Why Humans Created Technology
Ever wonder why we created technology in the first place? How we make it work for us and where it might be going? A brief look inside our heads.
Here’s the thing. If humans hadn’t invented technology, starting with those simple stone tools nearly two million years ago, you probably wouldn’t be having a nice sit down and reading this article. I wouldn’t be here writing it with my three-legged cat purring by my side.
So, why and even how, did we invent technology? Where did it come from? Why do we both love and despise it in one muttered breath? Why Is it controversial at times? It’s a question I’m asked, as technology anthropologist, quite a bit.
While we can’t of course, be absolutely certain, the following are some relatively suitable theories.
Where does technology come from?
Simply put, our imagination. And it starts as a result of search. Something our brains do very well is search. Not as in Googling something. Google hasn’t really been around that long. When you wake up in the morning, the first thing your brain does, other than signal a need to get the coffee going, is search your surroundings.
Search helps us establish our reality. Time of day, where we are. Most of us tend to start the day by looking out the window, or the cave entrance. And not just for the weather, but to see if anything out there thinks we might make for a tasty breakfast. We’ve been doing that for somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 years. The math is a bit fuzzy on that. Probably longer.
We, and some of our hominid ancestors, figured out somehow, that biological evolution was rather sluggish as a means of survival. It is also rather messy and unpredictable. We needed another way.
One might imagine that a woman was looking (searching) out the cave entrance one chilly morning and noticed that the bear in the valley was quite unfazed by the cool morning air, whereas she and her bunch were huddled around a fire, shivering. So, she thought, perhaps the bear wouldn’t mind much if she nabbed that nice furry coat for herself. Though she and her gang were strong, the bear was stronger. How to get that fur?
Off went her imagination. So she, and perhaps with some help from other members of the clan, figured out how to make tools from stones. At first they were rather clunky. But humans being humans, and having figured out working together was good for us, kept iterating and eventually made spears and arrows.
Probably not in sprints like we do today and they probably didn’t have a UX designer or product manager. But somehow, after breaking a lot of things, yet moving slower than we do today, they used their collective imaginations. Technologies begat technologies.
And that, roughly, is where technology comes from. Our imaginations, often driven by necessity and the desire to stay alive, which we rather prefer to the opposite state.
Two Types of Technology
There are, when it is all boiled down in a cauldron by the campfire, two overarching types of technology. Ones that harness a phenomenon, like fire, water and electricity. The others are ones that evolve and build on the first. Like smartphones. They’re a combination of technologies.
We’ve done a fairly good job of harnessing carbon for energy as a phenomenon. Sadly, the double-edged sword of harnessing dead dinosaurs is that it’s rather messed up our planet. So, being as imaginative as we are, we’re creating technologies that harness the sun and perhaps, one day, limitless energy through fusion. Through combining other technologies, such as aeroplane blades, we harness wind power.
Why Do We Need Technology?
We simply cannot exist without it. Humans, in the broader expanse of time, live rather short lives. Technology helped us to survive events like ice ages and made it easier to avoid being eaten by sea monsters when crossing the oceans. It helps us ensure our future generations will survive as well.
As big as our planet is, humans can only live within a certain area between the sea and the sky. We need oxygen when get higher up and we need it when we go under water. We need warmth for both too. We figured out many thousands of years ago that cooking plants and other animals also helped us live longer.
How Do We Figure Out How To Use Technologies?
One word; culture. Lest you think culture is music, books and art, that is only one part of what culture is. While there isn’t a clear and refined definition of what culture is, most sociologists, anthropologists and archeologists agree that it includes things like family structures (kinship systems), economic and political systems, militaries and social governance.
Although technological development is extremely fast today, in some ways faster than culture can absorb them, it wasn’t always this way. We create and evolve technologies much faster today because we created information technologies, such as the printing press and the internet that enabled us to share knowledge faster. As well as organise socially much easier. Sharing is caring.
Until recently, as in the last hundred years or so, we had a lot of space and time, between major cultures. This enabled various societies to figure out how they would adopt and use, and often reshape, a technology. This is done through socializing it through cultural frameworks of customs, traditions and social norms.
As we’ve sped up transportation and information technologies and created the idea of nations along with population growth, how we adopt and adapt technologies is undergoing significant change. A prime example would be Artificial Intelligence (an umbrella term for a bunch of technologies) bursting onto the global stage like a stark raving mad lunatic in the past year.
The result of this has been divided opinions, soothsayers, naysayers, doomsayers and overabundant glee. Amid exhausting hype. It is the first time in human history that a revolutionary technology has appeared around the world almost instantly. So yes, it’s causing a degree of culture shock.
Where Are We Going With Technology?
That is entirely speculative, yet we can say that technologies will continue to advance and evolve. That it will, as it always has been, messy. Just as biological evolution is messy and rarely predictable, so it is with technological evolution.
The big difference today is that we are increasingly imagining technologies that augment us cognitively. While we have ancient technologies such as the abacus that provided a degree of congitive augmentation, these had constraints and limitations. With quantum computing and AI, we are evolving technologies that enable our imaginations to get, well, more imaginative. They still have limitations, but we are pushing these boundaries constantly.
In a decade or more, what we call a smartphone today will look as pointless as a rotary dial phone does to us now. How we interact with technologies will be a mixture of thinking, speaking, gesturing and touching.
A lot of computing will fade quietly into the background and we will interact with the world around us much easier than we do today. Many technologies may become more organic as well.
We will evolve new social norms, behaviours, customs and traditions that include technologies that augment us cognitively and enhance us physically even more. How much more? That will be decided by culture, not technology. The limits? Our imaginations.