There are a lot of ideas out there in the humansphere about where the future is going to take us. One of the questions worth asking how technology will affect the direction of human societies. It is harder and harder to embrace the Luddite lifestyle. We are directed, reflected and protected by the technology we wrap around ourselves.
Phil Bowmaster speculates that technology is just a reflection of humanity’s wants and he is correct.
In other words, technology wants exactly what we want. And that shouldn’t be all that surprising, because our technology is us. We evolved to top out at a certain running speed, but that wasn’t good enough for us so we decided to build bicycles, trains, cars, and airplanes. We wanted to go faster. What did the technology want? The same thing.
We found that recording and having access to information was extremely helpful in many facets of our lives, and that often we needed more than we could relaibly maintain in our brains or within the brains of all the members of a community. So we invented writing, and then printing, and then all manner of media, and then the Internet. We wanted better information access. That’s what those technologies wanted to provide for us.
What happens when technology no longer wants what we want? Take speeding cameras as an example. Phone menus. Auto dialers. Obviously someone wants these technologies or they wouldn’t exist. But it is worth thinking about the ways that technology improves and lessens our quality of life simultaneously. Phil concludes that technology wants us to be happy. I’m not ready to go there. Technology is just a force multiplier of whoever controls it. Control is key. Whoever controls advanced technology has the ability to control us. That should be scary.