilities. But is that was the answer, why does it apparently exist a non-negligible extent of doubt on this issue? In my opinion the reason is related to human behavior regarding technology. At the beginning of this brief essay we stated that technology affects all kind of humans activities, particularly, individual and collective behavior. Technology evolves more rapidly than human behavior and, for this reason, we need time to get used to technology and learn how to use it. Therefore, it’s quite logical that, in the short term, we make a bad use of available technology. We can use our smartphones to communicate in a very effective way with people located very far from us but we can also use them while we are talking with our fathers and children. In the first case we are making a proper use of technology but in the second case our social (and also thinking) abilities are clearly deteriorating. We can strengthen this argument by taking a more extreme example. We may use nuclear energy to supply a whole country with power or to build a spacecraft to travel across the universe. At the same time we may build a bomb, press a little button and destroy human life. In this last example human thinking abilities will clearly deteriorate with technology improvements because there will be no more civilization!

This short reflection on technology and human thinking suggests that technological changes will always promote the improvement of our intellectual skills but our short term behavior may deteriorate while we are learning how to use technology.  Pitifully this topic is much more complex because technology and human abilities are related to more complicated and diverse factors that should be taken into account in a more rigorous study. Now we are only touching the surface on this issue.