Blog@GraceJunction

In my wee-wonder days of childhood, the classic debate was “Will robots replace human beings?” The person who stood “for it”, always won the debate by justifying the fact about the improved quality of life, faster production & development, maximum utilization of natural resources etc. Hearing the debate I always wondered what type of a dumb and wobbly feeling would have measured-up in the heart of the person who stood against it! 

But today it would be foolish to, not admire and be thankful for the great achievements of modern technology over the last century: advance medicines, advance energy, advance weapons, high speed communication and navigation systems. (more…)

Three weeks before Christmas 1993, Wolfgang Dircks died while watching television. Neighbors in his Berlin apartment complex hardly noticed the absence of the 43-year-old. His rent continued to be paid automatically out of his bank account.

Five years later, 1998 the money ran out, and the landlord entered Dircks’ apartment to inquire. He found Dircks’s remains still in front of the tube. The TV guide on his lap was open to December 3, the presumed day of his death. Although the television set had burned out, the lights on Dircks’s Christmas tree were still twinkling away.

It’s a bizarre story, but it shouldn’t surprise us. Each year thousands of people are found accidentally days or weeks after their solitary deaths in the affluent cities and suburbs of the world. If a person can die in such isolation that his neighbors never notice, how lonely was he when alive? (more…)