What Technology Wants (28 page)

As technology advances, we gain both more possibilities and, if we are smart and wise, better ways to anticipate these ordained trends. Our real choices in technology matter. Although constrained by predetermined forms of development, the particular specifics of a technological phase matter to us greatly.

Inventions and discoveries are crystals inherent in the technium, waiting to be manifested. There is nothing magical about these patterns, nothing mystical about technology having a direction. All complex, adaptive systems that maintain a stable self-organization—from galaxies to starfish to human minds—will exhibit emergent forms and inherent directions. We call these forms inevitable because, like a spiral whirlpool in draining water or snowflakes in a winter storm, they will manifest themselves whenever the conditions are right. But of course, they never render themselves in exactly the same details.

The vortex of the technium has grown its own agenda, its own imperative, its own direction. It is no longer under the full control and mastery of its parent and creator, humanity. We worry, like all parents, particularly as the technium's power and independence increase.

But its autonomy also brings us great benefits. The long-term rise in real progress is due to its growth as a lifelike system. And the most attractive aspects of technology are also due to these self-augmenting long-term trends.

The urge for self-preservation, self-extension, and self-growth is the natural state of any living thing. We don't begrudge the selfish nature of a lion, or a grasshopper, or ourselves. But there comes a moment in the childhood of our biological offspring when their childish selfish nature confronts us, and we have to acknowledge that they have their own agenda. Even though their very own life is an unambiguous continuation of our life (all their cells derive uninterrupted from our cells), our children have their own life. No matter how many babies we have seen, we are unsettled each time these moments of independence arrive.

Collectively we are at one of these moments with the technium. We encounter this natural life cycle every day in biology, but this is the first time we have met it in technology, and it is unnerving us. Our shock at meeting selfishness in technology has to do with the fact that, by definition, we are, and will always remain, part of the technium itself. In the words of psychologist Sherry Turkle, technology is our “second self.” It is both “other” and “us.” Unlike our biological children, who grow up to have minds completely separate from us, the technium's autonomy includes us and our collective minds. We are part of its selfish nature.

The ongoing dilemma of technology, then, will never leave us. It is an ever-elaborate tool that we wield and continually update to improve our world; and it is an ever-ripening superorganism, of which we are but a part, that is following a direction beyond our own making. Humans are both master and slave to the technium, and our fate is to remain in this uncomfortable dual role. Therefore, we will always be conflicted about technology and find making our choices difficult.

But our concern should not be about whether to embrace it. We are beyond embrace; we are already symbiotic with it. At a macroscale, the technium is following its inevitable progression. Yet at the microscale, volition rules. Our choice is to align ourselves with this direction, to expand choice and possibilities for everyone and everything, and to play out the details with grace and beauty. Or we can choose (unwisely, I believe) to resist our second self.

The conflict that the technium triggers in our hearts is due to our refusal to accept our nature—the truth is that we are continuous with the machines we create. We are self-made humans, our own best invention. When we reject technology as a whole, it is a brand of self-hatred.

“We trust in nature, but we hope in technology,” says Brian Arthur. That hope lies in embracing our own natures. By aligning ourselves with the imperative of the technium, we can be more prepared to steer it where we can and more aware of where we are going. By following what technology wants, we can be more ready to capture its full gifts.

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In 1917 Orville Wright predicted that “the aeroplane will help peace in more ways than one—in particular I think it will have a tendency to make war impossible.” He was echoing earlier sentiments from American journalist John Walker, who declared in 1904, “As a peace machine, the value [of the aeroplane] to the world will be beyond computation.” This wasn't the first grand promise of technology. In that same year Jules Verne announced, “The submarine may be the cause of bringing battle to a stoppage altogether, for fleets will become useless, and as other war material continues to improve, war will become impossible.”

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Prize, sincerely believed his explosives would be a war deterrent: “My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions.” In the same vein, when Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun, was asked in 1893, “Will this gun not make war more terrible?” he answered, “No, it will make war impossible.” Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the radio, told the world in 1912, “The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.” General James Harbord, chairman of the board of RCA in 1925, believed, “Radio will serve to make the concept of Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men a reality.”

Not long after the telephone was commercialized in the 1890s, John J. Carty, AT&T's chief engineer, prophesied, “Someday we will build up a world telephone system, making necessary to all peoples the use of a common language or common understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the Earth into one brotherhood. There will be heard throughout the Earth a great voice coming out of the ether which will proclaim, ‘Peace on Earth, good will towards men.'”

Nikola Tesla claimed that his invention of “the economic transmission of power without wire . . . will bring peace and harmony on Earth.” That was back in 1905; since we still don't have economic transmission of power without wires, there is still hope for world peace.

David Nye, a historian of technology, adds to the list of inventions envisioned as abolishing war once and for all and ushering in universal peace the torpedo, the hot-air balloon, poison gas, land mines, missiles, and laser guns. Nye says, “Each new form of communication, from the telegraph and telephone to radio, film, television and the internet, has been heralded as the guarantor of free speech and the unfettered movement of ideas.”

George Gent, writing in a 1971
New York Times
article about interactive cable television, said, “Supporters have hailed the program as . . . a major step toward the political philosopher's dream of participatory democracy.” Today promises about the democratizing and peaceful effects of the internet overshadow any similar claims about television. Yet as futurist Joel Garreau marvels, “Given what we know happened with television, I am astonished that computer technology is now seen as a sacrament.”

It is not that all these inventions are without benefits—even benefits toward democracy. Rather, it's the case that each new technology creates more problems than it solves. “Problems are the answers to solutions,” says Brian Arthur.

Most of the new problems in the world are problems created by previous technology. These technogenic problems are nearly invisible to us. Every year 1.2 million people die in automobile accidents. The dominant technological transportation system kills more people than cancer. Global warming, environmental toxins, obesity, nuclear terrorism, propaganda, species loss, and substance abuse are only a few of the many other serious technogenic problems troubling the technium. As techno-critic Theodore Roszak says, “How much of what we readily identify as ‘progress' in the urban-industrial society is really the undoing of evils inherited from the last round of technological innovation?”

If we embrace technology we need to confront its costs. Thousands of traditional livelihoods have been sidetracked by progress, and the lifestyles around those occupations eliminated. Hundreds of millions of humans today toil at jobs they hate, producing things they have no love for. Sometimes these jobs cause physical pain, disability, or chronic disease. Technology creates many new occupations that are indisputably dangerous (coal mining, for one). At the same time, mass education and media train humans to shy away from low-tech manual work, to seek jobs working for the digital technium. The divorce of the hands from the head puts a strain on the human psyche. Indeed, the sedentary nature of the best-paying jobs is a health hazard—for body and mind.

Technology swells till it fills all holes and spaces between us. We monitor not only our neighbors' affairs but those of anyone we care to spy on. We have 5,000 “friends” on our list but space in our heart for only 50. Our ability to impact has expanded beyond our ability to care. By turning our lives inside out with technological mediation, we are open to manipulation by mobs, clever advertisers, governments, and the inadvertent biases of the system.

Time spent with machines must come from somewhere. The flood of newly invented consumer gadgets suck time from the use of other gadgets or from other human activities. One hundred thousand years ago, Sapiens' foraging day was predominantly clear of technology. Ten thousand years ago a farming human might spend a few hours a day with a tool in one hand. Only 1,000 years ago, medieval technology was ubiquitous on the periphery of human relationships, but not central. Today technology places itself in the middle of everything we do, see, hear, and make. Technology has permeated eating, romance, sex, child rearing, education, death. Our lives run on clock time.

As the most powerful force in the world, technology tends to dominate our thinking. Because of its ubiquity, it monopolizes any activity and questions any nontechnological solution as unreliable or impotent. Because of its power to augment us, we give precedence to the made over the born. Which do we expect to more be effective, a wild herb or an engineered drug? Even our cultural compliments for excellence have drifted to the mechanical: “smooth as glass,” “bright and shiny,” “sterling,” “watertight,” and “like clockwork”—all suggesting the superiority of the man-made. We have become imprisoned in the technological framework of what the poet William Blake called “the mind-forg'd manacles.”

Simply the fact that a machine is
able
to perform a task often becomes sufficient reason to have it
do
the task, even if it does it poorly at first. The first machine-made versions of things, such as garments, china bowls, writing paper, baskets, and canned soups, were not very good, just very cheap. Often we will invent a machine for a particular and limited purpose, and then, in what Neil Postman calls the Frankenstein syndrome, the invention's own agenda blossoms. “Once the machine is built,” Postman writes, “we discover, always to our surprise—that it has ideas of its own; that it is quite capable not only of changing our habits but . . . of changing our habits of mind.” In this way, humans have become an adjunct to or, in Karl Marx's phrase, appendages of the machine.

There is a widespread belief that the technium grows only by consuming irreplaceable resources, ancient habitats, and myriad wild creatures and yet returns to the biosphere only pollution, pavement, and myriad obsolete junk. And worse, this same technology takes from the least in the world—the nations with the most natural resources and least economic power—to enrich the most powerful. So as progress fattens the lives of the lucky few, it starves the unfortunate poor. Many people who acknowledge the technium's progress are held back from a full embrace of the technological imperative because of its adverse effect on the natural environment.

This encroachment is real. Often technological progress has been produced at the expense of ecological habitats. The technium's steel is mined from the Earth; its lumber is taken by cutting down forests; its plastics and energy are sucked from oil and burned into the air. Its factories displace wetlands or meadows. One third of the Earth's land surface is already altered by agriculture and human habitation. You could compile a very long list of mountains leveled, lakes poisoned, rivers dammed, jungles flattened, air dirtied, and diversity slashed. More damning, civilization is responsible for the permanent extinction of many unique species of life. Over geological time the normal, or background, rate of species loss is one species every four years. Today, at the minimum, it is four times that; probably we are now eliminating species at thousands of times that rate.

(I happen to know a little bit about this decimation because for a decade I chaired an initiative to catalog all the life on Earth. We have historical evidence for the extinction of about 2,000 species in the last 2,000 years, or one per year, or four times the natural rate. The bulk of those extinctions, however, are in the last 200 years, so the known annual average today is significantly higher. Since we have identified about 5 percent of all species on Earth, and many of those yet-to-be-named species are in the same vanishing habitats as the documented extinctions, we can extrapolate what the total number of species going extinct might be. These estimates run at the higher end of 50,000 per year. In truth, no one has any idea how many species are actually on Earth, or what percentage we have identified, even to the nearest magnitude, so all we can say for sure is that we are eliminating species faster than before, which is criminal enough.)

And yet there is nothing inherent in the technium that insists on species loss. For every technological method we currently use that causes loss of habitat, we can imagine an alternative solution that does not. In fact, for every technology X that we can invent there is—or could be—a corresponding technology Y that is potentially greener. There will always be ways to increase energy and material efficiency, to better mimic biological processes, or to ease the pressure on ecosystems. “I cannot imagine a technology that cannot be made orders of magnitude greener,” says Paul Hawken, a renowned advocate for environmentally sound technology. “But in my opinion we have not even stepped inside the realm of green technology yet.” A greener improvement, it is true, may adversely affect the environment in a new unknown way, but that only means yet another innovation needs to remedy that shortfall. In this way, we will never exhaust the potential for greener technology. Since we can detect no limit to how biophilic technology can become, this open-ended horizon indicates to us that the nature of technology is inherently prolife. The technium is, at its most fundamental level, potentially compatible with life. It just needs to grow into that potential.