Over the years, even over the past century, there’s been an ongoing discussion/argument about technology, and whether it’s beneficial for society as a whole. It’s certainly beneficial for those who can reap its benefits, but the degree to which individuals can reap those benefits is largely determined by their education and physical resources.

What’s so often overlooked about technology is that its greatest function is as a multiplier. For me as a writer, computers were a godsend because I wrote barely legibly and got writer’s cramp after a few hundred words. Typewriters were better, but I was a lousy typist and went through bottles of Wite-Out. Computers definitely multiplied my writing accuracy and output, but I had the advantage of a good education and the resources to afford a computer.

The fact is that technology multiplies the skills and productivity more for those already enabled to a great degree.

Another factor is that technology is amoral. It can more greatly enable those who do work to improve society, and it can improve the ability of individuals who wish to destroy, either people or societies.

The third factor is that technology enables its users to create change more quickly, often more quickly than many, if not most, people can effectively adapt to. That becomes a destabilizing factor in any society because only a minority of people in most cultures can deal effectively with rapid change. Yet each improvement in technology increases the rate of change in a culture.

One area where technology has already changed the social structure of the United States is the replacement of brute physical strength in a range of jobs across the United States with computerized/mechanized systems, where precision and detail are increasingly important, and where women tend to handle such detail more effectively. That technological change has begun to reduce jobs demanding physical strength as well as to reduce the pay of such positions, which causes social and income erosion for men who used to fill those positions at higher pay.

Wider and more intensive communications convey more effectively and intensively the lifestyles of the rich and famous, if you will, and this increases social unrest among those less economically advantaged, which further increases already growing social unrest.

So far, the United States, as I see it, is failing to fully comprehend the magnitude and speed of changes created by ever-advancing technology and their possibly devastating effects (in a science-fiction sense, that just might be why we don’t see signs of highly intelligent life out in the universe).