Today, Technology and I
History as a compass in a digital ocean.
This text begins with a dialogue with an artificial intelligence, but it is not a text about technology in the strict sense. It is rather a reflection on how a man formed within technology itself — from the first computers and formal languages to today’s digital ecosystem — can still preserve his relationship with history, memory and his own identity.
If the essay “The Digital Shadow and the Light of the Future” looked at artificial intelligence from the perspective of a life that has crossed several technological revolutions, here the question shifts toward historical memory: what does the past still mean in a world that seems to run only toward the future, and in which technology has become, ever more visibly, a form of political power?
Complementary essay: The Digital Shadow and the Light of the Future
A question about speed
Over the last decades I have lived, from very close range, through an acceleration that, in my youth, I could not have imagined. I knew the large, isolated computers, the languages written with patience, programs built almost artisanally, then networks, the Internet, mobility, the cloud, conversational artificial intelligence. For me, technology was not a spectacle watched from the outside, but the very substance of a professional life. Perhaps that is why I am sometimes troubled by the force with which it seems to have become the only engine of our becoming.
We live in a period in which the engine — or rather the “carrier” of our becoming — seems to be exclusively technological innovation. Everything is being radically transformed, and at a dizzying speed, before our eyes. In this landscape, I cannot help asking myself: what is history still for? Why should we turn our gaze back to the past, when the future is rewritten daily in research laboratories and on digital platforms?
Is it necessary to know the past in order not to repeat the mistakes of those before us, or in order to replicate their successes? I think that the great achievements of earlier times were not based on technology in the modern sense, although humanity has had other major impulses — the wheel, printing, electricity — yet it seems that never before has anything had this exponential speed that takes our breath away.
History as a compass
This is an essential question for our spiritual and cultural survival. At first sight, it might seem that technology has cut the bridges with the past. In reality, the faster we move, the more we need a compass. And history is not merely a collection of dusty dates; it is the map of human nature.
If we look beyond screens, networks and algorithms, we see that history preserves its purpose precisely because technology changes the means but does not cancel the fundamental tensions of human life: power, fear, the desire for recognition, solidarity, memory, responsibility.
Human nature does not change with software
Technology evolves exponentially, but our psychological and emotional patterns have remained strikingly constant. Greed, pride, fear, but also the desire for justice, compassion and solidarity were not invented by the digital age. They come from much further back and are only reconfigured through the tools of each moment.
History helps us recognize early the signs of crises, abuses of power or social conflicts, before they become catastrophic. Today, the great mistakes of the past do not disappear; they dress in new clothes: the dynamics of geopolitical conflict or mass manipulation remain similar, even if they now manifest themselves through cyberattacks, digital disinformation or algorithms of polarization.
Past revolutions explain the present
We are not the first generation to feel the ground moving beneath its feet because of technology. The emergence of printing democratized information, but it also produced propaganda, doctrinal conflicts and a new circulation of ideas. The Industrial Revolution radically reshaped the labour market, urbanization, the family, and the relationship between human beings, time and nature.
By studying how past societies managed brutal transitions — how institutions, laws and forms of education adapted — we can better understand the Digital Revolution and the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Not in order to copy old solutions, but to recognize recurring mechanisms: initial enthusiasm, fear of replacement, the temptation of monopoly, the gap between invention and regulation, the emergence of new forms of inequality.
Technology as politics
There is something else that troubles me. Today technology is no longer merely a tool placed at the disposal of history; it has become one of the forces that produce history. It does not change only the way we communicate, work or inform ourselves, but enters directly into the domain of power: wars fought with drones, satellites, data and algorithms; coups prepared or amplified through the manipulation of information; new forms of economic and political dependency.
In the past, colonialism meant occupied territories, foreign administrations and visible armies. Today, modern colonialism can take more discreet forms: control over digital infrastructures, dependence on platforms, the capture of data, monopoly over chips, networks and the tools that organize public attention. It is not always necessary anymore to conquer a territory; sometimes it is enough to control the systems through which that territory communicates, buys, votes, works and informs itself.
You are right: technology can no longer be described as a neutral domain, separate from politics. It is infrastructure of power. Whoever controls data flows, standards, platforms, computing capacity, surveillance systems and communication channels controls not only instruments, but the conditions in which public opinion is formed, decisions are made, wars are fought and sovereignty is exercised.
That is why the historical question becomes even more important. Without memory, every new technology appears as an absolute rupture, a beginning without antecedents. But history shows us that power is always looking for instruments through which to expand: yesterday through armies, commercial monopolies, colonial administrations or printed propaganda; today through data, algorithms, networks, autonomous systems and infrastructural dependencies.
Contemporary technology does not by itself explain wars, coups or new forms of colonialism, but it increasingly participates in producing them. It can accelerate conflicts, amplify resentments, provide means of surveillance and control, and create almost invisible dependencies. To see it only as technical progress means failing to perceive its political dimension. To see it historically means understanding that every new powerful tool reopens old questions about domination, freedom, responsibility and resistance.
Preserving identity in a uniform world
In an age of technological globalization, in which social platforms tend to standardize our tastes, reactions and way of life, history functions as an anchor. It reminds us where we come from and defines our cultural values, traditions, sensibility and local specificity.
This anchoring does not mean isolation. On the contrary: a person who understands his own roots can look at the diversity of the world with greater respect and discernment, without letting himself be uprooted or disoriented by the global flow. For someone who has lived through several historical worlds — communist Romania, exile, Italy, digitalized Europe — memory is not a nostalgic luxury, but an instrument of orientation.
Success means cooperation, not just tools
You are right when you say that the great successes of the past were not based on advanced technology in the current sense. They were based, however, on much more durable elements: strategic thinking, moral courage, creativity and the capacity for cooperation. Greek philosophy, Roman law, Renaissance art and the great movements for human rights were born from social and conceptual innovation.
These ingredients are essential today as well. Technology is a catalyst; without a humanistic vision and without the ability to work together for the common good, the most sophisticated tools can become destructive.
Memory between archive and oblivion
Here, however, a contemporary paradox appears. Technology is not only an observer of history; it profoundly changes the rules of the game. I am thinking of our intimate, personal relationship with the past. In the age of speed, how can we still preserve collective memory when we are bombarded by an endless flow of information? Do we not risk losing precisely the ability to remember correctly?
You touch an extremely sensitive point: the tension between digital storage and accelerated oblivion. Technology has a double nature. It is, at the same time, the greatest archivist and the greatest dissolver of our memory.
On the one hand, we live in an age of information overload. In the past, historical documents were rare, preserved in archives, books or through oral transmission. Today we produce billions of data points daily, but the excess of sources overwhelms us. Our attention is fragmented by the culture of instantaneity and ephemeral content. Major events from only a few weeks ago can be buried under new layers of data and almost completely forgotten.
Moreover, we are witnessing a fragility of truth. Altered photographs, documents taken out of context or false narratives can redraw public perception in an instant, creating a genuine historical interference. At the same time, technology also offers extraordinary chances for rescue: digitized archives, manuscripts accessible from anywhere, virtual museums, databases, documentary recoveries, new forms of digital archaeology.
A personal note
Looking back at my own career and at the decades spent in academia, I have often observed this dynamic. In the years when I was building logical systems, analysing algorithmic structures or trying to formalize methods of software design, it was always clear to me that rigour does not belong only to the exact sciences. It also belongs to memory and to history.
Without the correct documentation of our steps, we lose the traceability of our own evolution. We no longer know where we started from, why we chose a certain path, what hopes animated a line of research, what constraints limited it and what, nevertheless, remained of it. For an engineer, traceability is a condition of verification; for a human being, it becomes a condition of identity.
That is why, for me, technology cannot be completely separated from autobiography. I have lived it as a profession, as an instrument of knowledge, as a promise, as a disappointment, as a relaunch and, today, as an interlocutor. But precisely because I have been so close to it, I feel the need to oppose memory to it. Not as refusal, but as balance.
Why I write these memoirs
This is precisely why I write these memoirs. Not out of a desire to stop time, and not out of the illusion that my past has, in itself, an exceptional importance. I write because the past seems to matter less and less in a world that consumes the present at a dizzying speed and treats every memory as an old file: perhaps recoverable, but rarely necessary.
It seems dangerous to me to accept this devaluation of the past. When the past no longer matters, it is not only dates, names and events that disappear. The criteria by which we judge the present also disappear. We no longer know what was good and deserves to be preserved, what was bad and must not be repeated, what was compromise, what was courage, what was cowardice, what was legitimate adaptation and what was surrender. Without memory, good and evil become passing images in a digital flow.
My memoirs are not a neutral archive. They are, inevitably, a subjective testimony. But a subjective testimony can nevertheless be responsible. I try to preserve people, places, events, errors, successes, hesitations, illusions and disappointments. I do not want to embellish the past, nor to condemn it as a whole. I want to leave it visible, with all the good and the bad it contained, so that it does not dissolve completely in the noise of the present.
In this sense, writing these memoirs becomes for me a modest form of resistance. Not against technology, which I have served and loved in many of its forms, but against the amnesia that technology can favour when speed replaces reflection. If technology pushes us forward, memory forces us to turn our head and ask: what have we lost, what have we gained, and what should we never forget?
The past as a responsible choice
Our relationship with history in the age of technology is no longer passive. It is no longer enough for history simply “to be there”, written in textbooks or stored in archives. It has become an active choice, an exercise in digital hygiene and a condition of political lucidity.
If we let ourselves be carried blindly by the current of ephemeral data, we risk becoming a society with amnesia, vulnerable to manipulation and condemned to repeat the errors of the past on a much more destructive scale. But if we use technology critically, as an ally of memory — saving, curating and verifying sources — it can become an extraordinary amplifier of human experience.
Technology gives us speed and carries us forward. But precisely because it has also become politics, economy, weapon and instrument of dependency, it needs the counterweight of history. History tells us who we are, where we come from, why we move in a certain direction and how we can remain human when we arrive there. There should be no rupture between them. There should be a fertile tension: technology as a force of transformation, history as the memory of consequences, and personal memoirs as small acts of rescue against oblivion.