IVIV (12): 195-197

[Joseph Tracy]

John Carvill

>> I take you to be pretty optimistic about technology.

On Nov 4, 2009, at 5:29 PM, Monte Davis wrote:
>
> Not so much optimistic as accepting. It's What We Do, and have been  
> doing
> since the technology of "stick a feather crosswise at the back of your
> pointy stick and it will go straighter" or the technology of "give  
> some of
> that munchy grass seed back to the Earth Mother and there'll be  
> more next
> year."
>
> I've spent 40+ years around a lot of scientists and technologists,  
> from
> Nobelists to run-of-the-mill, talking to them about their work. My
> experience just doesn't tally with the notion that as a group they  
> are more
> morally obtuse, or less alert to unintended consequences, than your  
> average
> citizen... or your average Sensitive New Age Humanist.

Joseph T
This is a good discussion, and in many ways, the most important topic  
humans face. To refer to a topic touched on in IV,  there is a recent  
interview on Terry Gross about fishing. The technologies of using  
sonar, GPS, giant floating fish factories, bottom trawlers with an  
opening large enough for 6 jumbo jets that scrape the ocean floor, is  
severely devastating the marine ecosystem and depleting fish causing  
large areas of algal bloom and otherwise raping the ocean. I think it  
is a bit of an oversimplification to place the agency here or in  
other technologies entirely with humans. The technology itself does  
what no humans can do. Some technologies are addictive, and alll  
tecnologies are made to be used.. As soon as a technology is used it  
has agency, doing what it was designed to do and often many other  
unintended things as well.  It is the unintended consequences of  
technology that is the heart of the problem. And we cannot separate  
the benefits from the unintended consequences.  To have technology is  
to have it's consequences. The problem is magnified enormously by the  
concentration of money in the hands of the technology owners that  
need to be restrained by some form of social, ethical, ecological  
limitations.  They go unrestrained because that capital is a more  
effective political tool in todays world than the votes of an easily  
manipulated public.

Also some technologies don't need agency to continue to act after  
humans abandon that technology. The consequences of  Nuclear  
technology will continue for tens of thousands of years.  Plastics  
likewise.