Play of Technology
By Erik Davis

In your talk this morning, you were speaking to a kind tension between nature and technology. Could you share your thoughts about that?

It's sort of natural, almost, to look at an antagonism between nature and technology because it's so obvious when you go out. You look at the difference between the way a city works and the way a meadow works and it's so clear, also, that technology has been the most visible sign of the way that we have ravaged the earth. It's with using technology that we strip-mine and we pollute the atmosphere and send up electrical signals everywhere, etc., etc.

That's been an old story actually; a whole aspect of our modern world the last 350 years is that as we develop these new technologies and new social institutions, there's been an undercurrent of hostility towards technology in the name of nature. Again, it's a very understandable antagonism, because in many ways it's very true, but there are ways of looking at technologies where you see them in a little bit more complex way as part of the kinds of things that nature does; that there are ways of looking at technology as partaking of some of the same mechanisms of evolution that we see in living systems.

If we didn't have that technology, we wouldn't be able to understand so much about the world that we're so desperate to save.

Indeed, it's only through technology, through computer technology, through massive computational machines, which can visualize extremely complex systems, it's actually only through that kind of technology that we're actually able to understand how some living systems work. If we didn't have that technology, we wouldn't be able to understand so much about the world that we're so desperate to save.

So, there's another story there about the way technology and nature are more interwoven. Some people go so far as to say that technology is simply the latest expression of evolution and that evolution is shifted from the biological to the cultural and technological. I don't share that view. I think there are some very important differences to maintain. That you don't criticize a tide pool the way you criticize a social institution, the way you criticize a car manufacturer, the way you criticize Microsoft.

Once things are on a technological level then you have a responsibility to understand that decisions are being made, and decisions can be made in different ways that are more democratic, that are more reasonable. It's not that things are happening purely by nature, that we have cars the way we do because there was some natural evolution of transportation to lead to the automobile. That's not how technological development works. So, there's a danger in looking at technology too much like a natural system, which some people do. But, on the other hand, I also think there's a great danger to looking at technology only as a kind of demonic sign of our inability to live with nature because in many ways, it's part of who we are as human beings.

Radio-V/Ethoschannel Index