There has always been a latent suspicion of knowledge, at least in Western culture. As early as the Genesis story the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil was the source of all human ills on earth. It was not how they lived up to the point of that acquisition, for God obviously approved of what it had created. It was the knowledge that the way they were living was immoral, hence the fig leaf. But worse than their lifestyle, was the fact that they had partaken of their creator's knowledge. In this foundation story for Christian civilization knowledge is therefore evil.
Again, Faust has to sell his soul to the Devil in order to acquire knowledge, which human beings are not supposed to have.
When knowledge began to be applied to the physical world technology, which consists of that application, made real that erstwhile vague suspicion. The Luddites set about destroying the machines of technology as they saw them robbing them of jobs and the sustenance of life.
The threat of technology to not only human welfare, but to human self esteem took root early in the 19th century. The story of John Henry the steel driving railroad hero competing with the new steam-driven machine portrayed a human who would not let a machine deprive him of his sense of self-worth based on his strength. In this age of mechanical technology the machine was competing with the human body.
Then came the bitter acceptance of defeat by the machine as Charlie Chaplin could not keep up with his relentless assembly line in Modern Times and was last seen enmeshed in the gears of the monster he serviced. In somewhat the same vein Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis portrayed a dystopia ruled by an intellectual elite high in their towering skyscrapers controlling a regimented laboring class doomed to service the blast furnaces and factories of immense heartless machines.
In all of this rebellion against technology the underlying theme was the machine's competing with the human body and winning.
With the advent of the computer in the 20th century the machine began to compete with the human brain. In the 1957 movie Desk Set the John Henry competition between human and machine breaks out in a corporate reference library. Spencer Tracy is demonstrating his new computer system designed to quickly answer reference questions. This corporate function has been traditionally performed by a small crew of highly skilled reference librarians. It is interesting to note that when it comes to brain-machine competition females replace male. In this early example of human-computer competition, humans win. By the early 1990's HAL, the computer antagonist of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, starts killing his masters, but is eliminated by the last surviving human on the spaceship who progressively disconnects HAL from the power and information it needs--a close call for the humans.
In an earlier column I mentioned Ray Kurzweil's book Singularity and its argument that artificial intelligence superior to human intelligence is on the near horizon of technological development and that the
In all the above comment on technology I do not mean to imply that it has provided no benefits. It obviously has. The inherent and generally disregarded fact is , however, that the very benefits, say the immensely extended life span, have generated our equally massive problems, e.g. overpopulation. We humans have not learned to control ourselves in our own interests. We have not learned the lesson of the Golden Mean or All Things in Moderation--maxims recommended as a primary virtue more than 2500 years ago by the philosophers of
In this part 1 my concern has been to trace human reaction to its cognitive brain from suspicion to backlash. In part 2, my next post, I will deal with some of the more subtle, but perhaps more fateful consequences of technology, especially the economic and social significance of continually diminishing resources.
Bob Newhard
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