Why Societies Fear Technologies
Human societies often react with fear to new technologies. When we understand why, it helps us figure them out and how they succeed or fail.
There can be a lot of division over emerging digital technologies these days, from crypto and blockchain to the most divisive of them all, Artificial Intelligence (AI). There is a pervasive fear and in equal measures love and excitement.
Why do cultures and societies fear and love technologies? Why does it help us to understand these emotions and what role do they play in evolving technologies to become truly useful to us?
In this article I’m exploring our fear and love of technologies at a sociocultural level. In prior articles I wrote about how culture becomes aware of, then evaluates and eventually adopts technology.
It helps to understand fear and love at a macro sociocultural level as well When we do, we can see technologies in a different light and think about them more critically. As we are in a period of unprecedented technological advancements and changes, this becomes even more important.
Why We Fear New Technologies
Those who imagine and then bring to life new technologies do so because they see a problem that can be solved using technology. From when we figured out smacking some stones together could result in getting dinner faster and creating high fashion with animal hides to automating as much as we possibly can.
As a society we tend to fear technologies the most when we feel that they will cause significant cultural disruptions. In our current economic system of capitalism, this is usually reflected in the belief that there will be massive losses of jobs and thus income. In hunter-gatherer societies it was likely the feeling that there would be a loss of equality in a given culture.
As humans, we like to control, or at least have the perception of control, over our societies. A technology like AI (which is an umbrella term for a bunch of tools), sparks sociocultural fears not just of economic impacts, but also our ability to control our societies. It is an existential threat.
We also fear not just our loss of individual relevance with some technologies, but the relevance of our culture. The more we perceive relevance at scale, the more afraid of a technology we become. Especially so when we feel a technology may change the way we live and communicate with one another.
Much of our societal life is built on social constructs such as customs, norms, traditions and values. This also involves universal emotions.
The more disruptive a culture feels or believes a technology will be, the more visceral the reaction will be. It is why we are seeing so much debate over AI today.
Interesting Examples of Society Fearing Technologies
Probably the most often cited fear at scale of technology is the Luddites. But they didn’t fear the technology so much, which they actually liked, they feared economic inequality.
Railways were deeply feared in the 1800’s. Some believed that a woman’s uterus would fly out of her if trains went faster than 60 Km/hr! Or that our bodies would melt.
In the late 1800’s as telephones became more popular a New York Times article suggested that using telephones would invade our privacy (sound familiar today too?) but perhaps most interestingly, meant we would communicate with the dead.
As the telegraph grew in use, some feared it would devastate the English language, especially poetry and that we’d all end up communicating in incomplete sentences.
When vaccines arrived on the scene, since they were created using cows, there was a pervasive fear and belief that humans would turn into cows. We even feared the use of electricity as it entered our every day lives.
How We Overcome Our Fear of Technologies
Rarely do most of our fears of technologies ever come to to reality. As sociologist Weber pointed out over a century ago, the more technology we bring into society, the greater the division of labour. This has held true.
As Amara’s law states too, we tend to overestimate the immediate impact a technology will have and underestimate its longer term impacts. A difference today over prior times of technological revolutions is that we have multiple technology advances happening much faster in a world where communication is also much faster.
As we have for thousands of years, humans will use culture as a means of adapting technologies as we go through changes. What may unfold is that because of our hyper-connected world, we end up working through these changes faster. Not in months or a few years, but in decades rather than centuries or millennia.
As many of our fears fail to materialize and we tend to find more upsides than downsides and adapt a technology, it becomes boring. In that the technology becomes part of the fabric of our societies. Much like the telephone and television.
Technology is deeply intertwined with what it means to be human. Digital technologies have, arguably perhaps, had more impact on sociocultural systems than any prior technological revolution, which may contribute to the cultural reactions we see in society today.
But we are integrating these technologies into our cultural practices and gradually adapting to these changes. When we see this, we can step back and take a broader view of what is being undertaken and be a little less fearful about a given technology and how it might all work out.