digitaldust

Ed pointed me at this post by Dave Pollard yesterday. It’s all about how technology has ultimately made things worse for humanity. Every supposedly good thing that comes along has an even worse dark cloud with it. Now this is not a new meme, it comes up again and again, usually as some sort of support for returning to a more glorious time before we invented [insert recent technology here], where everyone lived in harmony. But I remember reading texts when I did Egyptology where 5000 years ago the egyptians were saying the same thing.

The other thing that always comes out (as it does in the comments) is the opinion that technology is not inherently evil, it’s the people who use it. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”

All of this I think is a bit naive. Now I’ve been thinking quite a lot about technology recently for various reasons, and one certain thing that I am now a firm believer in is that any discussion about technology as a concept is inseparable from a discussion about ethics. I say unfortunately because ethics is a messy business and I would much rather be thinking about some kind of clean ontology of technology.

Technology is what defines us as human beings, without it we wouldn’t be human. Our species and the ones leading up to us used their knowledge in practical ways, and with ever increasing sophistication. It’s as much a part of us as breathing and eating. So trying to simplify the ethical debate down to a discussion of whether guns kill people or people do is wrong. The separation is both wrong and distracting. Technology and humanity are a unity, not separable phenomena to be examined.

This is also massively a question about viewpoint. It’s easy to sit in a comfy office and write on a computer that technology is evil. Whereas right now 6 billion or more people are actively engaged in various forms of technology use to survive, and most of them are not thinking about their actions or their own ethical stance when using it. Also from who’s viewpoint is it bad? From the viewpoint of other human beings? From the viewpoint of someone holding a gun? From the viewpoint of someone on the receiving end of the gun? (For gun read any other technology, from slavery up through concentration camps and up to nuclear weapons). Or is it from the viewpoint of the planetary ecosystem? It’s very easy to anthropomorphism the planet and wish for a world where we didn’t exist, but this doesn’t solve the problems of the here and now.

If you look at this from an empirical viewpoint then technology must be good, because it has helped us support an ever increasing population (a bubble that may burst), where there are more people alive today than have ever lived. So all the death dealing technologies are massively outweighed by the power of agriculture and medicine. This simplification is not something I buy because it’s purely historic and has no concept of possible future occurrences, also it in no way takes into account people’s personal perspective.

I’m reminded of of Nietzsche’s Will to Power, which was a human and intentional evolution of Schopenhauer’s Will to Survive. I think that this intentional approach to survival and effecting the world around you is what we see in technology. It is also therefor an intrinsically ethical and intrinsically personal activity. Just as a note the Will to Power can be misread as either a desire for power or as something about dominating other people. It’s not, very simply it’s about being able to affect the world around you and see effects of that.

I have always found this Nietzschean approach profoundly invigorating. Coupled with the inseparableness of humanity and technology this puts us firmly in control and also firmly in the world we inhabit. Technology is not inherently evil, it’s inherently what makes us human, but through this we can exert more control over the world around us. And that activity will also impinge on other people because we all live on the same planet, so that activity must be controlled by some ethical standpoint. So ethics and technology, no matter if that tech is seemingly harmless (and none of them are), go hand in hand. Damn, that makes it messy, I’ll have to go back to meta-physics to get some nice clean philosophy.