It was a hot Chennai Sunday; I put some Oolong leaves in the kettle, picked up my phone and started surfing through notifications that included a few SMSs, one missed call, news pop-ups, social media shares, reviews and a lot of other little things that existed in a digital format. A refreshing smell of tea permeated the air as John Lennon ended singing Imagine on my phone.
I walked into the kitchen to unplug the kettle while glancing through an article on ‘virtual revolution’ on my phone screen. Perhaps the kettle was hot, perhaps I was just distracted by the article, but while putting down the phone on the table to serve myself some tea, the kettle slipped from my hand, and the tea trickled down over my phone onto a WiFi router, which connected me to a world that coexists with the physical world.
My phone, now high on freshly brewed tea, went into an infinite restart loop. Suddenly, I was temporarily non-existent in the virtual or digital world. But yet a trace of me—big enough for someone to rebuild my identity, become me, and exist while I remained unaware of the impersonation—existed in that other world. Another me existed in a network of information that could be copied and modified and misused by anyone, including states. And I mulled over the fact that while I could not drink or make tea in the digital world, I could order one and have it delivered to my house.
All it needs is a virtual identity. Given the internet’s ability to enhance communication, performance and productivity, this artificially created world—which allows us to stay constantly connected—is rapidly the way we interact with the real world. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, not very long ago taught in school books as the future generation of computers is beginning to exist in the space-time fabric of the digital realm—a similar transformation in the physical space without digital influence would take hundreds of years.
The ability to compute immense amounts of data in seconds and the increasing dependency on bots for business and sometimes everyday choices has diminished the border between the digital and the real world. From teenagers killing themselves over an internet game, to propaganda affecting elections of major world powers, to a simple coffee date—choices are increasingly being made online. And this world has the power to influence our decisions, as well as those of world leaders. Whether we like it or not, this ‘digital revolution’ is going to profoundly impact and even dictate the shaping of the world’s demography and politics. We can either adapt, or perish. My tea had gone cold.
Arunava Banerjee
Email: arunava.banerjee9@gmail.com