Where will human over-enthusiasm for technology lead us?
What has Nye told us about technology
- technology is a fundamental human expression
- technology doesn't control us, in fact it isn't even predictable
- historians find technologies are shaped by their context, they are not independent of society and do not transform the world from outside
- people can use technologies for many ends, and people usually prefer variety
- consider next what about the problems technology causes:
- are we going to need to reduce resource consumption or the damage we do to the environment?
- can we solve such problems simply by inventing better technologies or will we need to consume less?
- does technology take away jobs?--not so far
- does technology reduce or increase our freedom?
- reduces freedom by making things more the same
- increases freedom by allowing us to do more
- since the direction of technology is not inevitable, it is
possible and necessary to make decisions
- can we simply trust the marketplace? Nye says no
because corporations don't necessarily develop the technologies that
would benefit us most
- is government control a better alternative? Ny says
not
with the institutions we have now
- he would like to see citizens have more voice in choosing
where we want technology to take us
- do people know enough to make choices between technologies?
- are choices available and visible?
- can we understand enough to know what risks we take?
- understanding the science and technology
- having information on the consequences of different choices
- having thought about what kind of society we want
- do we think the technologies we have grown up with are natural and not question them?
- we very quickly take technologies for granted and don't question them
- watch out for the human tendency to naturalize things
- Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke expects that human infatuation with technology will lead to intelligent machines that will replace us (or that we will merge with).
- Bill Joy, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
- David Lloyd, And They
All Lived Technologically Ever After
We have many possible futures made possible by technology.
Which one do we want?