Technology Is an Enabler, Not a Replacement

We All Pay the Price for Lost Wisdom

Since its founding, Google's mission has been to organize all the information in the world. In 2005, a reporter asked Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google at that time, 'How long do you think it would take to organize all the information in the world?'

'Three hundred years,'1 said Eric Schmidt to the reporter. It wasn't a riff at the reporter asking the question. Eric Schmidt holds a BS degree in engineering from Princeton and a PhD. from Berkeley. He knew what he was talking about. The engineers at Google had already calculated the answer to this question.

What you need to think about is if it takes 300 years to digitize all the information in the world, can you imagine what it would take to capture the wisdom in the hearts of the people? Technology helps us in preserving information. Generational connection helps us in preserving wisdom. Both are necessary.

Technology helps us in preserving information. Generational connection helps us in preserving wisdom. Both are necessary.

Here's a situation most parents can relate to. It's late at night and your baby starts crying non-stop. You call your paediatrician but it's after hours and the on-call nurse takes a message. In the meantime, you try patting the baby. You carry her around, turn off the lights, play music and when nothing works, you try to drive her around in the car. But the moment you put her in the car seat she starts shrieking even louder. By now the parents are close to having a full-on panic attack.

You video-call the grandmother, your mother, and she hears the baby in the background. She tells you to take some lukewarm olive oil and massage the baby's stomach and back. Laying the baby on her back as you massage her, she calms down and, within a few minutes, she slips away into a deep sleep. With the crisis resolved, the parents start breathing again and grandmother also signs off.

In your bookshelf, you may have the books written by Spock and Farber, but what you need at such times is the wisdom that comes from experience. Grandmother knows what to do because she learned it from her mother, who learned it from hers. Maybe the warmth helped the baby. Maybe the oils had some effect. Maybe it's the years of experience that calmed the baby. Who knows what the reason is, but whatever grandmother advised, worked.

We have all had similar experiences where home remedies saved a trip to the pharmacy. When we bring together wisdom and technology, our families benefit from the best of the past and the present. And what happens when we don't care about wisdom? What happens when a society loses wisdom en masse? I'm not talking about losing grandmother's home remedies but about losing medical science itself. Can you imagine the havoc in a world with no doctors? It may seem like a doomsday scenario, but history shows us that such black swan events have occurred.

(Excerpted with permission from 'The Wisdom Bridge' by Kamlesh D. Patel, Rs 399, published by Penguin Random House India)