When I read ‘The Technological Society’ from 1953 by Jacques Ellul, the French author, philosopher and theologian, I was captured by the distinction he made between technology and people. He noted that technology had one value, whereas, people have the capacity for many values. Technology values speed. Faster and quicker are paramount to the progress of technology. Humans’ values include love, cruelty, caring, hatred, jealousy, and many others that imply directly or indirectly the relationships we nurture with people, animals, plants and all of our environment. When we attribute any human values to technology, we are merely taking those human values and overlaying them on technology but they are, in fact, not an integral part of technology’s basis for any valuing or action. Speed trumps any other values every time, in the progress of technology.
If you look back to the emergence of technology, techniques that were efficient and time saving were always the determining factor in adopting a new method or means of doing something new. It goes without thinking. It is simply an urge that we have developed to have it now, the less waiting the better. I don’t know to what this inclination may be attributed. Patience is unconsidered or unpracticed in many if not most movements or actions in technology. How this gets us in trouble is that we surrender our control over what (or who) is in charge and how things change.
We like to think of ourselves as the ones in charge of our options and our fate. We don’t think of technology as a thing which can control or manipulate our decisions. Or, perhaps more disturbing, a thing that can move and make decisions without consideration of our human guidance or preferences. Since technology is only guided by the value of speed, human relationships and values are not even considered in its choice of directions and governance, except secondarily, if at all.
I begin to feel that we are being moved into a world where our agency as individuals is neglected or ignored or overridden by technology and its more empowered and dominant processes of speed.
In “2001: A Space Odyssey” brought us HAL, a robot on a future spaceship, who designates itself to take control of its space mission and close it down for some unknown technological or suicidal destination. Unbeknownst to ourselves, are we moving in a similar direction as our own technology gathers speed?
My hope lodges in the possibilities of slowing things down whenever we have the opportunity and influence to do so.
George Munger lives in Amherst.