PROGRESS AT WHAT COST?
Technology is not neutral. It can’t be, because by definition, advances in tech create change, and change always creates positives and negatives.
We now live in a time of rapid technological change, perhaps the biggest in 150 years. In the face of the overwhelming impact of tech, we might not be enjoying the ride.
Sometimes the problem is the tech itself, and sometimes it’s about our fear of change and unknown.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about which technology we’d rather live without–in other words, when was the golden age that we’re nostalgic for, the one that technology has tarnished in the name of progress?
They’re not in a perfect order, but if you had to draw the line, where and when would you put it?
Housing. Toilets. Money. Debt. Culverts, and water supplies. Books. Libraries. Handwashing and germ theory. Eyeglasses. The scientific method. Clocks. Trains. The cotton gin. The loom. The origin of species. Electricity. Voting machines. The telephone. Gas-powered cars. Credit cards. Vaccines. Television. Antibiotics. Sunscreen. Birth control. Portable telephones. GPS. Electric cars. Solar panels and windmills. Email. Online bookstores. Search engines. Cochlear implants. Mapping DNA.
Podcasts. Machine learning. Image recognition for reading x-rays. Wikipedia. Facial recognition. Augmented memory implants. GPT and AI writing and creation. Cloning. Gene repair. Quantum computing. The internet of things.
Seth Godin
