Kevin Kelly concluded a chapter in his new book What Technology Wants with the declaration that if you hate technology, you basically hate yourself.
The rationale is twofold:
1. As many have observed before, technology--and Kelly's superset "technium"--is in many ways the natural successor to biological evolution. In other words, human change is primarily through various symbiotic and feedback-looped systems that comprise human culture.
2. It all started with biology, but humans throughout their entire history have defined and been defined by their tools and information technologies. I wrote an essay a few months ago called "What Bruce Campbell Taught Me About Robotics" concerning human co-evolution with tools and the mind's plastic self-models. And of course there's the whole co-evolution with or transition to language-based societies.
So if the premise that human culture is a result of taking the path of technologies is true, then to reject technology as a whole would be reject human culture as it has always been. If the premise that our biological framework is a result of a back-and-forth relationship with tools and/or information, then you have another reason to say that hating technology is hating yourself (assuming you are human).
In his book, Kelly argues against the noble savage concept. Even though there are many useless implementations of technology, the tech that is good is extremely good and all humans adopt them when they can. Some examples Kelly provides are telephones, antibiotics and other medicines, and...chainsaws. Low-tech villagers continue to swarm to slums of higher-tech cities, not because they are forced, but because they want their children to have better opportunities.
So is it a straw man that actually hates technology? Certainly people hate certain implementations of technology. Certainly it is ok, and perhaps needed more than ever, to reject useless technology artifacts. I think one place where you can definitely find some technology haters are the ones afraid of obviously transformative technologies, in other words the ones that purposely and radically alter humans. And they are only "transformative" in an anachronistic sense--e.g., if you compare two different time periods in history, you can see drastic differences.
Also, although perhaps not outright hate in most cases, there are many who have been infected by the meme that artificial creatures such as robots and/or super-smart computers (and/or super-smart networks of computers) present a competition to humans as they exist now. This meme is perhaps more dangerous than any computer could be because it tries to divorce humans from the technium.
Image credit: whokilledbambi
The rationale is twofold:
1. As many have observed before, technology--and Kelly's superset "technium"--is in many ways the natural successor to biological evolution. In other words, human change is primarily through various symbiotic and feedback-looped systems that comprise human culture.
2. It all started with biology, but humans throughout their entire history have defined and been defined by their tools and information technologies. I wrote an essay a few months ago called "What Bruce Campbell Taught Me About Robotics" concerning human co-evolution with tools and the mind's plastic self-models. And of course there's the whole co-evolution with or transition to language-based societies.
So if the premise that human culture is a result of taking the path of technologies is true, then to reject technology as a whole would be reject human culture as it has always been. If the premise that our biological framework is a result of a back-and-forth relationship with tools and/or information, then you have another reason to say that hating technology is hating yourself (assuming you are human).
In his book, Kelly argues against the noble savage concept. Even though there are many useless implementations of technology, the tech that is good is extremely good and all humans adopt them when they can. Some examples Kelly provides are telephones, antibiotics and other medicines, and...chainsaws. Low-tech villagers continue to swarm to slums of higher-tech cities, not because they are forced, but because they want their children to have better opportunities.
So is it a straw man that actually hates technology? Certainly people hate certain implementations of technology. Certainly it is ok, and perhaps needed more than ever, to reject useless technology artifacts. I think one place where you can definitely find some technology haters are the ones afraid of obviously transformative technologies, in other words the ones that purposely and radically alter humans. And they are only "transformative" in an anachronistic sense--e.g., if you compare two different time periods in history, you can see drastic differences.
Also, although perhaps not outright hate in most cases, there are many who have been infected by the meme that artificial creatures such as robots and/or super-smart computers (and/or super-smart networks of computers) present a competition to humans as they exist now. This meme is perhaps more dangerous than any computer could be because it tries to divorce humans from the technium.
Image credit: whokilledbambi
So then are we to conclude that all tool-making/using animals are also "cyborgs"? Frankly, it's a ridiculous premise.
I'm personally put-off by the "technology as religion" crowd. Technology is not now, and can never be a solution for what we, ourselves, do wrong. Too lazy to study ... fantasize about a chip that can immediately turn you into an expert. Afraid of death ... fantasize about solving all our biological problems and living forever.
These aren't technological solutions to problems, they are religious invocations to rationalize and overcome our primal fears. This is especially true when most of the advocates gloss over the real and significant problems that such advances would really represent.
In most cases, we don't even have a working hypothesis to form a theory about humans and the technology advocates are leap-frogging over these difficulties to propose solutions that even the most avid fantasy reader would find hard to believe.
I don't hate technology, nor do I deny the benefits that it can bring. What I do hate are those that think that technology can solve the problems of being human and especially those that think that technology has no consequences. I truly can't imagine anything more phenomenally stupid as thinking that it would be a good idea to build/design our replacements in machine form (if that were even possible). The problem with these viewpoints is that it never seems to occur to any of these "advocates" of the consequences should they,themselves, be denied access to such technologies. It is the worst sort of elitist thinking and demonstrates how little they understand humans, let alone how to address problems that humans face.