Will technology help us or hurt us? Save us or kill us? No one knows, of course. Technological advances have always held both promise and peril and there is little doubt that artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and the rest will too.
Bill Joy, the chief scientist for Sun Microsystems, warned darkly in Wired Magazine recently about a future in which human-engineered technology ultimately would make human beings irrelevant. He argued that the “most compelling 21st century technologies,” like those listed above, pose a more insidious threat than earlier ones because they are self-replicating.
That’s how they’ll take over. Like kudzu in the South and zebra mussels in Lake Michigan, they will produce and produce until they destroy the world as we know it. Nanotechnology, the science of creating machines the size of a molecule that can manipulate matter one atom at a time, opens up unimaginable vistas. But Joy points out that “it is far easier to create destructive uses for nanotechnology than constructive ones.”
He quotes leading robotics researchers who believe that robots invented by humans ultimately will make humans extinct, that we will merge with robots and that the changes will happen so gradually we will get used to them.
It’s enough to give the human race the shivers.
But, for a different perspective on technology and life past and future, nothing paints the picture more starkly than the British import, “1900 House,” now showing on PBS (the next three Mondays on WTTW-Channel 11).
For this fascinating series, the producers reverse-renovated a suburban London house to the standards that would have applied to a lower middle class family at the turn of the last century. No electricity, no indoor toilet, minimal hot water. Then they solicited a volunteer family to inhabit the 1900 house for three months, dressing and living strictly according to period customs and conveniences.
Looked at from the distance of 1900, the year 2000 might well have seemed dark and foreboding indeed. Savage wars and ethnic bigotry, half a century of nuclear terror, AIDS, the loss of privacy, urban crowding, smog and global warming, an increasingly violent and vulgar culture, the coarsening of public society.
But with all that, our present–thanks to technology–looked pretty appealing to the 1900 house family after they had survived their Victorian interlude with its hardships and health and environmental hazards.
The future is unknowable, always has been, always will be. The potential for catastrophe lurks everywhere and that won’t change. But so, we do well to remember, does the potential for progress.
