Arts & artifacts - books dealing with man and technology

Reason, Dec, 1996

For the past several years, technology has been a major topic of well-received books - most of them resolutely opposed to the idea. Seeing no reason why thoughtful, well-written books should be limited to condemning the artifacts of human ingenuity, REASON asked a number of writers and scholars to recommend three books - preferably including a work of fiction - that provide a more positive, or at least more complex, view of the relationship between human beings and the made world.

Walter Truett Anderson

In recent times we have seen the emergence of a new polarization - anti-technology vs. pro-technology, Luddite vs. techie. The neo-Luddites dream of people leaving technology behind and advancing into a future that looks - well, looks a lot like the past. The techies dream of artificial intelligence - computers so brilliant that they can advance and leave people behind. (See, for example, the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer.) Along with this goes a lot of argument - much of it useless hyperbole - about whether technology is good or bad, destroyer or savior.

What we really need to do, rather than take sides in any such simplistic fistfights, is to understand how inseparable technological change is from human evolution. Technology is us.

Two books that I will mention here address this issue straight on. The third, a work of science fiction, illuminates it in more indirect ways, as fiction should.

Origins of the Modern Mind (1991), by the Canadian psychologist Merlin Donald, argues that the human species has evolved by developing new "systems of representation," and that at each stage - as people invent new ways to communicate and manage information - we become in fact a different species. The first big jump, he says, was the invention of mimesis. Then came speech, then - much later - writing. We are now in the midst of another such transition, and it is literally changing the way we think: "The growth of the external memory system," he says, "has now so far outpaced biological memory that it is no exaggeration to say that we are permanently wedded to our great invention, in a cognitive symbiosis unique in nature." What this means is that we are now evolving into computer-connected beings with a computer culture and a computer civilization.

Bruce Mazlish of MIT makes a similar point in The Fourth Discontinuity (1993), although his framework is more historical than evolutionary. He takes his title from the proposition that the human species has in recent centuries gone through a number of "discontinuities," each of which involved learning new - and disturbing - lessons about the world and our place in it. We learned the Copernican lesson that our planet is not discontinuous from the heavenly bodies, we learned the Darwinian lesson that humans are not discontinuous from the animals, and we learned the Freudian lesson that the conscious mind is not discontinuous from its preconscious origins. Now, he says, "humans are on the threshold of decisively breaking past the discontinuity between themselves and machines," discovering "that tools and machines are inseparable from evolving human nature." Mazlish's book doesn't footnote Donald's, and I don't think that is an academic oversight. Rather, I suspect he merely moved along his own disciplinary path (he is a historian) and came to a quite similar conclusion.

Kim Stanley Robinson isn't trying to make any such point in Blue Mars (1996), but he makes quite a few anyway. This is the third volume in a trilogy (the previous installments were Red Mars and Green Mars) about an expedition to Mars that results in the deliberate transformation of the planetary ecology and the growth of a new human civilization. Robinson's books reflect most of the current scientific thinking about "terraforming," and also show how that issue might lead to a new kind of techno-phobe-technophile argument. The major political groupings in his story are the Greens who are eager to modify the planet, and the Reds (more or less similar to the Greens here on Earth), who prefer to leave it alone. In the books the Reds win many of the arguments, but the Greens proceed to change Mars - while human beings move on to terraform Venus, various asteroids, and the moons of the outer planets. Along the way they go through several technological revolutions and evolve some fancy artificial intelligence, but remain recognizably human. Technological change and human evolution proceed inseparably from one another, much as (according to Donald and Mazlish) they always have.

Stephen Cox

To grasp the significance of technology, it's helpful to look at a society that didn't have much of it to go around. Conquest (1993), Hugh Thomas's magisterial account of the destruction of the Aztec Empire, shows precisely how far a society could advance without wheels, nails, or candles. (The lack of firearms was a comparatively minor problem.) Thomas demonstrates what can and can't be done in such a society, and he dramatically illustrates its vulnerability to any competitor that has marginally less primitive tools.