For sometime now I’ve been thinking about all the people who complain about “Modern” Technology or just Technology in general. Mostly it is people around my age who are complaining and upon a closer look what they are really complaining about is that they don’t understand all this “new” technology and seem to resent having to ask for help. Especially from their grand kids. This I can understand, no one likes feeling or looking dependent, but that is not what I’m going to talk about today.
Today I’m going to be addressing those out there who don’t like technology. Those who think things were better 50, 100, 500 years ago. Back when things were “simpler”. You find theses people scattered about the political spectrum, left, right, center. What does happen is, from time to time, they anti-technology ideology gets drafted by one side or the other. Way back when I was a 20’s something the anti-technology thoughts where mostly on the left. Then, years later it was on the right. Now it seems to be about evenly spread over the spectrum. But it looks like the right is finding anti-technology to be the thing to sell.
This seems to be because the right, as it often is, supported by the people with, or think they have, or should have, lots of money and power. A right now fair number of the biggest corporations are being threatened with change. And the things changing are not something they control, or even really understand. But, again, this is not what I’m going to talk about.
I’m talking about is that the creation and use of technology is one of the key things that make us Human. As we gain more and more knowledge about how the earliest hominids lived we are finding more and more evidence that they used technology. When I assert this I often get “are you saying “cavemen” had technology? A Yes that is exactly what I’m saying. The moment one of are ancestors picked up a rock and threw it to kill some pray we were using technology. Even more so when he/she started selecting rocks to throw for how easy they were to throw but how effective they were in taking down the prey. The first time we napped a rock to make a sharp edge we were ‘inventing’ new technology. This is what humans do. We create technology and we change the world we live in with it.
What is deferent now is we are becoming much more aware of what effects the new, and old, technology has. We are becoming more aware of unforeseen and/or unintended side effects of using technology. An we are now asking the question(s) is this what we want? Can we do it deferentially so that the side effects are mitigated someway? Or can we do something else for the same effect that doesn’t have the side effect we don’t want. An even more so now, we ask the question of “If we do ‘X’ what effects, other than the one we want, will happen and do we really want that?
These are not easy question to ask, much less, answer. The major reason is it forces us to look beyond the immediate results, why we created the new technology, to what it can do latter. It is not something we find easy to do. Worse, it is not something we train people to do as a matter of habit. Not like we train them to look and see if what they want to do can be ‘Monetized’. An if you don’t think this is done, just go to any ‘pitch’ meeting for a tech company. After we get passed the ‘What is it?’ And the ‘What good is it?’ We get the ‘How much profit will it make?’ Followed by ‘How Soon?’
So to everyone out there, get over not liking all the Newfangled Technologies. It is what we do. I recommend you start encouraging the young ones around you to help you figure out how you can use it to make your life both happier and just a bit nicer.
