Publicado originalmente en Medium – Manuchis
In this article I want to argue that “technology-driven” is a lost cause, and we have to think on a technology-pushed society. When I mean pushed, I invite you to think on being pushed to the cliff. Not very optimistic, but for your comfort is not mandatory to follow that path as society.
These are my arguments:
- Society and technology are contemporary. As we know, there is a symmetry between. It does not exist technology without society and viceversa. In the Social Construction of Technology Theory, we understood that this symmetry allows to social groups to embrace and make sense of technology, following to the adoption of it. Saying that one or another comes first, is to miss something.
- Technology has replaced others way of believes. Different from pre-modern religions, technology is an aesthetical belief, an expression of the self, a fetichism of the unworthy live in the world. Without paraphrasing Nieztche, our god is dead and we replace it with the wonders of the human creation, the technology advancement.
- Ordinary rituals of technology-driven ideals, justify decisions on society. We do more for “innovation” than for solving our problems as society. We conquer other countries for petrol, we extract silicium for build Artificial Intelligent systems, we exploit children to make our customes. We drop old wired connectors making objects obsolete just for transfer speed. Futurist ideals are not far from us, despite the belief that we are more human, we just move oppressive practices out from our sight.
- Climate Change is because our technology, while we are looking solutions with technology. I trust in renewable energy, waste reduction and all these climate change mitigation actions. But we have to be honest, we are trying to solve the illnes with the same thing that caused it. We are not sure at all how it will be solved.
- Modern ideals of excluding the others are still being reproduced. Discrimination is a problem, slavery is still around us, but with different conditions and names. We are not addressing those problems, we are just adding new complexity layers over it.
- Artificial Intelligence is just another highly complexity system that works as a black box in our lifes. I don’t need to argue here, nobody knows how AI works. We know how to build an AI system, but we don’t know what it would do and how to solve that problem. AI-driven solutions are adding more problems that solutions. Of course, it is helping to address small problems, and some big unresolved problems in society (specially in health and mobility).
I think it is enought. You can think by yourself why we are pushing society more than we can understand it (avoid “control” word here, please). And the reason that, I believe, we are doing it is beacuse we don’t know what else to do. We don’t know how to save ourselves from us.
We have to move forward, because we are humans. There is no explain for that, and there is no reason to stop. You can conver to the Amish, but it is worthless anyway. You can go to live in the forest, but the forest will be destroyed sooner or later. You can conquer Mars, big joke.
You can jump to the cliff, believing that your technology would work. Or, you can descend the cliff and try to make it work again. Smarter, to your own pace, with the intended technology to do it.