Few of us would argue with the author’s reasons for writing this book: “Technology matters because it is inseparable from being human.” Nye, a technology historian, approaches his topic by discussing (and sometimes answering) ten questions, including “Does technology control us?” “Does technology create cultural uniformity or diversity?” “Does technology sustain abundance or cause ecological crises?” “How does technology affect work: More or less? Better or worse?” and “How should technologies be selected? Government dictate? Market forces? Expert opinions?”
You get the idea. These are deep, challenging, everlasting questions, and, to Nye’s credit, he offers his ideas clearly, with lots of examples that make the discussions accessible to all readers. He offers examples from history (automobiles, telegraphs, phonographs, all the way to the Internet). He quotes philosophers and scholars (from Plato to Henry Thoreau, Freeman Dyson, Sherry Turkle, and Ray Kurzweil).
Nye often uses fiction to make his points. For example, in the discussion of how technology might assure abundance, he discusses Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, to illustrate how a technology savvy Englishman could create comfort for himself using minimal tools and maximum ingenuity. When I read Robinson Crusoe in high school, long ago, I saw it as an adventure tale; I didn’t realize, as Nye points out, that Defoe was creating a “story [that] seemed a parable about the superiority of Western civilization.”
While Nye encourages us readers to debate various sides of issues, he does have opinions on a few points. For example, he’s quite clear that technology is not deterministic, that the use of technology is not only contextual but optional. He mentions how some societies, such as Scandinavia, have chosen to use bicycles and public transportation instead of automobiles, and how that choice influences and is influenced by the geographic and population planning of entire countries.
From that comes another belief: that the impacts of technology cannot be predicted, because the birth of the technology, “invention,” is only the first step. “Innovation,” the adoption of the technology into the society, is more important in determining the impact of that technology on a society. It took decades for electric lights to be implemented widely, because of the commitments, financial and emotional, that people had to gas lighting. Phonographs didn’t take off until innovators realized that the real market was in bringing music into homes.
My favorite chapter is the one on how technology affects work. This is another area in which Nye’s opinion is clear. He is not a Luddite. He believes that, in spite of dire predictions to the contrary, technology continues to create new and better jobs, albeit over time and space. There is no question that there can be displacement in the short term. Nye discusses the “de-skilling” of work caused by technology, and how that changes the way jobs are done. “Workers lost control of their time, their space, and their movements.” Some countries, primarily in Europe, try to deal with this displacement by legislating shorter work weeks. Nye finds that, instead, people are working more, sometimes out of fear of being replaced, but also because they want to earn more, and, for a fortunate group, because they love their work and blend it seamlessly into their lives. Nye notes that “nations are not closed systems. They must compete in a global marketplace that puts cultural values under pressure. ... More education and embracing ever more advanced technologies” are key.
In a chapter called “Expanding Consciousness, or Encapsulation,” Nye looks toward the future and offers some of the challenges being raised by the virtual world. He notes that concepts that we now cherish--leisure, privacy, and personal space--are relatively new; we’ve enjoyed them for, at most, a few hundred years, and losing them may be worth the tradeoff offered by freedom from workplace and of intimacy. Virtual experiences may be different (and perceived as better) than real ones. For example, we can now get CDs with music digitally mixed in ways that can never be performed in a concert hall. There are now IMAX theaters at such wonders as the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and Yosemite. “Tourists seem to prefer mediated [and less strenuous] experience to [the] direct use of their senses.”
Nye gives us lots to think about, but there are two curious omissions: the impacts of technology on art and on religion. Questions of how art interrelates with technology can be inferred from many of his examples of how technology is depicted in books and movies, although it would have been fun to hear his opinion of some of the more direct uses of technology in art, with computers and video, and definitely in movies.
The issue of technology and religion, however, is more urgent. On the one hand, we have technology-driven super-sized churches. On the other, we have niche sects that show up only on the Internet. There’s more that needs to be studied, however. Nye writes a lot about how technology has affected warfare over the centuries, and how technological superiority has created arms races, but not enduring peace. The arms races are not necessarily based on technological equivalence. In recent conflicts, for example, in order to combat a technologically superior enemy, people are choosing to be suicide bombers, motivated by the promise of religious martyrdom; this is an ultimate reaction to both technology and religion.
Nye has given us a thoughtful book. I look forward to the sequel.
