Our Shrinking World

by Fernando Perfas, Ph.D.

| Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

By the end of this year, I expect to log about 60,000 miles of air travel from my home in New York to two continents. That’s a staggering number of miles traveled in a year by a regular person like myself. And I know of several people who have more than that. Even the idea that within 24 hours, I could transport myself by airplane to the other side of the world still boggles my mind. Before, I could only dream of such an amount of travel within a relatively short span of time. This is all about physical travel, not counting the realm of the digital world, which could take the human mind almost beyond the bounds of time anywhere in the world at the click of a fingertip.

When I was in 5th grade, my social studies teacher, Mrs. Cabral, dazzled me with pictures of her travels. In class, she described famous landmarks around the world that she had visited, making her class my favorite. Sixty years later, I don’t remember anymore the names of my grade school teachers, except her. I was this wide-eyed, curious youngster who could not get enough of her stories that left me in awe. I could only read about those places or imagine them. She did not pull out the information she taught in class from textbooks. All her experiences made the subject almost come to life and made her class memorable. She fed my innate curiosity about the world – of different people, cultures, and civilizations from distant past and present. She left such an impression that nurtured my love of world history, cultures, people and travels.

“The astounding verisimilitude of these experiences challenges the concept of reality as we understand it. The rise of artificial intelligence will usher in a world that will cross many boundaries and alter how we see and understand reality, not to mention how we live.”

Traveling and visiting places of interest around the world was a remote possibility in my youth. I read about world heritage places in books and magazines to satisfy my wanderlust. The National Geographic and Life magazine were my all-time favorites. I read back issues of those in our local public library, outside the shantytown of Tondo in Manila. I literally spent the entire summer hanging out in the library, a stuffy Quonset hut without air conditioning donated by the American military. All the books were outdated, but it didn’t matter. Back then, that’s how I visited interesting places through my readings and imagination. Little did I know that a major paradigm shift would occur within a lifetime, shrinking the time and space that span the world. Making any corner of the world accessible physically or through the Internet.

The Internet and technology have shrunk our world. One can digitally visit the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, or any important landmark anywhere in the world in real-time. All that’s needed is someone’s cellphone camera snapping video shots of those places and sending them to your phone. Recently, I did a five-day Zoom training for an audience on the other side of the world on my home computer. I took a course without leaving the comforts of my home office through a laptop. Last week, we watched sporting events live on high-definition TV during the 33rd Summer Olympics in Parish. It was almost half as good as being there.

We can now wear gadgets on our heads to be transported to a virtual world to play sports, visit a mall or a real estate agent, and interact with a virtual environment. The astounding verisimilitude of these experiences challenges the concept of reality as we understand it. The rise of artificial intelligence will usher in a world that will cross many boundaries and alter how we see and understand reality, not to mention how we live.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR   Dr. Fernando B. Perfas is an addiction specialist who has written several books and articles on the subject. He currently provides training and consulting services to various government and non-government drug treatment agencies regarding drug treatment and prevention approaches. He can be reached at fbperfas@gmail.com.

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