My posting last week that touched on the potential fallout from a repeat of the 1859 Carrington Event has got me thinking...a lot. While I have been heading in this direction for some time, and while those who know me well are not surprised by this turn, the more I reflect upon, research, and write about technology, the more I find myself becoming a Luddite: one who eschews technology.
Yes. This is irony, and paradoxical, but stick with me for a moment.
Technology has its place. And when I speak of Technology with a capital “T” I am referring to free electron-driven technology involving silicon wafers, and micro-sized transistors. The problem I see with Technology is the breakneck speed at which it is advancing, and how with each new invention, and each new breakthrough we drive our society further and further down a path that is totally dependent upon Technology.
Maybe Kurzweil has something when he speaks of the coming Singularity. But maybe this Singularity is not of a radical shift in how humans we think and act, but in our inability to function without Technology.
Seeing how dependent we already are on Technology does not take a PhD in sociology, computer science, or public policy. You do not have to look far and wide to find examples of how we, as a society, are driving ourselves away from our ability to be collectively resourceful. Take, for example, the moments at a coffee shop when the computer system goes down, preventing the workers behind the counter from entering in orders, and selling coffee.
I know a person who owns a number of coffee shops and we spoke about this condition. He laughed and recounted how there are times when an entire store will shut-down, unable to understand, or figure out a way to continue doing business, but there are also times when he still has resourceful employees who realize that there are ways to continue doing business with access to the cash drawer, a pencil and a pad of paper.
This is a small, easy to construct and manage example of how pockets of our society are forgetting how to work without technology. Interestingly, back in the fledgling days of the United States, to survive in the frontier everyone needed to know how to plant crops. Everyone. In the United States today, few people could raise crops on their own if they absolutely had to. We've removed ourselves so far from the food supply that children have to be taught where food comes from, forget about how the plants grow, growing seasons, rotating crops, and letting fields lie fallow.
A recent blog posting on the Weather Underground noted that the probability of a Carrington Event-sized calamity occurring during the next Solar Maximum in 2012 is approximately one to two percent per year, so when we're talking about such a prospect we're really talking hyperbole. With an ever increasing move towards a paper-less society (through initiatives and current practices ranging everywhere from equity transactions to medical records) we are talking about an ever-increasing likelihood of at least a micro-calamity occurring somewhere within our Technological infrastructure.
As discussed last week, electronic media is a terrible media on which to rely for the archiving of important documents and information. The hidden costs are far greater than people who work within technology will ever let on: after all it's a great prospect for revenue generation. And as more and more of our day-to-day lives become streamlined and ported through electronic conduits, what are we going to do to insure that an influential and large enough population of our society still knows what to do and how to operate without Technology?
We must start thinking this way, and not from a conspiracy theory, Armageddon is around the corner kind of perspective, simply from a we're-organic-creatures perspective.
Technology is great for what it does. It is NOT, however, the answer to all of our survival needs, it will NOT create Utopia, ever, and it certainly should not be our sole definition of progress.
We must remember that our foundations for survival and progress are steeped within us, the human animal, and in how we relate to the organic world around us: the world of which we are now – like it or not – the stewards.
RJ Lavallee is the author of IMHO (In My Humble Opinion): a guide to the benefits and dangers of today’s communication tools on sale at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and lulu.com.
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