Home   Introduction   Curriculum   Reading   Speaking   Activities   About Us

 Books   Articles   Interview

My definition changed as I started to notice similarities between “high tech” and historical tools. If both are used for the same reasons, and both are subject to the same forces of change, and both exhibit the same sorts of costs and benefits, then their similarities may be more important than their differences. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and looks like a duck, then it must be a duck.

I want a definition that helps me discover enduring patterns. Enduring patterns are useful because they prepare us for the future. New things come along, but we are not confused and disoriented because we’ve learned these patterns that fit the new as well as the old. If my definition is extremely narrow, then every few months new discoveries or inventions will appear that do not fit it and I will have to start from scratch trying to understand them (or simply ignore them and hope that they do not affect my life). If my definition is too broad, then everything qualifies and any generalizing truths (i.e. patterns) are so vague as to be useless. A good definition helps me to recognize familiar and useful patterns in the new that seems to be coming along faster and faster in our world.

So I would answer your question that the main—and most important—reason we use technology is for whatever is most pressing for us. If our survival is in question and we need to find food and water to survive the day, then having Internet access is utterly irrelevant. In the environment that you and I live in, food and shelter are virtually guaranteed and we rarely think of them. To us, communication may be far more important. To many in the first world, entertainment is paramount. Just look at the number of hours people spend watching TV, how much they spend on their equipment as well as cable or satellite subscriptions. Or look at those who use drugs, including alcohol and nicotine, to keep themselves entertained. An addict may even ignore the food and shelter that Maslow claimed is our most basic need. Laboratory rats that repeatedly pressed a lever to get a cocaine “fix” did so to the exclusion of eating, drinking, and sex.

So the answer to your question is much more interesting than simple.

Beyond my greater appreciation for communication as a reason for using technology, writing the book broadened my awareness of the many reasons we use it. I probably use it for the very same reasons before and after, but am more conscious, more aware of those reasons now.

As far as more recent technology, it may be a matter of semantics. Although stone tools may still be important in very primitive areas of the world—grinding seeds with a mortar and pestle, for instance—it has been a long time since they were important to the leading edge of technology. Although this question would be answered better by someone with expertise in anthropology, which I do not possess, I would hazard the opinion that stone tools are somewhere back in the common lineage of all technology. If we could trace back technological evolution, as we are trying to trace back human evolution, we might find several “Adam and Eve” types of stone tools, developed independently in different areas, but similar in form and use, that led to all technology that followed.

The fictional movie “The Gods Must be Crazy” described a tribe of African bushmen that encounter a Coca Cola bottle, and are amazed by it because they have nothing as hard—which they would have if they had stone in their geography. Assuming that the movie offers an authentic depiction, the technology developed was based on plant and animal products: bows and arrows, anesthetizing poison, snake skins, etc.

In the case of the bushmen, these technologies did not appear to lead to more advanced technologies. Would they have, given enough time? Or was there an absence of need and, therefore, motivation for more advanced technology? Or are stone and, perhaps, other material resources necessary for further development? If this last case were true, then removing stone tools from world history could have inhibited development of any further technology. The world would be a very different place, with small, isolated populations still using bows and arrows.

But there are opportunity costs to understanding how technology works. Understanding even a single technology can take a great deal of time and may be quite difficult. Years of science and engineering study may need to precede examination of the specific technology. Now, multiply that by the countless new inventions appearing around the world, sired by millions of specialists and you see that understanding how all technology works in complete detail is impossible. And the more time we spend figuring this out, the less time we have to understand environment, sociological, and other aspects of technology. So we have to balance our efforts.

Fortunately, there are simple patterns that explain how a wide variety of technologies work. Not only are we relieved of learning new patterns for each and every technology, but these patterns are fairly common sense, not requiring an advanced degree in science or engineering. Understanding them does not substitute for such an advanced degree. They do not magically confer on us the ability to design new, complex technology. But they do equip us to understand and evaluate technology at a high level. And they equip us to better understand the technical answers provided by those who have devoted their lives to science and engineering.

While driving at night, take a look at all the electric lights around you. I’ve seen streets, presumably leading over a hill to a new housing development, that are surrounded by nothing but grassy fields and yet lit by hundreds of bright lights. How much energy is being consumed to shine on the grass and the occasional passing car? Many kilowatts on that section of street alone. All this to power lights that are not even necessary—after all, the few cars that use this road have their own headlights.

Now, if you rode a stationary bicycle connected to a generator, you might be able to power one of those light—if you were cycling champion Lance Armstrong! He can produce between half and a whole kilowatt, but not indefinitely. To power hundreds of lights, each consuming about a kilowatt (maybe more!) with human power, you’d need to fill the field with such bicycles. Plus, you’d need support personnel to feed and water the riders and you’d need replacement riders to rotate through. This field of bicycles is ridiculous, right? If that were the source of energy, we’d never even conceive of lighting empty streets at night. Yet, for most of human existence, humans and animals were our only source of energy. Wind sails are about 5500 years old and waterwheels about 2100.

So, trying to explain the amount of energy we expend thoughtlessly to a human from our ancient history, we would, in effect, be describing an unlimited quantity of energy. Technology’s accelerating rate of change means that we who live in the early 21st century may have as much difficulty comprehending the quantities of energy used in the 22nd century as that ancient human would have comprehending ours. We might well call it “unlimited,” even though for the 22nd century inhabitant, it might be a bare minimum amount.

The safest answer is that there is nothing, not even energy, that every technology must have in order to work. This subscribes to the Arthur C. Clarke theory that if someone says that something is impossible, he is most probably wrong.

For instance, at least some factors of evolution by natural selection appear to apply as well to technology as they do to living organisms. Yes, humans are involved in the ecosystem that subjects technology to these forces and it is humans who do the things that actually change a technology, for instance by inventing something new. But this scheme transcends individual humans. If some technology is particularly well adapted to a given environment, natural selection will reward those humans that adopt that technology with greater survival rates. We address this in “How Does Technology Change?”

In the chapter on how we change technology, we focus on the roles we play in that ecosystem. Individuals will make choices to engineer, promote, manage, and so on. What is it like to play one of those roles? What are examples of people who have?  What happened to them? This is important to know for all of us who look to examples around us—our parents, for instance—in order to decide how to spend our lives. Yes, they are subject to the natural forces we describe in the earlier chapter, but there is a richness in the stories that applies more to human choices.

We can imagine a future in which technology operates autonomously. Already, assembly line robots assemble cars and scheduling software routes trucks around our highway systems, but within decades, humans may have only minor roles in the operation of our society. That’s scary, but unless we understand both the natural forces causing change in technology as well as the roles that we (or future autonomous robots) can play, we have no tools to evaluate that potential threat. Being equipped to evaluate is good.

How could developing stone tools have been so slow? Were humans that much less intelligent back then? In answer to that question, consider the island of Tasmania and an old TV show, MacGyver. As anywhere, Tasmania suffered from occasional famine. Unusual, however, was that for about 4000 years Tasmanians, surrounded by rich oceans, did not fish. They did not think of fish as “food,” much as most Americans and Europeans rarely think of insects as food, even though people in many parts of the world recognize them as highly nutritious.

Now, on to MacGyver, the television show about a resourceful hero who uses a paper clip to short-out a nuclear missile, a chocolate bar to plug an acid leak, and a cold capsule to trigger a homemade bomb. What did he have that most people with easy access to paper clips, chocolate bars, and cold capsules lack—other than life-threatening situations every week? Information. Most of us lack information about missiles, acid, and bombs just as the Tasmanians lacked information about fish. Similarly, before we invented stone tools, we lacked information about stone tools—a seed for technology.

Our vast interrelated network of technology is like a crystal. The molecular components of crystals can float around in liquid (non-crystalline) form until they come in contact with a “seed” crystal. This seed is literally a few molecules that have already been stacked into a crystal structure. These cause more molecules to come out of solution, adding themselves to the structure. Integrated circuits are made from a giant silicon crystal grown from a tiny silicon seed. Stone tools may have been the conceptual seed from which all technology since has grown.

But to the overall question of whether technology will eventually usurp human control, that is still open. Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy, and many other brilliant scientists and engineers have written on this topic. There is, as yet, no consensus on the answer. But we can see trends…disturbing trends. The vast blackout of New York and surrounding areas on November 9, 1965, plunged 30,000,000 people into darkness. In 2003, a blackout affected more than 50,000,000 people.  The power grid was designed to protect itself so an overload in one section cascaded to others, like dominos tipping each other over. Technology is becoming far more autonomous and capable of “protecting itself.” The premise in the Terminator movies is that “Skynet” triggered a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia in order to protect itself from humans trying to turn it off. Our dependence on technology is growing, so it’s likely that we will continue to approach such situations where we cannot turn it off, but it may be able to turn us off.  Watch an interview with Chris Langton on the evolution of technology.

To try to answer your question globally, we’d have to start with transportation and communication technologies. Ocean-going ships caused upheaval around the world. Trade connected China with Africa and Europe, including trade in technology such as magnetic compasses, gunpowder, and paper. Europeans conquered the western hemisphere. Wars became global. The telegraph connected Europe with America and some thought that this instantaneous communication could clear up the misunderstandings that lead to war. Though wars continue, the telegraph and the telecommunication technologies that followed it have had huge impact. Look at how CNN affects Americans’ perception of the world and how MTV affects the world’s perception of America.

Transportation and communication technologies have united the world in many ways and with both costs and benefits. Without being able to pick a specific technology, such as the Spanish galleon or TV, I would say that these two classes of technology have affected the most people in the greatest way.

But forging ahead where angels fear to tread, I would say that technology changes people more than the other way around. Most people do not consciously change technology, so their impact is small and felt only in the aggregate. For instance, consumers affect technology by making it successful (or not) in the market place. In the aggregate, this is a big impact, but the choice an individual consumer makes has little impact.

On the other hand, many technologies can change how people live their lives. From medicines that keep us alive to ubiquitous products like cellular phones and cars, people eventually adapt to use them, often benefiting and often becoming dependent. This would make for an interesting roundtable discussion, as I am only scratching the surface.

But the large organizations responsible for much of technology’s development are interested in getting to the broader markets as quickly as possible. Forget spending years selling a few $5000 phones, let’s sell millions of $100 phones! So, in this case the more populous middle class will be a driving force.

Still, one thing that the history of technology shows us is that predicting where and how technology develops is nearly impossible. It comes from all quarters and is frequently used in totally unanticipated ways. The best way to look at this question may not be through the lens of socioeconomic class as through categories developed in the study of technological diffusion. Consider five waves of adopters:

1. Innovators and enthusiasts, adopt a new technology as soon as it appears.
2. Visionaries and other early adopters soon follow once the technology is a bit more practical to use.
3. Pragmatists, the early majority, join in once the price comes down.
4. Conservatives, the late majority, adopt once the technology has become standardized and easy to use.
5. Laggards and skeptics are dragged, kicking and screaming, into adopting it when everyone else is already using it and they have little choice (“What do you mean you have no telephone?!?”).

I draw these categories from Everett Rogers (who wrote Diffusion of Innovation) and Geoffrey Moore (who wrote “Crossing the Chasm”). Based on this way of categorizing people, we could say that innovators and enthusiasts cause the biggest changes in technology.

And, second, lack of information can keep us from making good decisions. If the system in which the technology operates is complex, it can be difficult to determine that it is the source of the costs. Yes, something bad is happening, but we don’t want to blame this wonderful technology that is doing so much good for us, so it must be coming from some other source. Even when such self-delusion is not involved, the basic science explaining the connection between cost and source may be undeveloped.

Over time, both of these disconnects can be addressed. It would be an interesting study to see how long this can take and if some costly technology is never held accountable.

If we did not have the disconnect I addressed two questions back, it would be easy to say that, as a rational society, we would have far more technology that is, on balance, beneficial. With those two disconnects, it is hard to say, but I would guess that technology is overall a good deal more beneficial than costly. I certainly would not wish to live a hundred years ago (before penicillin) or a thousand years ago (before the printing press).

I would educate those citizen panels with the ICE-9 questions from the curriculum and book. It would give them a simple yet useful tool for approaching nanotechnology. No matter the detail they wished to immerse themselves in, ICE-9 is a perfect framework. I have contacted Langdon Winner as well as the Loka Institute (which is advocating Langdon's recommendation), but it may be a friend of someone who reads this interview that actually makes the contact that gets ICE-9 in.

Certainly, if there were some other tool for understanding and evaluating technology that were even better, then Congress should use that, but I have seen nothing like ICE-9, much less anything better. Here is a chance for you to change technology: find some way to connect ICE-9 with those in the US Congress guiding this effort.

There is no absolute “good” or “bad” for every technology across every environment. There is a great deal of relativity. What I consider good is conscious evaluation. What I consider bad is blind embrace or rejection of a technology. That is static. You might as well flip a coin. In our dynamic world we need dynamic responses, which means putting technology into context so we can assess it. That is precisely what the ICE-9 technique in the curriculum and the book help us to do.

Understanding technology deeply is a philosophical thing. It affects how you view the Universe around you and how you make the major decisions you do. It is a different mindset, a different worldview. I think it’s healthier for the individual and I strongly believe that it is healthier for society at large. We have important decisions to make concerning technology and doing so with knowledge and perspective is the safest, most productive way to go.

©

 2010 KnowledgeContext

Teaching Young People to Think About Technology