Thursday, April 30, 2009

Technology and aspiration

For years it was difficult for me to see things differently. That our existence and preservation of life on earth and our aspirations were in direct and fatal conflict was a sad conclusion I had arrived at.
 
I deeply and desperately desired to do something to save our planet. I reasoned that if we had to save life on earth we had to rein in our aspirations. And though I studied engineering and technology, for most of my years in college, I came to dislike it. I saw it as product of our 'evil' aspirations and as something that was at the heart of the self-destruction that we were inflicting on ourselves. All around were signs of how the use of technology was slowly destroying our forests, land, rivers and seas and polluting the air we breathe.
 
But something was wrong with this picture. Because when I looked around I also saw that so much that was good about life flowed from aspiration. Indeed aspiration was life. And that life depended on aspiration to move forward on its path of evolution.
 
Then it occurred to me one day - technology was not bad in and by itself. It was the inadequacy of the refinement and application of technology that was responsible for the rapid destruction of our environment.  And that a very large part of the solution to reconciling our aspirations with self preservation may lie in technology itself.
 
Amongst other things, our company's objective is to discover applications of technology and how it can be improved to build a future that is more sustainable. One in which our aspirations and existence are not on a collision course.
 
Our current engagement with Messaging and Collaboration technology is one such attempt at providing a faster, cheaper, lesser damaging and in many cases better alternative to travel and transportation. We also see technologies for collaboration (and knowledge management) as a way to tap into the collective intelligence of the human race to find durable answers to the conflict between our existence and aspirations.
 
I hope we can make significant contribution towards this.

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