So I just finished Tad William's Otherland series: 4 books and nearly 3,300 pages! Of course, I didn't read it all at once--but over 3-4 years. The thing is, I don't really like Tad William' writing style all that much. But after a two year hiatus after book three, I figured it was time for a little bit of closure.
clo·sure n.
3. A bringing to an end; a conclusion: finally brought the project to closure.
So I did, and was pleasantly surprised: It ended up being a decent series. I finished it yesterday, and while I was driving home from work I must have been in the Otherland mindset, and I was thinking about the internet.
The internet is multiplier of our senses and our minds. I know the idea has been touched on movies like Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix, plus books like Neuromancer and the Otherland series...and yet the thought was novel to me. I thought about how the 'net changes us. I'm not saying this in some Luddite-sort-of-way, or even negatively; I'm just trying to point out that we are recreated by our creation.
The internet, of course, is not the first tool to reshape its bearer. Consider mankind's first primitive tools: clubs, bone awls, hammer-stones and stone blades. By the very fact that such things are found, it is obvious that the first Sapiens must have recognized their technological advantage. And, having acquired them, would never have relinquished them. On the contrary, they built upon their basic knowledge of mechanical advantage to create even more complex, more advantageous tools. Complexity builds on complexity: this is the nature of all life and science. There's a saying I once heard. Something about how evolution does not retreat. Man was no longer limited to hands and feet and teeth as weapons. He had increased his reach, increased his power and, thereby, his standard of living. He could now hunt, rather than scavenge. The psychological effects of that one improvement must have been enormous. Revolutionary. On a par with animal domestication and agriculture: impressive developments in their own right.
Now, I'm not going to trace the technological timeline from Stone Age to modern. All I am trying to say is that any major technological development is accompanied by a change to the human psyche. Take the clock for instance. With the invention of Huygens' clock came the accompanied change that humans no longer measured their days by the passage of the sun. Obviously, candles had been invented long before then; but the human mentality evolved by no longer thinking of a "day" as one earthly revolution (a very Naturalistic viewpoint), but instead as 24 hours (a very scientific viewpoint). The change is not merely semantic: humankind had shifted, really. Neil Postman broaches this subject in the opening chapters of Amusing Ourselves to Death, if you would like to read more.
More illustrative examples are the telescope, by which Galileo proved the Copernican model correct, and genetics. With the telescope, it was proven that the earth was not the center of a theologically determined universe but instead one of an almost-infinite number of planets. As to the second development, genetics is allowing us to dissect the building blocks of life. The shift of human psyche is most apparent in genetics' accompanying ethical questions--most apparent in recent cloning efforts, stem-cell research, and eugenics. We are touching the finger of God. Gradually, humans have evolved psychologically to think of themselves not as creatures enslaved by fate or nature, but as masters of our domain, even gods.
Recognizing that we cannot make a significant technological advance without having a subsequent change on our world and ourselves, it cannot be ethical to continue our mad dash of discovery without significant thought. We have not shown much restraint thus far. Advancement in technological has been thought of, for the most part, as progress. Why should we hold ourselves back from progress? Of course, there are occasional Cassandras. But even people who protest some advancement or other are, essentially, drawing an arbitrary line in the dirt. They don't recognize that a majority of the technology they appreciate and think of as normal would have, at one time, been decried as blasphemous or unnatural. That doesn't really answer my question about the ethics of technological advancement, however.
Albert Einstein, after the detonation of the atomic bomb, made the following pronouncement:
The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.
To be continued...
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