Have you ever heard a story with a struggle between pure good and pure evil? There are lots of them, but for some reason I think of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. There, you’ve got pure goodness (a Hobbit) on a quest to rid the world of the ultimate temptation (the ring) to stop the ultimate evil (Sauron). This story resonates with us as we tend to think of the world as a bunch of quests between good and evil.
But technology has an interesting effect on the world. It’s pretty obvious that the high-level goal of technology is its own growth. It just wants to evolve into states of higher complexity, and this is directly against the sustainability of biological life. But instead of being an ultimate evil, technology tends to take what is evil and merge it with what is good so that the pursuit of good becomes the pursuit of evil.
For example, consider scientific investigation, an example close to my heart because I consider myself a sort of scientist. At it’s root, I’d say that science is about pursuing one’s own curiosity through mental effort. Yet, because of the industrial capitalist system, which can be thought of as one of the initial stages of truly runaway technological growth, science is co-opted to serve the system. Any discoveries of science that can be used, are used for more efficient ecosystem destruction.
Or consider the work of programmers. I think most programmers start out just wanting to make something cool. But pretty much anything you can do in this world with programming is destructive, at least when it comes to making a living. Just look at how programmers have increased the efficiency and destructiveness of the global financial system. It’s sickening. Social media is another horror brought on by the programmers.
Sadly, this is pretty much true anywhere. The fire of creativity in the human soul these days is directed only through systems that are destructive.
The result is what I mentioned in the beginning of this essay:
One of the prime goals of technology is then to unify good and evil as much as possible, because then we’ll be forced to pursue evil which is nothing else than technological growth at the inevitable expense of biological life.
Human beings at first seem to be quite good at ignoring this bizarre unification. After all, we are good at playing within the rules of the game, and since the increase of our unsustainable practices is an emergent phenomena of our group behaviour rather than the result of any individual will, we keep playing the game.
This is only reinforced because the effect of pursuing the good is immediate and acute, but the effect of the evil is delayed and diffuse. For example, let’s say I make a video on YouTube about how to improve your photography. I’ll get some creative satisfaction out of it immediately, and it will also very quickly help others. But the ads on the video will take time to increase the probability that some people will buy the product on screen, and it will take time for that disposable junk to end up in a landfill or in the ocean, and it will take time for that garbage to cause ecological damage.
However, we are really not so good at ignoring the evil. Indeed, the necessarily evil that accompanies the good contributes to the dissonance in the minds of people everywhere. The dissonance also grows slowly, and is also somewhat invisible because it becomes part of the new background norm. It’s distributed and it’s subtle, but it’s there.
And maybe we can live with it now, but its presence will become more obvious as it grows. Tensions between people will increase, and psychological problems like depression and anxiety will multiply. The system will attempt to ameliorate this as it’s always done but with more sophisticated methods such as advanced virtual reality, AI, new medications, and more media of course.
On the other hand, this tension can also be used as a positive force to counter the growth of advanced technology. If this tension can be made obvious, it can be transformed into a suspicion and even dislike of advanced technology in the general populace. And if the dislike of technology grows sufficiently large, it can reach a critical point that can actually counter technological growth.
Such an effort to increase the dislike of technology of course cannot be accomplished in a short time, for several reasons. First, people have been conditioned to look upon technology as their saviour. Science and technology has become the new god. Therefore, the effort of revolutionaries to grow the dislike of technology is like convincing long-term members of a cult that they’ve been brainwashed.
Second, technology itself does give short-term benefits to those who use it, so it’s not really easy to argue against economic prosperity and increased amusement. And of course, we have also been conditioned to become more hedonistic over time, again due to technology. (In general, the pursuit of anything fun, no matter how shallow, is in the best interest of technology so that we be kept amused.) It’s human instinct to find new technology fun. I find some of it fun.
Third, technology itself has many defence mechanisms aside from the obvious ones, which also have to be countered.
Yet, the dissonance created in us by technology is a definite weakness of technology. We can see that many people are deeply concerned about climate change, and lots of people (including myself, of course) hate AI with a passion. Even people who are not Luddites like myself hate AI. Especially creative types. So the dissonance is there, and we just have to find ways to take advantage of it.
It won’t be easy. In fact, it will be more like a long chess game with a good chess player, where we’ll have to figure out the correct move and keep making the correct move again and again in a tactical way. But if we keep up a sustained effort over time that will likely be on the order of decades, we can slowly turn the dissonance caused by the good-evil unification into a fire large enough to stop unfettered technological growth.
That’s something worth doing. For our home and wild nature.