Technology, time, and the conversations of modernity Book

Technology is part of our life and even if people try to scape of it will follow them. Let’s pretend a person goes to wood to live from nature and scape from the technological society we are involved in. As soon as that person takes a stick and sharpens one end to be able to hunt, or to create a hole in the ground to plant some crops, or even if he just use the stick to pick a fruit from a tall tree he is already using some type technology. There is no argue that there are some technologies that are more primitive than other but at the end every society from the beginning of humanity has used some type of technology. Even when we were nomads human had tools to hunt down animals. We can argue that technology is part of humanity as the need for eating and sleeping is. How technology comes to be, and can we live without it?

In the book Technology Matters: Questions to live with, David Nye brings important issues of the relationship between the development of technology and the evolution of the human. His book is form by 10 chapters where each chapter brings a new question. Nye responds each question providing a historical survey with multiple examples from various societies.

Technology is part of us and the main reason for its creation is to make our life easier. People have thought for long time that new advances of technology will make human useless. New technology just changes the way we operate but doesn’t makes us useless. Unemployment doesn’t occur because of development of new technology; employments shift and technology just might improve the productivity of some people. New business occurs because of technology and is the job of humans to come with the new way of operation. Maybe 200 years ago we might have had 20 people planting corn but now we have 2 people planting corn and 100 people coding some application, new jobs that occurred because of the development of new technology. In the US in May of 1975 the unemployment rate was of 9% and in May 2009 was of 9.5%.[i] In those 34 years there has been significant change in technology but not much change on the percentage of unemployment, so do people lose their job because of technology?

One point he makes clear through the book is that technology cannot be predictable and that society changes the technology and not the other way around. He mentions multiple examples where a technology was created for one purpose but other usages were given after. He also points out other ways on how technology, originally created with a good purpose, has created negative impact on our world and how some societies have denied some technology. He mentions how asbestos was used to prevent fire but how it killed many of the workers who installed it. To prove that society shapes technology he mentions the example of the gunpowder that was created in China but it was the Europeans that used it to produce fire weapons. Going back to the refusal of technology by a society he also mentions how the Japanese Samurais refused to use guns even though they knew that it was more powerful and lethal than using a sword or an arrow, also in a more modern environment the Amish in the US still prohibit the usage of farm machinery for agriculture inside their community.

On one of the chapter Nye talks about technology and safety. During the cold war the ownership of nuclear weapons didn’t make anyone feel safe, people lived in fear of being attack with weapons of mass destructions. Some can argue that that was then, we don’t feel like that anymore and nuclear weapons still exist and now more countries have then than during the Cold War. Others can argue that technology might bring us some type of safety and the installation of surveillance system in business and houses prove that technology makes us feel safe. Is it technology or is it society that make us feel or not feel safe. Recently 2 Mexicans twitted that a school in Veracruz (a city that has lots of violence) was taken over by gunmen. These twits made concerned parents go and pick up their children from school, more than 26 accidents occurred and after the crash those concerned parents left their cars in the middle of the road and ran to the schools just to make sure that their kids were alright[ii]. At the end the twits were lies, but can you blame the fear of the parents on the technology or on the society they are living in?

In conclusion how technology comes to develop and what impact it causes on us are the main theme of Nye’s book. He makes a strong argument that technology is not deterministic and we cannot predict it, we cannot even predict the full usage of it when we initially create it, mentioning that invention is the mother of necessity. At the end technology shapes and is shaped by us and our culture, and brings infinite possibilities to our lives.