Technology gives us our greatest chance to be idiots

We like to promote ourselves as an advanced species, so why does it seems the only thing we truly excel at is stupidity?

Illegal drone use has been in the news a lot this past week. Picture: TAHLIA STEHBENS

THERE'S no denying we often promote ourselves as an advanced species.

Unfortunately, more often than not it seems the one thing we truly excel at as a race is idiocy.

I mean, how else would you describe disrupting firefighting efforts at Tasmania's Bruny Island simply because you couldn't wait a day or two to play with your toy (drone)?

And, of course, how could we then also overlook possibly similar behaviour which shut London's Gatwick Airport for more than 36 hours last week.

Water bombing helicopters were unable to help fire a fire at Tasmania's Bruny island thanks to a lone private drone in the air. Picture: Peter Carruthers

The only thing that would have ruined Christmas for the 120,000-plus people more than being stranded at an airport in the holidays would have been remembering that airport was in West Sussex.

But the lunacy does not stop there.

No, it turns out the two arrested were wrongly accused and soon released - but not before they were pilloried by some news outlets and social media had started tying a rope to a tree well in advance of that annoying thing called "facts”.

We should be glad the Puritans didn't have social media. Picture: Georja Ryan

And who wants to wait for something so prosaic when there's a heathen to burn?

If we're to be truly grateful for anything in the past, it's surely that the 17th-century Puritans didn't have iPhones.

Unfortunately, it seems we've found the paradox of our time: our technological growth exponentially explodes our ability to be colossal dumbasses.