How Much Technology Can Humanity Handle? A lot.
If you're feeling overwhelmed by technology, it's really just one kind of technology. There's a lot more coming and it's good. Here's why.
Feeling a little overwhelmed with the seemingly endless declarations of A.I. changing everything, everywhere all at once? The tsunami of productivity apps foisted on us at work? Just this one more collaboration app and we will be in productivity heaven? The metaverse, crypto, Web3, drones, robots, DNA ancestry. How much technology can we handle?
First I’ll take a look at how we arrived at today, then I’ll look at how much we can handle and why we can handle more than we might think.
As I’ve written previously, human societies used to have a fair bit of time and space between them to figure out how they wanted to adopt, adapt and evolve various technologies. From the wheel until most recently, the telephone.
We could say that technologies began spreading faster throughout the world’s societies around the time of the printing press. The press allowed a faster and more accessible route to knowledge. Both the creation and sharing of it. The spread of printed books was enabled by advancements in transportation technology. The sailing ship.
While information technologies from all the stuff that makes the internet and mobile networks work, to data centres, PCs and such have advanced rapidly, transportation technologies have not. They have, to a large degree, plateaued. In part because if we could fly fast enough at about 10 G forces, since we’re mushy creatures, we’d arrive somewhere as gelatinous pancakes.
The speed that information can travel no longer relies on human transportation technologies. This truly began with the telegraph. This too is when we began to figure out ways to combine technologies. You’re smartphone seems like one really cool device, but it’s a complete jigsaw of various technologies initially created for something else altogether. Including the antenna, originally created for radio transmission back in 1886.
Then along came Claude Shannon’s brilliant theory of information. It’s importance to, and influence on, our digital age cannot be overstated. We then leapt forward in building out the digital technologies that have lead to our current vast troves of digital tools; the firmware, middleware and software that makes it all work.
Today, if we can finagle some sort of digital thingy into something, from car wheels to bread-makers, manufacturing machines and wind turbines, we will. Even into our brains and bodies. We’re even building digital twins of everything from large ships to ourselves. Information is how we live our analog and digital lives.
How Much Technology Can Humanity Deal With?
Quite a lot, and the reality is, we’re going to need a lot more. Not just better Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools (of which ChatGPT or Generative AI is just one of several), but also tools to help fight climate change, shift to a non-carbon society, make electric vehicles viable, including large ships and trucks and so on. With population declines, we will need a lot of robots too.
So why does it all feel so overwhelming at times? That part comes down more to a particular set of technologies, how they’re promoted within our societies and how we use them as a society. These are mostly information technologies such as social media, AI and the devices we use to access, manage, create, store and share information in a social context. By social context I mean work, literature, memes, music. The more aesthetic elements of culture.
This is, I believe, why we feel so technologically overwhelmed right now. It comes down to how we’re using these information technologies.
In the case of work, it is the application of Taylorism that has tried to apply analog manufacturing approaches and translate that idea to knowledge work. It is Taylorism that sought to turn humans into machines, that everything we do can be datafied and precisely tuned. Turns out, it can’t.
Some aspects of Taylorism have worked, but if we look back at the Hawthorn studies, we can see how brutal they were in today’s terms. These lead to the Hawthorne Effect, which is applied by many knowledge based companies today, but isn’t really working well anymore. Taylorism did a lot to foster the rise of unions as well.
In our non-working lives, it has been the deluge of notifications, social media and a number of psychological impacts that lead to digital exhaustion and mental health issues from depression to suicide and everything in between.
It takes society a while, often between one to two decades, to begin to understand the effects and impacts of a revolutionary technology and then a while longer to figure out how to correct the bad stuff and make the good stuff better.
We are currently entering the phase of realizing the bad stuff from technologies like social media and starting to correct them. Along with the issues of data rights and privacy that go hand in hand with social media and surveillance capitalism.
This is when cultural agency comes into play, which I wrote about last week. That’s various cultural elements such as politics, citizen groups, academia and economic systems pushing back against a technology. First a technology changes us, but ultimately, we change the technology through the use of culture.
We Can Handle A Lot More Technology
While we set about fixing the nasty bits of social media and addressing the issues of privacy and our data rights, we will be moving full steam ahead with Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing. As AI has a lot to do with a surveillance society, privacy, data and copyright, we may well deal with it at the same time. It is likely we will. Which is good for society but shareholders may get a bit grumpy.
Meanwhile, we’re going to be making some tremendous advances using AI along with other tools to advance manufacturing, climate change fighting tools, genetic engineering, materials design and so on. A lot of the advances will be significant, but somewhat boring for the news cycle. A 3.2% efficiency gain for a wind farm is quite exciting for engineers but is harder to get front page media coverage with CNN.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by technology today, it’s more than likely the technologies that you’re using the most and the agency you have given them in your daily life. The good news here is that not only are we figuring out ways to govern these technologies, people are just naturally moving away from them.
There’s a reason printed, analog books, are still popular. That people are not using their phones at parties and social gatherings anymore beyond the group picture. Than Gen Z and Gen Alpha staying away from dating apps.
As our world becomes more complex because we have more people and economic models begin to change and we see shifts in geopolitics, we’re going to need more technologies and as before, we will figure out how to use them. Our brains are rather adaptive things. And culture is amazing.