Technology: Are We Over Reliant?
Are we really over reliant on technology? Perhaps it's something else and we've been here before.
Has humanity become over reliant on technology is a good question to explore a little more deeply. As a digital anthropologist working at the intersection of human culture and how we adopt, adapt and use technologies, it’s a question I’m often asked.
The answer is, as you might expect, complicated. And nuanced. At a time when we seem to live in a world where an answer has to be binary, when polarisation seems to be the norm and we are seeing a flood of technologies enter our societies, a binary answer isn’t possible.
At a basic sociocultural level, humans cannot be over reliant on technology because we could not survive without technology. One of the primary means of survival for our species has been technology ever since we started banging stones together to make tools.
We are the dominant tool using species on the planet. Other animals, from birds to some primates, use tools as well. Some species, such as the New Caledonian crow, can combine tools and make tools to use other tools, which requires rather complex reasoning.
For a rather long time, archeologists and anthropologists studying older human (homo Sapiens, us) societies and cultures believed humans discovered tool making along with fire. We are discovering that this is not the case, that for us modern humans, tool and fire use existed in our ancestors. Why we Homo Sapiens became the only and likely last, human species to dominate is still largely unknown.
Tool use is inherent and inextricably bound to us as a species. Technologies are part of human identity. Technology in part, defined us as humans. One of the very wonderful things about technologies is that they come from our imagination. Our ability to look ahead and imagine how our lives can be different by harnessing a phenomenon (i.e electricity and fire) of combining technologies to create novel new tools, like the smartphone or a car.
Technologies, for thousands of years, took a rather long, messy and circuitous route to spread and become used around the world. As information and communication technologies evolved and we learned how to combine technologies for compound effects, our world became abundant in technologies for every aspect of lives.
An Abundance of Technologies
Today, we live in a world of technological abundance. The net result of which is that we are living longer, healthier lives. We can move faster around the planet. No human born since the launch of the international space station will ever know a time humans didn’t live in space. That is quite something.
The abundance of technologies has negative aspects as well. Technologies are not neutral and are a double edged sword and all have unintended consequences. The technologies of the fossil fuel ecosystem have now past their best before date. We inevitably moving to an age of renewable energy. Culture is the ultimate decider of all technologies and culture has decided it doesn’t like those indentured to fossil fuel.
The process of culture determining what technologies will succeed, how they will be used and how they will be shaped after they first shape us, is long and messy. But faster than biological evolution. Humans created culture as a primary survival system because biological evolution took too long and key to this strategy is tool use.
We have an abundance of technologies. What’s different today is that rather than just physically augmenting us, many new, digital technologies are cognitively augmenting us. We are, for the first time in our species history, living in two world simultaneously.
It Might Be Something Other Than Over Reliance
So are we over reliant on technology? The short answer is no. The more nuanced answer would be to wonder what technologies we might be over reliant on? Or perhaps more astutely, would be to ask are we using some technologies in a way that could, ultimately, hurt our survival as a species?
It all gets complicated quite fast. Because of this abundance and that these technologies cognitively enhancing us, we are increasingly turning to the human sciences for answers. Philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, archeology.
The computer scientists and engineers have introduced some wonderful, exciting and incredibly beneficial technologies into the world. Those who then used them to create great wealth however, seem to be failing humanity. Culture will fix that. Always has.
We must also recognize that of all the technologies available to us, these modern digital technologies are incredibly fragile. We can still use a stone axe that’s over a million years old. We can barely make use of a smartphone that’s over eight years old. A solar storm could knock out our global communications, data warehouses and satellite navigation in an instant. In some cases, we may be over reliant on technologies that we haven’t yet figure out how to make as resilient as a stone axe.
So if we’re not over reliant, what might we be feeling? Perhaps we are feeling overwhelmed by this abundance of technologies? They are coming at us at light speed and socioculturally, we are having to figure out, quite fast and at global scale, how we really want to use them. That is a topic worthy of discussion in and of itself.
We’ve felt overwhelmed by technologies before. The printing press, the loom, factories, cars. But through our typically human, messy way of doing things, we ultimately figure it out. We use sociocultural processes to do this; laws, regulations, policies or outright rejection of a technology. Most often new technologies make others redundant.
So the question of over reliance becomes nuanced and complex. Like with much of human societies, there is rarely a simple answer or solution. We need technologies to survive and as long as we have imaginations, we will continue to create technologies and re-shape our sociocultural systems. It’s how we roll.