The technological paradox

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."
Albert Einstein

Would that Albert Einstein were still alive today, I feel sure that he would be a great help in unravelling the problems we have created for ourselves. Whilst the scientific approach has in a sense opened Pandora’s Box, technology has to date, represented its contents. Technological innovation was the father of the industrial revolution and capital gain its mother, their child I propose is ecological devastation. In its infancy let’s say the last 300 years the infant appeared to bring enhanced quality of life to all it touched but has this really been the case? What has happened to the social infrastructure, the family, is our quality of life better than it might have been without it? Don’t get me wrong, those halcyon days were not truly so but might we have taken a different developmental path, more supportive of social and ecological equality?

Certainly in developed nations, at the material level things have improved but I question if the qualitative experience of life actually has. We are a social animal but technology seems to have resulted in social fragmentation rather than integration. Now, more than ever, the outward signs of the haves and the have nots are all too clear. Technologies such as the Television, the Internet, mobile phones, MP3 players and computer gaming, whilst claiming increased connectivity on one level, actually isolate us from personal face to face interaction on another.

Technology has been the great enabler of our excess; through mechanisation, it has enabled the mass production of low cost consumables and intensive agricultural practices. The impact of technology on agriculture has been fundamental in both the support of population growth, the over exploitation of land, the migration from the countryside to cities and has resulted in the loss of our collective connection with, and sensitivity, to nature.

I see technology as paradoxical because on the one hand, physically, at least in the short term, it has made life easier but on the other, emotionally, I feel it has had a leaching effect. I find it astounding that millions of people around the world are choosing to live an imaginary life as an Avatar in cyber space rather than actually going out into the world and relating, not only to each other but to the world at large. This is Plato’s cave writ large and symptomatic of the scenario painted by the Matrix trilogy of films, it seems we are becoming a community of virtual ego’s just needing to be fed the right blend of fantasies to keep us compliant. I do not advocate abandoning technology but I do suggest we consider how we might use it to augment our lives rather than act as a substitute to reality and richness of them.

How important technology needs to be in the long term is debateable but it is clear to me, that we will need technology to contain and perhaps reverse some of the damage we have already done.