Below is a snippet from my new book The Agony and Ecstasy of Entrepreneurship, available now on Amazon and HyperInk.

A few recent experiences have spurred my thinking on the subject of humanity vs technology. Some of this will seem inevitable and some of it will seem common sense to you. Some of it might even go against the grain of what you are currently working on right now. My purpose is to get you thinking about how you go about your life using technology—by yourself and around others.

I am not sure if it’s just me, but I feel we are starting the upswing on what will be viewed as the turning point in our society. We will never have a “slower” life than we do today. Cell phones allowing us to talk to and message anyone in the world was just the beginning of this movement. Now, we have really powerful mobile computers in our pockets that basically bring the entire world to us—instantly—with a touch of a finger. In a not so distant future we will be wearing these computers on our wrists (I hope not) or our faces with such innovations like Google Glass. Will brain implants one day do away with any device or hardware required to access all the worlds information?

Fashion faux pas aside, I think these technical advancements are inevitable yet at the same time very scary.

What seems to bother me is what will happen to our humanity as all these technical advancements come into our lives. We already deal with the quick “phone, text and email check” at the dinner table or during a conversation with someone else.

Is it lost on our society that this action is actually quite rude to the other person you are sitting with? I know I am guilty of frequently swiping my iPhone and seeing what I missed over the last five or ten minutes. In reality, it simply says to the other person, “you are not very important to me and I am wondering what other bits of information I can quickly scan to keep my attention.”

What will happen when we wear a pair of glasses with a screen ever-present right in front of us?

I am afraid we, as a society, are not prepared for this use of technology. Sociologically, we are trained to observe people and gauge them via non-verbal cues as to how we are connecting with them. Are they threatened, scared, turned on, tuned out, distracted, interested, etc. The human eyes/mind/body instantly calculates these millions of inputs and tells us what is going on within this specific human interaction. We live our lives on non-verbal human cues.

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