The horseman serves the horse,The final chapter of David Nye's book Technology Matters: Questions to Live With
The neat-herd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind,
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ode to William H. Channing
is titled "Not Just One Future". Summarizing the book's argument that technology is not the sole determinant of the way we live, and considering some of the literature and film angst about the future impact of technology, suggests that we should choose our technological future with some care.We as individuals feel we have considerable choice of technology in many of our common decisions. Consider the shoe as a device for moving on foot and protecting the feet and ankles; this is an apparently simple technology yet there are many varieties of athletic shoes, of business shoes, of boat shoes, etc. There are high heeled shoes for women and germ fighting shoes for diabetics. That choice is affected by advertising; it may be more of a social choice than individual as peer pressure is brought to bear or as people seek to emulate cultural norms in footware. If there is not enough demand for blue suede shoes, the market will intervene and no manufacturer will manufacture them. If the government decides to levy a tax against the import of shoes from a certain country (as might happen in a trade dispute), then the consumer will not have the choice of purchasing those shoes at a competitive price.
Of course, in many ways we have little choice of technology. We can individually not choose the technology used to build the roads we must use, nor that that provides the water to our house and office. As workers in a large corporation we may not have a choice of the computer brand we use nor the software with which it is loaded. Such decisions are made by institutions.
In theory, one could commute using an airplane, but in practice flying an airplane requires skills that few people have mastered. If we want people to have free choice of technologies, then we have to provide them with the skills to utilize those technologies. (All too often the trend is to make technological changes to deskill activities, a process that has made work more unpleasant for many and which can create a sense of anomie.)
Similarly, we might want to drive an electric car rather than a car running on a gasoline fired internal combustion engine. To enable people to do so, there would have to be systems developed to manufacture and sell electric cars and to service and maintain them. One can imagine needs to retrain drivers and to modify laws to handle the new forms of traffic.
Nye raises the issue of how we might make better decisions on technology. We might improve the information on which technological decisions are made. That may not be so easy, as it has been difficult to predict the impact of technologies in the past. Who in the days of foot traffic and bicycles would have thought to worry about lack of exercise in a motor vehicle based society? The people who commercialized the telephone did not understand that it would be used as much for family and community life as for business life. Even if the information were theoretically available, it can be hard to get it to the people who make technological decisions, or to get those people to use that information. Think how much we spend to get a medical system to provide adequate information to patients to enable them to make good technological choices on the health interventions available to them. Think about the reluctance of the Bush administration to use the best available scientific information on environmental and regulatory issues.
We might also improve the processes by which technological decisions are made. The use of advisory committees in legislative, executive and judicial branches of government is one way to do so. So too would be the support for civil society organizations, such as think tanks, that analyzed technological options and educate the public. Increased media attention to such information could be encouraged to inform both voters and individuals in their technological decision making. Schools could help students develop technological decision making approaches and skills that could be used throughout life. Much could be done, and I suggest should be done.
This will be the final post on Nye's book, which I have found very thought provoking and worthy of attention. He packs a lot of information and a great bibliography in a short book!
Here are links to the other postings I have made on reading Technology Matters: Questions to Live With
:- A thought on reading Technology Matters
- How does an organization learn
- Technology Prognostication
- A Technology and Culture Case Study
- More on "Technology Matters"
- Thoughts on Reading Nye on Technology and Cultural Diversity
- Sustainable Abundance, or Ecological Crisis
- "Work: More, or Less, Better, or Worse"
- Technology Choice
- Technological Progress: Has it made us safer or at higher risk?
- Still More on Nye's "Technology Matters"
2 comments:
I should also have mentioned getting values right in technology decision making. In theory the political process is to do that, reflecting the value diversity in the population through representative government. Getting the values of the general public right in other institutions, such as corporations and markets, would seem to be harder.
Nye correctly emphasized technological decisions made at one time that influence the evolution of technology in the future. He also correctly recognizes that the important forms of technology evolution involve co-evolution of social systems, and that further implies evolution of value systems.
When the southern colonies of what became the United States were developing and in the same area before the Civil War, their residents created a system of slave labor with its related technologies both of production and of forced labor. After the Civil War people in the same area reinvented the production system based on discrimination and jim crow laws, often including debt peonage and involuntary servitude. Today we see those systems as immoral. Indeed we are more concerned with human rights than were our forefathers.
We can assume that in the future our descendants will also see some of our values as incorrect and improper. In some sense it seems appropriate that technology decisions made today will be seen as morally correct in the future. Unfortunately, it is all but impossible to foresee what aspects of our decisions run that risk, nor to get current decision makers to share those future values.
Another example, the rifle. This is clearly a device, the technology of which has evolved over centuries. The muskets of the Civil War were slow to use and inaccurate. Today's rifles in the hands of an expert rifleman can consistently put rounds in a man-size target at 1000 yards.
In high school, many many years ago, I was on the rifle team. With good coaching I devoted three years to learning how to hit the center of the target, spending perhaps a day a week on the effort. That was simply skill development.
My best friend at the time spent much more time reading about rifles and learning how to do such things as load his own cartridges. He was a better shot than I, although I was good for a high school kid.
My point is that developing the knowledge and skill to use even an simple appearing technological device may take quite a while and quite a lot of effort.
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