Should we stop the future of technology now by any means before it gets out of hand? As we go into the future is technology getting ridiculous or what? Give an example if you can of how a technology can get ridiculous for us humans going into the future. Have you seen the movie "The Bourne Ultimatum"? Good movie by the way. If you have just think about it... Some technology makes the world a very small place to where no one can hide from a corrupt government if they truely need to in self-defense.
Technology is controlled by the few and powerful. That which poses a threat to those in charge isn't allowed in public hands. The technology the people have is that which has been authorized for them to have. The majority of the technology that's in the public's hands is obsolete compared to what really exists under lock and key, which is available to only the elite few. Most of the "groundbreaking" technology that's in the public's hands today has been around for decades and is anything but new.
i think that's a mystaken assumption for the same reason utopian fantasies of a hundred years ago were. people's values, the ones we actually live by without even telling ourselves that we're doing so, play a major roll, not only in how tecnologie is used, but in creating the very incentives that determine the directions in which it evolves. simplistic distopias are just as unrealistic as simplistic utopias, especially when they don't take real cultural values into account. and that these aren't static either. our collective romance with our collective ego is killing us certainly, in a way that is neither perminent nor simplistic at all. =^^= .../\...
one of the things i think people forget when scapegoating tecnology is that it doesn't begin and end with the automobile, "the gun" (i.e. weoponry and military tec) and the use of combustion to generate electricity. there ARE good, useful and bennificial tecnologies (like refrigerators, small form factor, railway like transportation alternatives, and of course this internet). cars, guns and the use of combustion to generate energy, just don't happen to be among them. and of course the expectation of tecnology to solve everything for us and clean up after our thoughtlessness, that's really the problem and our environmental carelessness with it, and sure, other enequities in how its being used and that whole bussiness. if we try to throw it all out, most of us, as many of us as there are now, will almost certainly starve, especially anyone living in cities, so i think it's pretty much of a fantasy to just accross the board do anything of the kind. certain things will be disguarded and forgotten though. they will or we will as a species and possibly as a planet with life on it. and the use of combustion for anything other then cooking and keeping warm is sooner or later going to have to be one of them. the gargantuan scale on which we do a lot of things is going to have to be toned down a bit too. but other things, like doing really sophisticated things with very small amounts of energy, those i think will continue to thrive, or at least be able to, as long as there is an us to do them. and no, we don't need to keep doing all of the stupid things we're doing now in order to have them. but the automobile, and our emotional attatchment to it, is one of those stupid things. at least, certainly, in the form it currently exists. maybe something the size of riding lawn mower, powered by flywheels or batteries, but not what we think of currently as cars. and there ARE advantages to putting it on some kind of little rails wherever that might be possible or practical. =^^= .../\...
The thing you have to realize is that technology is matter made from ideas. People often look at it as its own entity or monster but it is a force born of human imagination that is and sculpts both matter and ideas simultaneously. It is an extension of the human species and so is bound to mirror the same inherent dualism that we possess. Technology is not just some volatile thing which looms threateningly over human existence. It’s an ever evolving stream of imagination that is invisibly but securely attached to mankind and the human experience. Where is it going? Perhaps it’s taking us to the stars or maybe it’s speeding us towards a giant brick wall of the pending eco-crisis (imagine a time lapse of humans covering the planet in a metal cocoon of sorts by pulling metals from the earth and then lauching themselves into space). There’s also the threat of nuclear holocaust but then again we could figure out time travel or teleportation tomorrow. But whatever the case may be it is merely the rear wheel drive of our species. Sentient beings still in the driver’s seat. I think currently the most powerful form of technology is the internet. The future of the internet is a new frontier of creativity and information. Luckily it falls to our generation to decide how we are going to evolve it. How we want to better interface with it and each other. I definitely think that the internet is in many senses the collective unconscious manifest in the physical world, or at least has the potential to be. With the advent of handheld internet, a generation used to ideas of elongated electronic conversations and exchanges of ideas, ignorance of anything almost seems to become inexcusable. Aside from emerging communities which allow you to tap into the ideas of others directly there are repositories of information like Wikipedia which become extenstions of human memory to some degree. And we’re walking around with this in our pockets! Furthermore we are on the brink of developing technologies that will again severly reshape that nature of human reality for future generations. The ability to Terraform planets and create new biospheres capable of sustaining life. Couple that with the hold we are quickly gaining over customizable genetics… this is some pretty heavy stuff we’re playing with. We’re talking about technology acting as a catalyst for evolution on a scale that transfers powers to scientists that we have always projected onto our gods. The implications of this are immense. There is extreme danger and an unending sea of moral grey area and yet there is a lot of potential as well. Again we come to the idea of the dualism of man and the use of free will as a determing factor, not simply the power of a technological tool. Along those lines I think that our generation can set a new standard for what enlightened and empowered peoples of the world can and will do to affect the course of human history. I think that accepting the fact that we have inherited the eco-crisis is the first step. We unfortunately are responsible for testing our mettle with this issue and I think new forms of biotechnology are only going to aid us. The current state of the environment and the global political climate as well are ours whether we like it or not, left to us by our parents and grandparents. When you think about it what they’ve really passed to us is a choice they decided to put off, that choice is whether we want to suck it up and make the choices to create and use resources be they technological or other to insure the survival of the human race on this planet and possibly on others.
