Friday, September 13, 2013

My Problem with Technology

As anyone who knows me fairly well will tell you, over the past three to five years I have developed an increasing distaste for technological advances.  So I thought I would take a few minutes to put my thoughts into more carefully constructed words.  First of all: I don't believe technology as a general concept is uniformly bad.  In fact there are whole categories of technologies that are uniformly good.  Specifically easily replicated and distributed technologies are almost always uniformly good.  For example the idea of the wooden plow, paper, writing, open-source software, etc.  These technologies are good because *most everyone* who wishes can through their own labor take advantage of these.  So what are the characteristics of a good technology?  1) Mass-distribution/Availability 2) Replication and 3) Harnessable with One's Own Ability (Can anyone no matter what their economic/social state learn and reasonably take advantage of it?)

However, most technology falls into the bad category which while it has positive potential uses most often ends up creating a negative social outcome.  These are technologies whereby economic and social power become more concentrated by the limited owner or user of the technology.  This includes things like copyrighted inventions, satellites, machine-intensive industrial production, etc.  So why are these not necessarily good for society?  I will not argue against the fact that these inventions have had a positive impact on a very large number of people's lives.  A lot of technology does in fact improve at least some people's lives.  However, they also tend to concentrate power into the hands of the few people who control that technology.  Now is this a bad thing?  Some would say these people who came up with the ideas or controlled the capital allowing them to be created deserve a reward of some kind.  (apparently the reward of adding to the collective knowledge of human achievement is not reward enough)  However, has this created a net positive for society?  Is creating technologies only a few can access/use a good thing for the world?  If it ends up concentrating power in a minority is that still okay?  Over time my answer has increasingly become no.

At the end of the day what begins to frighten me more and more is the fact that the further we seem to technologically progress the further we also seem to go towards negating the idea of meritocracy.  The more that we require access to increasingly complex technology or capital markets the more power gets concentrated into the hands of those who control it.  Therefore the lowest in society who may only have access to intelligence and labor can only go as far as the limiting factors may take him or her.  Is this a society based on merit or based on unequal access to life-defining resources?  Will even more technology help with this issue or simply exacerbate it?  I suppose my idea of 'progress' is not simply more technology and more useless consumer gadgets, but a mass movement towards a society where those who wish to fully use their capacities for reason, intellect, and labor have a reasonable pathway to do so.

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