Why do we do technology?

It’s actually a more interesting question than it sounds…

We are not the only Earth-creatures who do technology. We’ve figured out a lot about how other creatures do it recently, and I’m sure even more creatures are doing it in ways we haven’t even noticed yet. (Let’s hope we notice before we make them extinct. With our technology.) It is true, though, that no other Earth-creature does technology the way we do, to the out-of-control extent that we do. Thinking scribblers much more experienced and accomplished than I am have long pointed out that we can either learn to understand our use of technology, so that we can control it in ways we never have, or we can let it drive us, and lots of other creatures, into oblivion. So, anything that helps us understand it, even a little bit better, is automatically worthwhile.

On our walk this morning, my wife was telling me about how four decades of research have revealed a small area of our brains that controls motivation—and that, if this area is compromised, say, by localized bleeding, our motivation can completely disappear—without the presence of depression, which is what we usually associate with a severe lack of motivation.  She observed that it’s so difficult for us to learn about how our brains work, and there is so much we still don’t know. That prompted the thought that the only way we can know how our brains work is by employing technology, mostly novel technology, because our senses are not, on their own, capable of perceiving what we need to perceive to understand brain function. And that, in turn, led me to realize that technology serves two basic purposes for us: first, it extends our mechanical functions; second, it extends our sensory capabilities. Both of those sets of functions are, on their own, severely limited.

Our oldest technology extended our mechanical functions. We can’t knap flint with our bare hands, and we can’t stab a mammoth to death with them either. It’s a lot easier to plant crops with simple tools than on your knees scrabbling in the dirt with your bare hands. We often attribute much of our success as a species to our opposable thumbs—and that’s valid, but our hands, and the fine motor skills of which they’re capable, are what allow us to make things that can do what our hands alone cannot. The ease with which we could, and can, make and use deadly weapons is of course as important a consequence of that ability as any.

Let’s take a real quick anti-determinism pause here, though. Weapons make it much easier to wound and kill. The motivation to do so is, however, just as important. We are inherently violent. That doesn’t make us unique. Throwing spears, and automatic rifles, make us unique. And they drastically lower the threshold of motivation necessary to employ deadly force, as I’ve observed here before. Anyone who dares utter the imbecilic “guns don’t kill people—people do” should be slapped repeatedly, in public. People with guns kill people—far more often and easily than people without guns. Separating the human from the technological extension is not helpful; understanding the connection—and the dialogic relationship between the two—is what’s helpful.

So, no, technology does not dictate our behavior. But it certainly does modify it, and guide it.

I think we can usefully explore considering the history of technology in two overlapping phases. The first was the development of technology to extend mechanical function. That required less than the development of technology to extend our sensory capacities—less, in terms of resources, a sophisticated understanding of what we call “the sciences,” and the prior development of the technologies upon which newer technology is based.

We now know just how limited our senses are—how rudimentary they are, in so many instances, compared to those of other Earth-creatures. It’s difficult to quantify, for example, how much more powerful and sophisticated a bear’s sense of smell is than ours—but, it’s about seven times more powerful and sophisticated than a dog’s, and most of us have a pretty good idea of how much more developed a dog’s sense of smell is than ours. Snakes and dogs and a lot of other creatures have a sixth sense, part taste and part smell, that requires physiological equipment we either don’t possess or only possess in rudimentary form. Bees and butterflies and a lot of other creatures can see ultraviolet light. We recently developed a special camera that allows us to sort of see it—to see a representation of it, anyway, so that we can approximate what a bee sees. The ability of a raptor to make out detail from miles away is really almost incomprehensible to us. I joke that 4K TVs are for raptors, since they can actually see 4K and we can’t. Bees, butterflies, and raptors can all fly. We worked on that for so long before we worked it out—but we worked that mechanical function out before we worked out the sensory functions that go with it.

Cetaceans and bats use echolocation. We didn’t invent artificial means of doing that until the 1930s and 40s.

The first microscopes and telescopes of the seventeenth century drastically changed our understanding of reality (or at least it did for those with access to those instruments, and those willing to believe what those people were saying).

The electron microscope did it again. Imagine our ignorance without it. You can’t see a virus without it, for one thing.

I think the true boundary of knowledge and ignorance in technology now is the boundary between what we can sense, with the aid of our inventions, and what we still cannot. New knowledge in physics depends simultaneously on our ability to see the huge and distant and the impossibly-small and up-close. It depends on both the James Webb and CERN. We need our computers to analyze huge data sets of whale songs for us, to find patterns that our brains alone don’t have the capacity to recognize. (We need our computers to do that for a lot of things, of course.)

Some of the most gee-whiz stuff we’re doing now actually combines the sensory and the mechanical functions of technology. Think of experiments with artificial limbs. We’re learning how to make “smart” artificial limbs that our brains can actually control, the way they do our natural limbs. We can do stuff with nerves now that requires the ability to perceive something as small as a nerve—and the ability to then manipulate that very small something.

Hooray for how clever we are, right? Sure, as long as we don’t fall into the deadly assumption that it will save us. It won’t. Not that kind of clever, anyway. It will assist us mightily in correcting course, and living a better collective life, for sure. Without forcing us to go back to the Stone Age—or even the eighteenth century. But technology is an extension of our natural abilities. It’s not passive, but it’s not fully-determinant, either. It is neither “good” nor “bad.” It’s a power, a capability, that can be used for either, and what constitutes either is for us to determine.

And that, in most cases, really isn’t rocket surgery. The senses we were born with, and what they can tell the brains we were born with, are enough to tell us what we need to know about that. Our technology is there to help us accomplish it. We can choose what to make, and how to use it, and what not to make, and what not to use.