Technology – What’s It Ever Done For Us?

It’s easy to argue that responsibility for many of the world’s biggest problems can be laid at the door of modern industrial technology. That’s because there is abundant evidence for it: cars, planes, electrically powered devices of every kind and massive amounts of transportation. The net result has been depletion of the earth’s precious resources and pollution on an unprecedented level.

A central issue is that we have been burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil to provide the energy that powers our modern technologies. The fact is that more has now been burned than remains in the ground, and if that isn’t depressing enough, all the fuel that has been burned to date has been relentlessly pumping surplus CO2 into the atmosphere.

So it would seem that the good times are gone. Soon the barrel will run dry and we shall have to sober up with sore heads and a hazy memory of how we got here. The final touch might be a pandemic of biblical proportions with the contagion spread to all parts of the globe thanks, ironically, to our modern transportation networks.

But how likely is this scenario really and can the blame all be laid at the door of technology? The fact is that this is hardly a first offence – as a species we have a pretty poor record when it comes bad behaviour leading to unfortunate consequences. But every time we’ve somehow managed to survive and emerge stronger.

The fact is that you cannot separate people from technology. It’s what defines us. Go back however far you like into prehistory and wherever a few old bones are identified as being human in origin you will find evidence of technology.

Tracing the human race back as far as possible we can never find a period when we actually didn’t engage in making clothes, decorations, tools and weapons, or cooking food, painting pictures and making music. These things in a sense define what it is to be human, just as wings or a poisonous bite help define other creatures. We are compelled to invent and employ technology just in order to get by.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Mozart’s Magic Flute has its origins in the hollowed out animal bones that our ancestors fashioned into crude early flutes, or that the weapons of modern warfare can trace their lineage back to stone arrow heads. Consider as you read this, brought to you as a stream of ones and zeroes, that digital communication evolved from printed media, which was a step up from handwriting which itself developed from painting which seems to have started when we still lived in caves.

Human technology constantly evolves, improving on and adapting earlier technologies – quite commonly in order to address the shortcomings of that existing technology. There are always side-effects; the inventors of steam technology may have foreseen an Industrial Revolution as a possible outcome, but they would never have guessed that vast sewage systems would also be a consequence (needed to contain disease caused by urban crowding).

So if there is one thing we can be sure of it is this: technology almost certainly helped bring us to our present impasse, but it also once again represents our best hope of averting disaster. Salvation lies, not in reverting to some previous pre-tech era, but in moving forward to develop better “eco-technologies” – LED’s to replace incandescent lighting, solar energy in place of fossil fuel, and extend the opportunities offered by the internet.

These newer technologies use fewer of the planet’s resources and cause less pollution, both directly and indirectly (by reducing the need to travel so much for example). Yet at the same time they can enhance our lives and broaden the choices available to us. Sure, one day we’ll realise that they too were less than perfect and guess what we’ll do then?

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