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is technology, overall, serving to divide us, or unite us, as humans?

qwe

qwe

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Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) said:
I recently came across this quote of mine from 22 years ago: ” What it comes down to for me is this: Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?”

I believe this is still a supremely relevant question and the jury is out. There is a lot of commercial clutter on the net, and a lot of propaganda, but I have a sense that just beneath the surface understanding is gaining ground. We just have to keep blogging, keep twittering, keep communicating, keep sharing ideas.

30 Years ago when I wrote The Wall I was a frightened young man. Well not that young, I was 36 years old.

It took me a long time to get over my fears. Anyway, in the intervening years it has occurred to me that maybe the story of my fear and loss with it’s concomitant inevitable residue of ridicule, shame and punishment, provides an allegory for broader concerns.: Nationalism, racism, sexism, religion, Whatever! All these issues and ‘isms are driven by the same fears that drove my young life.

This new production of The Wall is an attempt to draw some comparisons, to illuminate our current predicament, and is dedicated to all the innocent lost in the intervening years.

In some quarters, among the chattering classes, there exists a cynical view that human beings as a collective are incapable of developing more ‘humane’ ie, kinder, more generous, more cooperative, more empathetic relationships with one another.

I disagree.

In my view it is too early in our story to leap to such a conclusion, we are after all a very young species. I believe we have at least a chance to aspire to something better than the dog eat dog ritual slaughter that is our current response to our institutionalized fear of each other. I feel it is my responsibility as an artist to express my, albeit guarded, optimism, and encourage others to do the same. To quote the great man, ” You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”
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gilmour may have been a great guitarist, but roger waters was the heart of PF ;)
 
Syd Barrett deserves an honorable mention here.

Some believe, if you will, that the fundamental challenge facing Mankind today is the struggle between freedom and technology. We see signs of this everyday, but most of us are too busy to notice because we've already become slaves to our "smartphones" and other devices. MORE TECH = LESS FREEDOM. Certainly, there is the possibility that most of us will eventually be enslaved or destroyed by our own technology. The challenge then becomes figuring out a way to avoid those outcomes. We are mere Kindergartners as far as tech is concerned. Extrapolate our tech to 1000 years from now (if mankind makes it that far) and just imagine the possibility of horrors wrought by genetic/mechanical/bio-engineering and the ability to alter fundamental aspects of our existence such as space/time. Sure, great advances will be made and used for 'good" purposes...but also acknowlege the possibility of the "bad" uses of tech...and realize it will be used for both. There will come a time when Mankind, out of necessity, will make a choice between freedom and tech in explicit terms....maybe within our lifetimes. The way things are going now, we just kinda let tech wash over our lives and ask questions later, if at all. The Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts of the future aren't concerned. They will have their own loyal clone (or droid) armies to protect them. The rest of us won't be so lucky. Good times.
 
I would say technology is a tool, for whatever us humans want to do with it. We could use it to kill, heal, art, whatever... It's very periphery to what actually matters though. It's like whether the sky is blue or yellow IMO
 
^^

Yes, tech is a tool of sorts. However, there is the realistic chance of tech getting out of our control and taking on a life of it's own. Technology is a tool that must be used with great care and forethought. Otherwise it might become a tool of Mankind's unwitting demise. The concept of tech vs. freedom might seem periphery at first consideration, but realize that it will become an increasingly important consideration as the impact, and significance, of our technological advances grow. Will Mankind's intellect expand sufficiently enough to keep tech under control? Remains to been seen homie. Matters a little more than the name we give to the color of the sky.

On another related note...does anyone believe that the most recent E. Coli outbreak in Europe is a natural occurance? Perhaps it is. It's also just as likely that bugger is a manmade, bio-engineered, lab-created tool brought to us by our friend...technology.
 
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This reminds me of the topic of Radix Malorum Est Cupiditas (money is the root of all evil)
While that interpretation is widely used, the original intent was "the love of money is the root of all evil"
What im saying is that technology itself isnt a bad thng, its what you do with it.
technological overuse, abuse, excess n obsession is a bad thng of course.
But there are just as many good qualities attributed to it as well.
 
If it were up to me, I would prefer to go back to the paleolithic era. Back in the days where we were constantly in direct contact with nature and we saw each other as human beings. It's not necessary, but I think our culture could use a little bit of paleo life.
 
sheepie said:
I would say technology is a tool, for whatever us humans want to do with it. We could use it to kill, heal, art, whatever... It's very periphery to what actually matters though. It's like whether the sky is blue or yellow IMO
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i posit that there is no difference bewteen "natural" and "artificial" technology, eg, an eyeball and a camera. both came about, ultimately, from a turbulent spacetime where particles follow their laziest trajectories. we evolved physically over a great span of time, and then when we reached our modern anatomy, and our social evolution continued... that social evo only continued unification between "us" and "the rest of the universe", where our will extends through more of the environment and more of it is understood and manipulated by us, and our social evolution is still changing our species today, at an accelerating rate co-evolving with (and can be seen in unison with) technological evolution.

so, my point is that our perception of that yellow or blue sky, and the colors yellow and blue themselves, are arbitrary in terms of nature (we could have evolved entirely differently) and technology (we will, in the future, have the capacity to expand our capabilities in all senses, and add senses; and at present, technology has been empirically shown to be actively changing our brains, chemically, whether it is a cell phone, computer, or television set).

thus, consideration of technological evolution and its effects on our existential awareness is incredibly useful for discourse on ontology/the universe/meaning.
 
tech is certainly dividing us, distracting us from our true nature: infinity of ourselves.

we're willing slaves, however. you can choose to wake up whenever you want to.
 
Technology doesn't unite/divide people, people unite/divide people. It can and will be used for both purposes. Part of the duality of life imo.
 
Technology largely is allowing us to explore realms of complexity that is not us or generated by us, and how very different they are to us, reinforcing the notion, eventually, that we've actually got more in common between us than we might realize at first - so uniting us, IMO.
 
People really need to broaden their definition of "technology".

A cellphone is technology, as are, of course, a PC, jumbo jet, and a steel foundry. So are the printing press, antiseptics and vaccines, looms, canoes, and the very first spear. If you want to broaden it to any tool use, then include the termite sticks chimpanzees use, or the rocks sea otters use, or the bread kingfishers have been seen to use to attract fish. Even obviously "bad" technology can be put to good use; the space program that gives us glorious views of the cosmos grew on the back of machines designed to destroy entire nations. Nukes themselves have no ostensible purpose other than annihilation, but Project Orion could've used them to send us to the stars.

I would say that technology has done more good than bad, but I think that's less true than saying that technology is in fact utterly meaningless; we have to change--and in thousands of years we've changed very little--not technology. The cave man who killed his rival in his sleep, and the gang member who riddles an opponent with gunfire are different only in their tools, not their minds.
 
The cave man who killed his rival in his sleep, and the gang member who riddles an opponent with gunfire are different only in their tools, not their minds.
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the cave man is as much monkey as he is human, if we are considering how he views the world and his mind.

his brain has not yet been altered by dramatic accelerated social evolution (sparked by language) and technological evolution (sparked by social evolution). even televisions and computers demonstratively alter our neurological structure... even the light bulb changed our brains, i would say, mainly by changing our behavior.

after the fall of Rome (apologies that i can't remember the source) it's estimated that the emotional intelligence of the average person, in what once was an empire with academies, was so low that they no longer had the capability to view the world through other peoples' perspectives (let alone an animal's, or a god's).. they no longer had the ability to deliberately "put on a different lens through which to view reality."

it's a bold claim, but i think it makes perfect sense. try imagining what it would be like to view the world as a monkey... we might tend to think of primitive humans as like us sans technology, but in reality, humans tens of thousands of years ago would be as monkey-like to us as bonobos or orangutangs.

we evolved physically as monkeys, and then the stage was set for continued memetic evolution as techno-talking-monkeys. what is going on in the head of a gang member is profoundly different than what is in the head of a caveman,

though, since both the human and the cave man are closely related primates in the end, they surely have very similar motivations. i'll agree there, and i wish more people would realize that we're still just monkeys, even if we have surpassed our ancestors in many important aspects.
 
Technology can either be material or it can be organic. All the computer chips and cars and rocket ships we possess currently are in their very nature, evil. When we rid the world of all evil forces and influences we will be able to possess organic technology that will be vastly superior to our current material technology and we will be able to actually sync up to it easily and naturally and it will do as we wish without needing an input device like a keyboard. Thoughts will simply power these organic devices to do as we desire within their limitations, or perhaps our own.
 
Given the exponential rate of division between the top 2 percentile, and bottom 50 percentile, unless technology itself is able to eradicate such disparities I fear that a future of techno-archs, and techno-serfs is a real possibility, regardless as to whether technology can lift the whole of humanity towards greater happiness and fulfilment.

This is one of the many reasons why I support the precautionary principle (rather than the pro-active principle) when it comes to the development of new technologies.

The bio-info-nano revolutions are placing us on an inexorable course towards the emergence of the posthuman, at which point normative ethics begin to flounder.

It is worthy of note that an increasingly large amount of R&D is dedicated to military projects, which does not bode well for the future of humanity.

Having mastered out external world, we increasingly look inwards to see how technology can be applied to the self, giving rise to Liberal Eugenics, Transhumanism, Cryonics, Cyborgism and radical life-extension.

Technology is but an instrumental good with multifarious applications designed by the minds of men who are finite, corruptible and hubristic.
 
Harvey Feinberg gives a particularly good talk on this subject. I highly recommend (though not entirely agree with) it .:)

HERE
 
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