Although I risk staring into the abyss and becoming incarnate darkness myself, I’m dedicating my third piece in a row to technology. Hopefully, by next week, I’ll have something less fringe and tin-foil-hat-like to discuss. Regardless, I’d like to recommend that everyone watch the YouTube video entitled “Humans Need Not Apply.” It isn’t about Terminator-style AI or HAL; it’s about the creation of nonhumanly intelligent, but still extremely smart, robots that are already in development or on the market. This very well could be the end of productive human labor. And that should scare you.
That said, I’d also like to take this opportunity to interrogate an aspect of technology that is too often forgotten or left unexamined and that may ultimately be the key to understanding how to use our inventions responsibly. Modern technology is simply not an ancient phenomenon. When someone complains about computers, they’re often asked why they don’t stop using shovels or rocks and just go back to wrestling wolves for food. Modern technology, however, presupposes a lot of things. A shovel presupposes human beings and that’s about it.
Examining this issue in his book Technology and Justice (go buy it and read it—not later: now), George Grant looks at the sentence “the computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used.” In good postmodern fashion, he precedes to deconstruct the sentence into its constituent parts, crafting a sort of linguistic critique. While I don’t have the space, the intelligence, or the Canadian blood to state the argument as eloquently or as vigorously as Grant, his basic point is that much underlies the development of computers. To build a computer, a society requires post-Baconian science, industrial capitalism (or a similar system of funding, research, and development), a developed science of mineral extraction, an emphasis on productivity and efficiency in communication over other fields of work, etc.
In other words, the computer does impose something on us. It is technically a tool, but because it presupposes so much (including, he argues, a deeply materialistic society) it is almost impossible to conceive of people not using it for distraction, entertainment, and self-indulgence. And in fact, they are likely to use it primarily for these reasons. A shovel doesn’t presuppose much about the culture that develops it. A computer says a lot more. We wouldn’t have computers if we weren’t, by-and-large, materialists. That’s a trail worth following, especially since humans need not apply.