The technological continuum
Technological development is a continuum. It runs from the first flint arrowhead through clothing, the wheel, the aqueduct, the sail, vaccines, the airplane, genetic engineering, the internet -- and will continue through the cure of aging, virtual reality, brain-machine integration, mind uploading, and the Dyson sphere. It is all a steady progression of escaping the horror of living at the mercy of nature and increasing our ability to shape our existence as we wish. There is nowhere in that continuum where you can draw a line and say "before this point life was natural, but afterwards we became unnatural and need to go back."
People are free to refuse forms of technology they don't like -- I don't have a "smartphone" largely because I'm repulsed by the subculture they represent -- but it's absurd to pronounce that once technology allows people to do things that make you uncomfortable, it suddenly constitutes an unacceptable level of hubris or a violation of God's plan. 250 years ago religionists were making the same kind of objections to lightning rods.
That first flint arrowhead set us on the road to the conquest of the galaxy. It is a long and hard road, but also wide and straight -- and there are no stop signs.
posted by Infidel753 at 3:10 AM
16 Comments:
I’m all for technology. Sometimes it’s hit or miss and not all is good, but most of it becomes commonplace and beneficial.
Great observations... I too am not against technology per se, but I abhor what it does to weak-minded hoomans who should know better if they were schooled better. Here's something I wrote about creeping technology: https://gortnation.blogspot.com/2016/08/digital-insanity.html
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It irritates me to no end when I hear people say things like that. Birth Control being against nature makes them sound like they're back in the middle ages.
Nuthin' wrong with tech, per se, except how it might be used - and in some cases, by whom. My personal prime example; just about anything nuclear, aside from the Sun.
I did not know that about religion and lightning rods. Very interesting.
I still haven't made the jump to a smartphone either. Touch screens don't like me and drive me nuts.
Technology is my friend. I use it to my convenience but like you, I refuse to use some things (apps for smart home appliances and the such) because I resent the intrusion.
One thing I cannot understand is anti vaxxers, though. If the science is there, why do they want to be at the mercy of nature? Maybe natural selection is there for some reason..
XoXo
Sure, aging has been a part of our natural being ... but I feel as some doctors do, that we can look at it as a type of disease, that can be cured, too ... in time.
I was talking to a small group of kids this last december (I played Santa twice this year, once for the family annual xmas eve get- together, and another a week before for some children at a kids birthday party ... geeezzz ... all the parents want photos, must have taken 100 pics of me and the kids), and told them that they will get to see some exciting things to come, which of course included, living a bunch of years ... they were all wide eyed, etc ... told my grandkids too, when they were little kids. I'm 64 now, sure wouldn't mind taking off a few years, I took off a few pounds, but didn't do my hair any good, still is gray, and didn't even get a "few" of my dark hairs back {:-)
Mary: Yes, technology is really neither bad nor good -- it just increases the ability of people to do what they want. It's people who are bad or good.
Oblio: Oh, that post is wonderful. I wish I had written that!
Mary: I think they are back in the Middle Ages. And religionists are especially stuffy about anything to do with sex, of course.
Martin: I'd prefer to do without nuclear power -- it doesn't lend itself to decentralization -- but we may need it during the transition away from fossil fuels. As for nuclear weapons, I'd argue that they've saved tens of millions of lives.
Mike: It was quite an issue during the late 18th century. Some Christians argued that lightning was God's wrath and using technology to deflect it was impious. Seriously, people actually said that.
Sixpence: I hate being spied on by machines. As for the anti-vaxxers, well, I consider that natural selection in action. Too bad it's often their kids that suffer.
Ranch: It's mind-blowing to think what those who are children today will see during their (perhaps very long) lifetimes. My grandmother was born before the flight of the Wright brothers, but she lived to see men walk on the Moon. And today progress is even faster.
Those pounds taken off probably will help with health and lifespan -- even if they don't help with hair.
M (deleted): Go read what I actually wrote. You're arguing with things I never said.
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Re: Nuclear weapons
I'd argue that we've been very, very lucky with them, and our luck will run out someday.
We almost had a nuclear launch during the Cuban Missile crisis, but it was single-handedly blocked by Vasily Arkhipov . The B-59 submarine he was on lost contact with Moscow, and the captain wanted to launch nuclear weapons because he thought war had already broken out.
Later, in 1983, Stanislav Petrov also blocked nuclear war. Soviet systems indicated that American missiles had been launched against the USSR, but Petrov decided to wait because he thought the missile detection was a computer error. In fact, it was a computer error.
We've had plenty of close calls with nuclear war, almost all due to some sort of error. I'm scared that, someday, the mistakes will be fatal.
Anon: Thank you.
Rancid: I would argue that the nature of nuclear weapons makes it extremely unlikely that they will ever be used, however close we appear to have come at various times. It's been 75 years. The fact that not a single one of those incidents led to an actual bomb usage argues that there was more than just luck involved.
On the other hand, the experience of prior history makes it virtually certain that if nuclear weapons had not existed, we'd have had another global war of the magnitude of World War II every couple of decades since 1945.
My observation has long been that there is always a trade-off with
any new technology. There are gains, yes, but something will also be lost.
The idea is then to identify both sides of the trade-off -- difficult sometimes,
as the implications of adopting a new technology aren't always obvious -- and
then making an informed choice as to whether the gains sufficiently outweigh
the losses. A perfect example is found in these comments: note that several
people here admit to not having a smartphone. (And I am among them. I object
to my loss of control over the device, the apps, the data, etc.)
Infidel,
I think we're talking about different types of close calls and incidents. Your argument is that no (reasonable) person would launch what they considered a first strike to start a nuclear war. All your examples of near misses are political events.
Most of the events I linked to involved people mistakenly thinking they were already under attack; that is, they were considering retaliatory strikes.
*In Stanislav Petrov's case, he disobeyed orders by not launching nuclear missiles in retaliation for what appeared to be an American first strike. He stated that most of his colleagues would have launched the "retaliatory" strikes - and started World War III due to a computer error. We got lucky.
*We got very lucky in January 1961, when a nuclear bomb almost wiped out Goldsboro, North Carolina. An American plane carrying two bombs broke up in flight, and the bombs fell to earth. According to Robert McNamara, "by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted."
No explosion in Goldsboro? That was due to pure luck. Mistakes get made, and a mistake here would be a real lulu. That's why I'm worried.
P.S. It's fine for us to disagree on this point.
Anon: In most cases, I think the gain far outweighs the loss. Consumer products like smartphones (which I think of as more gadgetry than technology) are often an exception -- but it didn't have to be that way even there. It wouldn't be so bad if these things weren't being marketed by companies obsessed with collecting information about their customers.
Rancid: My point was that regardless of the type of "close calls", if we've gotten through so many of them without an actual mishap, they probably weren't actually that close.
I usually summarize Homo Sapiens relationship with Technology as symbiotic and in doing so we became a slightly more advanced subspecies.
Humans (Homo Sapiens primitive) can and are definitely still capable of adapting to an entirely non-technological existence; the problem is space and time. Technology and tools allow a single human to use less time(energy) and space(hunting grounds and/or farm land) to exist. This facilitates less resource competition and longer life spans even ignoring the direct effect of technologies like vaccines and medicine.
The simple fact is that Homo Sapiens Modern (early Borg in denial) are incapable of existing without our technology. Remove technology, the collective bequeathment of knowledge advancement to future generations, and humans instantly regress to Homo Sapiens Primitives that are migratory bands/herds of nomadic scavengers.
We are Borg and we are constantly evolving by our own hand. The only way to stop it is to completely remove technology from our genome; not in half measures like the Amish.
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