technology
culture
Is Technology Actually Making Things Better?
Philosophy, Cal State Fullerton
Author, The Roots of Progress
0
0
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
September 30th, 2020
Jason Crawford argues that technology (and industrialization) have brought about stunning benefits, and he is right about this. He also argues that, up to now, the good achieved by technology has outweighed the harm. He may be right about that too, with a possible caveat for nuclear weapons. Finally, he argues that this pattern will continue—that, in the future, the good achieved by technology will continue to outweigh the harm (partly because technology can solve problems arising from technology). I think he’s mistaken about that. I’d like to be wrong, but I don’t feel optimistic.
Mr. Crawford points out that technology can solve the problems it creates, and gives examples concerning cars and crash-prevention and X-rays. He is right about those examples. He also suggests that technology can protect our digital privacy; I’m less sure about that one. China, for example, is full of surveillance cameras with face-recognition software, and it’s hard to foresee the technology that would shut all that down.
He believes that technology can also solve or ameliorate the problems raised by climate change, nuclear weapons, and A.I. I’m not optimistic there. It’s possible that someone will develop a clean energy source that replaces carbon-based energy, but time is running out. We have been living under a nuclear sword of Damocles for several decades, and still lack technologies which prevent the use of nuclear weapons. As for A.I., perhaps we can build in safeguards (somewhat like Asimov’s three rules of robotics), but there is no guarantee that no one will develop an A.I. that lacks such safeguards.
Previously I said the problem was a growing gap between our power and our wisdom. Let me put that point another way. Right now we seem to face several problems involving technology one way or another: the threat posed by nuclear weapons, climate change brought on by carbon-based industry, terrorism, the threat posed to employment by automation, data and privacy concerns, using bots and fake news to influence elections, and population growth and environmental degradation, to name just a few.
However, these are, in a sense, not several problems. They are really facets of a single problem: the growing gap between our power and our wisdom. I wish I shared Mr. Crawford’s optimism about the capacity of philosophy to make us wiser, but I fear we fall short in that regard.
Can technology itself make us wiser? Some thinkers suggest that it can, that we can bioengineer ourselves to improve our biologically limited capacity for altruism, cooperation, and long-range prudence, thereby enabling us to make wiser choices. However, even if we learn to do that, doing it to the entire human race is probably infeasible, and those who need this the most will resist it the most. Moreover, that technology could be abused; some may wish to make humans that are worse in various ways.
I said that there is, in a sense, only one problem behind all the others. The “only problem”… is us.
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