Wild Weather In Silicon Valley: Reflecting On The Limitations Of Technology

If you watched TV at any point in 2009, you probably remember Apple’s iconic “There’s an app for that” commercial. 

It flooded the airwaves to educate consumers on what smartphones were capable of with mobile apps. Apple led a technology revolution that would transform society as it gave every consumer more power than most governments had 50 years earlier.

Fast forward to today and the power and complexity of smartphones are rivaled by quantum computing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, 5G technology, and so much more.

Yet, with all of this, we still can’t combat and overcome the basic forces that have existed since before humans - mother nature.

Over the last week, the area I live in (San Jose, in the San Francisco Bay Area) has experienced a culmination of external forces that is unlike anything I’ve seen in the last 7+ years of living here.

Last weekend, the temperatures in our city reached 100 degrees in pure heat. Extreme lightening plagued the area. Because of the dire heat, wildfires have been ravaging the area for multiple days, leaving dense smoke that is unbearable after a few minutes. Oh yea, and we also had a 3.3 magnitude earthquake. 

This was all within a few days.

[This photo was taken by a friend at Big Sur, which is 1.5 hours from my house]

I draw this technology/weather parallel because I rarely find myself in a position where I think that technology can’t more immediately solve real-world problems, but here we are.

We can’t Tweet or Zoom or Uber our way out of this. Mother nature responds to our actions, among other things. 

As a result, cities will change and the way we live will change. If you need any additional evidence that things need to change, let this serve as that. 

I’m not claiming that we caused all of these problems, but we’ve definitely contributed to them.