The Grand Illusion
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).
LEM, Yep. But this is a big, big subject. I guess it depends on some specificity on the term technology. Certain technologies regarding food production, for example, might not be as controversial (and then they may be, ; cf., bioengineered food and future vat grown meat substitutes).
I’m assuming you mean modern computer age technologies. In this I agree that the speed of development makes some control and adaptation beyond society at large. Further it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to opt out of said changes. The legislative and judicial institutions are also exceedingly poorly equipped to keep up with and manage those technologies, ceding to the technologists themselves power and authority. Look what Musk was able to do with little oversight last year and walk away with no accountability.
These changes may even be contributing to general unrest around the world, but we may be misdiagnosing that unrest into the catch-all populism category, which is pretty hard to nail down into actionable specifics.
You can be sure that the technology leaders do not want any oversight or regulation. They will fight very hard against it in every country.
I’ll be interested to hear what others think about this topic.
yeah, arguably one of the greatest technology shifts of the last century was the invention of dwarf wheat in the 1960s, which massively increased production globally, along with the concurrent hybridising of rice and other cereals. That lead to an explosion in cheap food, and effectively doubled the global population.
The other big one was the creation of the shipping container, which made goods transport so cheap and reliable that anywhere could be a market.
But LEM is also correct in that the primary driver in most “tech” spaces is not improvement, but disruption – improvement gets you a small piece of the pie, disruption lets you break out your own pie, without the entrenched competitors. The big Tech players are all about invent a new space, monetise it, monopolise it, and then move on before the regulators and markets can step in to control them. It’s robber barons 3.0, everything is legal until they specifically include you in the existing laws.
“Further it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to opt out of said changes.”
You said it. I remember telling my mother about word processors years ago, but she preferred to stick with her typewriter.
I’m kinda tired of being the resident cybersecurity person, but can I use the internet less? Businesses and even the government push the internet harder and harder, so they can a) stick the likes of me with more of the security risks, and b) make me do their data entry for them, too.
A year ago I would have said that word processing technology had reached its maximum and could not evolve any more.I remember in the 90s there were several major players with far too many updates. Nowadays there is just MSWord and possibly LibreOffice which is a lookalike.
Then came the so-called AI large language module applications which can generate stories or essays with minimal guidance, removing the need to plan. If I asked one of them to generate an Imager story I believe it could. All I need to do is change names and add a little to make it different. Effectively robbing your soul. I hope I am wrong.
LLMs need a *lot* more work before they can write something comparable to LEM’s work.
I don’t touch the things, but I had a friend who does ask it to write something in my style. I am no Modesitt, but what it came up with was terrible, the “slop” you hear so much about. (Some old stuff of mine on the web got scraped.) If it can’t produce a reasonable facsimile of my work, it can’t possibly come close to LEM’s.
Seems to me the social disaster, mestastcizes(sp) in the confluence of “personal” screens w/24/7 connectivity and our culture of anything-goes promotion – which shelters under the holy slogan of “free sppech.
Parents of all stripes are conscious of the relentless affects of advertising and foreign media. The Amish try _hard_ to avoid contact w/our media. They both respect abhor and fear the real impact this has on people. But most in our culture deny or profess not to see the _immediate_ destruction of what’s flowing over and into them. If they do, they blame the other guy.
We need to listen to The Alligator: “We have seen the enemy and he is us!”
The irony of these complaints being voiced on the Internet. Your complaints are not going to slow down or reduce the changes occurring. Now what?
Perhaps, instead of lamenting change we should try to direct it. Let’s come up with some worthy goals, even though working toward a better future is harder than just identifying all the problems.
Well… the first step is to educate people more effectively on what technology actually is, what it can do and what it cannot, and make clear the implications of technology, particularly its effect on multiplying the speed of change. Right now, far too many people complain about change, often getting extremely angry, without really understanding the basis of the speed of change. Anger without understanding is one of the biggest reasons for our current political mess (at least in my opinion).
“…working toward a better future is harder than just identifying all the problems.”
That’s true, but at the same time, identifying the problems is the first step.
“…identifying the problems is the first step.”
We can identify the things we think are wrong. Coming up with practical solutions that improve on the situation, that last, that are acceptabble to the majority of people is much harder.
Absolutely.