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Does technology improve our lives?
Technology's grip is felt in every aspect of our lives and yet we often don't understand it.
Strangely, it is often the things which are most influential in our lives that go unnoticed and escape thorough examination. Mankind has long proved adept at slipping into routine, and with such familiarity comes the notion: ‘to take for granted’. For most of us, much of our daily routine - what we eat, where we go, who we like, love and hate – is taken as a given - it just is.
Nothing shapes how we live so profoundly, and yet barely registers in our attention, as much as the advancement of technology. Despite being unprecedented in all of history, the fact that it’s perfectly possible to have breakfast in Dublin and dinner that evening in New York rarely fills us with awe. Every time we turn on the oven, get the bus, or send an email or text message, our ways of living, communicating and even thinking are being shaped in ways unheard of in times past.
Naturally, this raises an important question: does the relentless evolution of technology improve and enrich our lives, or merely cause more problems than it solves?
After all, the very technology that allows the miracle of transatlantic restaurant-hopping also facilitated the leveling of Hiroshima and, with it, the obliteration of thousands. History has shown us that the most innocent seeming of developments can become deadly in the hands of the unscrupulous. Today’s life-saving cure could well become tomorrow’s plague.
In many ways technology illustrates both humanity’s greatest strength and its crippling weakness: an insatiable appetite for improvement and an inability to ever be fully satisfied.
Consider if our proverbial Neanderthal friend ‘Mr. Ugg’, who, after discovering fire, had decided he was happy enough with his situation – that getting a little prehistoric with Mrs. Ugg beside the fire would keep him content for the rest of his days. And imagine if everyone else had followed suit. Well, that would have been the end of progress; the day man stopped striving for something better. The bizarre world in which we live is built on the struggles of people who wanted ‘something more’.
But in our quest for the perfect world do we risk overstretching ourselves? In John Gray’s fascinating, and indeed wretchedly depressing, Straw Dogs, the author argues that what we know as ‘human progress’ is in fact an illusion and that we are hurtling towards self-destruction. Gray cites the millions killed in the name of progress in Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. as examples of how “Humanity’s worst crimes were made possible only by modern technology.” It can be argued quite convincingly that such atrocities do not outweigh the good that has been accomplished through technology, but just on which side does the scales of progress tip? Has more harm been done than good?
We do not have to look at such heavy questions to ponder what the point of certain ‘advancements’ is. The late Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich once calculated that, between working to pay for tolls, tax and insurance and waiting in it when idle, the typical American – and I doubt the Irish differ greatly – spends 1,600 hours a year in their car in order to travel 7,500 miles. That works out at around five miles an hour, not much faster than walking. This raises a fascinating possibility: like so many things we buy, is a car more important for the possibility of freedom it suggests or what it says about us, rather than its practical use?
Read part two of this article.
By: John Power
