Techno-Myopia
Techno-myopia is my term for the type of mentality prevalent in certain sectors of today's society. These people are generally smart, spend lots of time on the internet, get all excited about potential technological developments, and view the potential applications of these new technologies with excitement. Often they promote technological fixes for todays' ills. Nano-tech, bio-tech, post-industrial applications of all sorts get these people real fired up.
Generally these attitudes remind me of the type of thinking of specialists. Take an engineer who has very specific knowledge of his field. This knowledge is coded as it were in the particular lingo of his field, so that it appears utterly incomprehensible to the lay man. This produces a feedback loop of self-importance for this specialist in question. Eventually he is more than likely to consider himself a smart man indeed, and will proceed to offer his opinion of things on all manner of subjects, as if he were authoritative. Maybe his perspective is worthwhile, maybe not. My point is that specialisation inherently limits the scope of a man's perspective. And that unless he has taken the pains to study history, philosophy, and other humanities he is likely to reflect his own limited engineers perspective on any issue he takes up.
Other pursuits such as meditation, yoga, and simple calculated restraint also will tend to internal modify a man's perspective. These practices will help develop a more integral approach, and perhaps shed some light on his limited perspectives.
This particular rant was inspired by my reading of someone's blog on nanotech. This guy was all pumped up about this breakthrough and its practical industrial applications. The following comments were mostly excited and supportive, a few were cautiously indicating the potential environemental and biological side-effects of this emergent technology. No comment touched on the basic wisdom of this enterprise. Of course this reflects the particular community of interest who would take the time to read and comment on that sort of information. They are already predisposed to think that technologies potential is something the human race should explore.
As for me, I hope the energy situation becomes dire in the very near future. Of course I don't want to see people suffer and likely die as this world-wide crisis hits. What I would like to see is all research and development come to a screetching halt. We have all the technology we need already. In fact far more than enough.
What does it mean to be human? What is human?
All I can offer is my own opinion. We are destroying out biosphere. This is our mother, we are not separate from her. And time will tell us that technology was the tool that enabled us to kill her.
Generally these attitudes remind me of the type of thinking of specialists. Take an engineer who has very specific knowledge of his field. This knowledge is coded as it were in the particular lingo of his field, so that it appears utterly incomprehensible to the lay man. This produces a feedback loop of self-importance for this specialist in question. Eventually he is more than likely to consider himself a smart man indeed, and will proceed to offer his opinion of things on all manner of subjects, as if he were authoritative. Maybe his perspective is worthwhile, maybe not. My point is that specialisation inherently limits the scope of a man's perspective. And that unless he has taken the pains to study history, philosophy, and other humanities he is likely to reflect his own limited engineers perspective on any issue he takes up.
Other pursuits such as meditation, yoga, and simple calculated restraint also will tend to internal modify a man's perspective. These practices will help develop a more integral approach, and perhaps shed some light on his limited perspectives.
This particular rant was inspired by my reading of someone's blog on nanotech. This guy was all pumped up about this breakthrough and its practical industrial applications. The following comments were mostly excited and supportive, a few were cautiously indicating the potential environemental and biological side-effects of this emergent technology. No comment touched on the basic wisdom of this enterprise. Of course this reflects the particular community of interest who would take the time to read and comment on that sort of information. They are already predisposed to think that technologies potential is something the human race should explore.
As for me, I hope the energy situation becomes dire in the very near future. Of course I don't want to see people suffer and likely die as this world-wide crisis hits. What I would like to see is all research and development come to a screetching halt. We have all the technology we need already. In fact far more than enough.
What does it mean to be human? What is human?
All I can offer is my own opinion. We are destroying out biosphere. This is our mother, we are not separate from her. And time will tell us that technology was the tool that enabled us to kill her.
posted by pjack | 11:23 AM
1 Comments:
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