Aboard the Axiom

Yesterday's knowledge for tomorrow.

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Printing Revolution

Long before our chairs became mobile and our eyes became crossed to fixate one foot in front of us at all times, none of what we currently consider technology existed. People spoke to each other. In person. All the time. ALL THE TIME. Most of them couldn’t read, most of them couldn’t write, and certainly none of them had heard of instant messaging. 

Then came the printing press. The Printing Revolution led to an explosion of knowledge, an explosion of accessibility, and an explosion of specialization. The printing press allowed for rapid reproduction of literary works, most notably the Bible. The church played a big helping hand in encouraging literacy as Martin Luther spearheaded the Protestant Revolution, and every person was to be their own priest. As literacy rates increased, people had access to more information as they could now read up on whatever topics they were interested in; it wasn’t necessary to track someone down to ask questions they may or may not be able to answer. Because information was so accessible, people could deeply understand and research topics that, before, neighbors had little knowledge of, leading to higher specialization.

On the other hand, the press actually led to the standardization of a lot of stuff. The same versions of books were circulating Europe, leading to one single, correct dialect. Deviations from that dialect were then considered slang. Uniting people through language broke down a lot of cultural barriers, and facilitated the transfer of even more ideas and information. Beyond language, printed copies led to standard weights and measures, policies and procedures, and the foundation of bureaucracy. Researchers needed some sort of reliable baseline to conduct experiments and record results. Volumes on law and precedents gave rise to widespread standard procedures, ultimately giving people a justice system; therefore a big administrative entity.

Through accessibility, specialization, and standardization, we can see dependence begin to shift from fellow humans to that printing press technology. Without those books, developing complex systems on a large scale would have taken a ridiculous amount of time.

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Isolationism and Intellectual Property

Before the printing press, people were social because they had to be. They had to get information by word of mouth, and often their entertainment came that way, as well. With the introduction of books, therefore higher rates of literacy, people became more and more isolated. Reading to yourself is a solitary venture, as is the energy required to write. These were things people could do in their head, and enjoyed doing. In other words, they could now devote their lives to this technology. People relied on reading and writing as an escape, creative therapy, entertainment, or to learn. And if they could get paid for it, their livelihoods depended on it, too.

Consequently, it started to matter who wrote the literature people read. Again, before the press, people passed down stories and it was a social, acceptable part of life to take and manipulate stories for the next telling. Afterward, everyone read the same version, and the author’s name was printed within the first couple of pages; thus the introduction of the modern conception of originality. Suddenly, all of the ideas and creativity floating around needed to be attributed to someone, and it was downright offensive to claim someone else’s material. Copyrights emerged to protect ideas, and the concept of those ideas being someone’s personal, intellectual property took hold quickly.

Let’s break this down. Language sets us apart from other animals. With the printing press and copyright laws, we were able to focus on the very thing that makes us human. Even this idea of ownership speak to that notion. From what I gather, the two main reasons to be concerned with authorship are so your ideas alone make money and no one else can take them, or so you can be remembered for a great literary work or scientific contribution. And that breaks down even further to either money or posterity. 

Presumably, those after money are looking to continue their current lifestyle of writing for the masses, which in itself furthers humanity. Those after preserving their work for future generations are also in the business of furthering humanity, even if they’re just looking for a legend to their name. Both ways you look at it, ownership has implications beyond that primal desire to call things yours. Using the printing press to distance ourselves from uncivilized animals was an impressive step for mankind.

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Automaticity and Playing God

When people first began dabbling in mechanics, they looked for ways to help people think. There were mechanical calculators and astronomical clocks that made solving arithmetic problems easier. The machines required input by man, a series of programmed procedures, and an output.

As technology progressed, men looked for ways to reduce the need for constant input. We moved toward automatic, thinking machines as we programmed them to assess feedback. Windmills controlled their speed depending on the severity of the wind, temperature-regulating thermostats self-adjusted to maintain a certain temperature, and steam engines monitored pressure regulators to keep them from exploding. We no longer wanted help thinking; we wanted machines to think for us altogether.

Pause for a second… Is this a bad thing? Not having to constantly monitor temperature or pressure allows humans to use their time and energy elsewhere, going back to that idea of furthering humanity. If a machine can perform simple, routine functions, it seems to be more of an advantage than a disadvantage. Relying on that “thinking” technology gives you more freedom; more room for higher-order thinking. The only problem there is the consequence of failure. If something goes wrong with a pressure regulator in a steam engine, the entire thing could explode. 

While consequences worsen the more we rely on technology, that intellectual freedom to advance humanity in other ways is worth the cost. For so many centuries, people were at war or were constantly just surviving to survive. Beyond philosophy and great war stories, none of the discoveries we learn about in school come from much farther back in history than a few centuries. We get the cliffs notes of the wars and the dynasties and eras, but only know Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. What happened in between? Nothing of too much significance, apparently. If we don’t learn about it in public school, it is implied that it matters less to our culture; thus less to our current state of humanity. 

All of that to say that the most important discoveries have come when we have been free to think deeply. We weren’t concerned with perpetual environmental monitoring, we didn’t need to obsess over where the next source of food could be found; we could learn and devote resources to creative thoughts and expression. We intellectually evolved.

Let’s go back to this idea of technology receiving, and adjusting to, feedback from the outside world. It fascinated the masses for hundreds of years, pretty much until we got sent into space on this godforsaken ship. Scientists, inventors, and psychologists began trying to define human life in mechanical terms. The heart was a literal pump and ideas merely a function of acquired information. If people were just machines, we could be replicated. The development of mechanical automata exploded: there were ducks that could chew, swallow, and excrete; birds that could sing; monks that could write; dolls that could play the piano. 

These all operated on very specific, defined procedures. Even though they could interact with their environments, their interactions were controlled by human input and design. But what if they weren’t? Scientists and everyone else involved loved to think about the day those automata could become self-sufficient. Literature and movies began focusing on potential futures: both good and bad, which speculated about what self-controlling machines might do and how they could change the world.

A historian named Chistine Woesler de Panafieu suggested this new obsession to create humans mechanically was an effort to construct an entirely manmade world. The attempt to give machines life was an attempt to play God. The world of science men had erected for centuries continued to exclude nature, and for that they felt an incompleteness they were trying to recover by reassuring themselves they could be responsible for creation on a larger scale.

f man could create and control the environment to which their creatures responded, there would be no variability; no reason to expect a robot takeover or Frankenstein’s monster. We were trying to edge ourselves toward a utopia comprised of complex robots and little personal effort. Our desire to be separate from uncivilized animals had gone too far. With all of the progress in such a short amount of time, I questioned how long it would be before corruption overtook betterment.

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We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Carl Sagan

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Is It Necessary?

Lance Strate argues we don’t need to rely on mechanization, industrialism, or technological progress to reach a utopia. This is a relief if you’re playing along at home and have noticed the trend in fictitious literature. 

Most fiction tells us technology will be both our destroyer and our savior. From 1984 to Brave New World to Fahrenheit 451, our future consists of a complete collapse of the system, followed by a reconstruction in some markedly automatic, loss-of-humanity way that keeps everyone ignorant and happy. (That’s exactly what has happened on the Axiom…but what’s to stop it from happening again?) If we are trying to achieve societal utopia, now is the time for a failure of self-fulfilling prophesy. No one wants that dystopic future, but most expect it. And even as most expect it, we continue to advance our technology and scare ourselves in the process.

Strate holds that humans have no balance. We are notoriously bad at taking things in moderation, and technology is no exception. Technology allows for nonstop entertainment, and that is now all we want; all we expect. People stopped taking things seriously because there are always entertaining twists on things; the media is so good at glamorizing destruction in a way that keeps people hooked. Even in the face of real terror, there are other things to focus on; other places to turn to get a fix. The media tells what to watch, how to react, and how to think. It now controls us. 

We need a revolution. Strate is pulling for a rejection of imbalance; a push to return to humanity. We have to harness technology and steer it toward social, moral, and political progress. Those are all positive goals, but I think it’s unreasonable to call for a total rejection of technology.

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Co-Evolution: A Quick Point

Technology is socially shaped, but not pre-determined. We decide how it’s used and implemented in our culture and in our world; it has not already been decided for us.

Moving away from technology altogether ultimately weakens, if not ends, its progress. Along with the bad, we have to take into account the amazing things we can do with technology. There are medical advancements, those with disabilities have easier lives, and we can talk to people located anywhere at any time. Those are all awesome things that shouldn’t be discounted.

I’d like to make a friendly amendment to Strate’s argument, and say that we don’t need to rely completely on mechanization, industrialism, and technological progress to reach a utopia, but they can be of assistance. We just have to stand up and drive technology where we want it to go.

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Cell Phone Mechanics: The Beginning of the End

To illustrate the point of socially shaped technology, let’s turn to the cell phone. It was one of the biggest implementations of technology. The cell phone was the beginning of truly portable communicative technology, and led to both simplifications and complications. Children could reach their parents by phone at any time, and vice versa. Husbands and wives could send quick messages and reminders to each other throughout the day. Friends could plan nights out and help each other with homework. 

At the same time, people were crashing cars because of the attention given to their phones. The cell phone became so advanced that people relied on it not only for communication, but for taking pictures and videos, as a navigation system, and to receive work emails. Dependence on the devices continued to grow, and people started to talk to them, and worry about them as if they were animated, feeling beings.

Using this technology to our benefit was not a bad thing. Looking up facts in an instant, calling someone for help, and finding your way around a new city were incredible features of the cell phone. Becoming so dependent as to obsess over it while in a vehicle moving seventy-five miles an hour was a bad thing. I found commercials warning people not to use them in cars, usually because they were trying to send a message that really could wait until the car stopped:

Of course, it took a lot of work to get to that point. Researchers spent more than ten years to get SMS, or text messages, to send and deliver properly. Work began in 1978 in Europe, and the first message finally sent successfully in 1992. SMS was a store-and-forward system, so the message was sent from a handset device to a server, then dispatched to the intended recipient. The whole system was designed with business professionals in mind: the idea was messages wouldn’t need to be predetermined anymore, they could be composed at time of dispatch. It was a quicker, more efficient was to disseminate information.

Regardless of the intentions of the technology, young, non-professionals took it and ran. In 2000, almost one billion messages were sent in Finland, with a population of only five million. Friends used to them as a different way to chat that was similar to online Instant Messaging, but now portable.

Even at these first levels of development, cell phones and texting became so sought after all over the world that they became the basis of a new form of inequality. The devices were expensive, the plans were expensive, and people who didn’t have them, or couldn’t afford them, were somehow lesser for it. A complete class of people was excluded from the in-crowd. These were unintended consequences, but the continuation of cellular implementation meant those consequences were worth less than the benefits people believed to have gained.

As technology improved, phones came with all kind of capabilities, and all kinds of storage space. People could keep their entire lives on their phones, and they did. Something that was wholly unnecessary at one point in time morphed into the lifeblood of an entire generation. Losing your phone meant losing everything you were, and everything you wanted to be. If that’s not dependence, I don’t know what is.

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A depiction of technological dependence. The social media became a drug; something everyone needed to survive.

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The Power of Social Networking

With people more and more engrossed in their devices, they needed a way to make life happen on the screens in front of them. Social networking ran the gamut, from blogs to videos to dating sites and apps, there was a way to record everything that happened in one’s own life, and share it with others. People developed alter egos for profiles on those sites, played games while pretending to be other people, and falsified information about their real lives to seem better to everyone they connected with.

All of those personalities were carried around in pockets and purses. Losing the phone meant losing all of that. There were a number of reasons to use those sites. On the extremes, these sites were an escape for some people, and a tragic wasteland for others. Some used them to sink into a life they created, a life they wanted, and a life others approved of. This is light years away from using reading and writing as an escape; there was no furthering humanity with posts about breakfast. This constant search for validation and approval had negative consequences. Some used them honestly, and were hurt as cyberbullying rates increased, going from an unhappy physical life to an unhappy virtual one. 

In the middle ground were those who used them to simply connect with friends, and keep up with multiple people at the same time. Here is where we can find ways to further humanity. Virtual reality allows us to connect with people all over the world, in a more efficient way than the printing press. That means data and ideas are shared instantly. It has so much potential to improve our society. 

There was a Facebook page that began a revolution. The New York Times optimistically sees social networking sites as a way to strengthen movements set against corrupt institutions. When a man named Wael Ghonim saw a photograph of a young man, Khaled Said, beaten to death by the Egyptian police, he decided enough was enough. He created a Facebook page titled “We Are All Khled Said” which gained 250,000 supporters within three months. His page was just a sample of all of the activist pages and discussions on Facebook. Social networking was a haven for the oppressed to express their frustrations. This mutual venting location sparked the uprising that ended in President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation and the disbanding of the National Democratic Party. 

The truth is out there, along with the manpower to change it. Similarly to the introduction of the printing press, social networking increased the speed at which information was transferred. The collapse of the system would result in slower change. It would have taken years to seriously rally enough people for an uprising in Egypt. Taking all of that into consideration, it still stands to reason that it is not the technology alone that drives our society, it is where we choose to let it take us.

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Where Are We Going?

There are difficulties in predicting the future, especially as technology increases in complexity. Complexity plays with dependence and unintended consequences. Hypothetically, the more complex technology is, the more we can rely on it because it’s capable of serving multiple functions. The more pieces of technology we have to depend on, the higher the number of unforeseen repercussions. Those technologies interact in ways we’re incapable of conceiving. A book all the way from the year 2000 specified three reasons for such difficulties in prediction that still hold true today:

1. The development of technology itself is difficult to predict; breakthroughs might take days or decades. Like insight problems, the next big breakthrough requires all of the stars to align, and something to come into perfect focus. There is no way to accurately gauge how close researchers are to discovery.

2. There’s generally a steep learning curve involved in the introduction of new technology. New technologies competes with both the already-existing technology and the non-technical alternatives, which are usually much cheaper and better-understood. For example, with the introduction of the printing press, it took years to see huge literacy increases on a large scale. The older folks still relied on word-of-mouth for their information, a process reflected by the time it took for seniors to hope on the Facebook wagon.

3. The success of technology depends heavily on how users adopt it. It’s not always the best technology that’s adopted, but the one that meets the most needs. Of these three points, this seems to be the most pertinent. It again emphasizes the point that technology gives us the tools, but we are in control of where we go with them. It also reminds us how unpredictable humans are. What developers thought would be a success for business professionals ended up being a thirteen-year-old’s dream come true.

While valid, these are scary reasons because of where technology is right now. People have become so accustomed to the prevalence of technology in our lives that to suggest moving away from it would cause outrage. It’s our support system, our validation, our friend when we’re lonely or bored. We are so far-absorbed that technology is almost to the point where it is using us to improve itself, rather than us using it to improve humanity. 

Between Artificial Intelligence and websites robots can access to pull more information from, technology itself is collecting, processing, and analyzing data to improve itself. Humans designed this process, and no longer need to touch the technologies with access to such information for updates, because they automatically update themselves. The extreme isolationism that has resulted from our being so engrossed in this technology has negatively impacted our positive, productive, constructive contributions to the human race. That’s what’s so scary. If we aren’t living for humanity, what are we living for?

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Conclusion

Let’s get a recap on all of these findings.

Our partial dependence on technology is not bad, but our complete dependence on it is. We have to maintain some personal control over our lives, and our devices. That people become so addicted to technology is a dependence problem, and speaks to how much power technology can have over us.

We need to re-prioritize humanity’s values. If we are so certain of a dystopic future, we need to change how we approach and implement technology. If we’re looking for a utopia, it should involve technology as a means of homo sapien improvement, not takeover. We can use technology to free our minds to a certain degree, but if you go too far in any direction, you end up back where you started. Our minds are so free that we are now imprisoned by mundane details and cat videos.

It is up to us to find the balance, get a grip on technology, and demand that it work for us.

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If this is how we live now, you can only imagine where we will go from here. It is beyond the realm of possibility to accurately predict what is coming next. All we can do is hope for the best, and do as much as we can to move it in the right direction.