Faith in Technology
Since industrialization, technological advances have transformed most aspects of daily life. The footprints of technology are pervasive. Constantly advertised as “progress,” people generally see technology positively.
People may not understand how a particular technology works, but they do assume that it will work. People unconsciously associate technology with success. ~ American business management professor Chris Robert
The more exotic a technology is, the greater its appeal. Less faith is put in familiar technologies, as their limits have already been exposed.
People have more confidence that unfamiliar technologies will provide solutions to a range of problems. People put new technology in a category of “great things that work which I love but don’t understand.” ~ Chris Robert
Used to the conveniences of technological appliances and inured to living in complex societies, people maintain optimism, with ignorance mounting no obstacle. The mind resigns itself to what it cannot alter.
Faith in technology is false. As this book patiently explains, the overarching arc of technology has wrought conveniences of all sorts at the consequential cost of degrading the natural environment, being detrimental to societal cohesion, and damaging health.
In the heedless way it was accomplished, industrialization has ensured our own demise at an astonishingly accelerated pace, along with much other life. Replacing crafts with manufactured goods may have made them cheaper, but they also cheapened life. Modern processed foods may be convenient, but they are not nourishing. Those now-ubiquitous handheld tablet phones/computers are a convenience which has drained mental acuity and is rendering youth stupider and more infantile than they might otherwise be.
In short, technology has been a bane disguised as a boon. Health, the enjoyment of life, and life expectancy do not correlate to technological state. Success in living is instead an outcome of luck, skill, and discipline that has little to do with technology. Societally, technology has been most ‘successfully’ applied to man’s worst inclinations, thereby amplifying with ease what was otherwise difficult to accomplish: pollution, inequity, and murder on a mass scale.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. ~ American Baptist minister and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
