On future: utopia or dystopia?
Something I've never shared is the exaggerated optimism that some people have for the future, you know, like "in the future technology will solve all human problems" and things like that. Because people have high hopes for technology, there are many problems, the world may be on the edge of the abyss in many respects, society may be in chaos, but people hope that technological advances, as if by magic, simply solve all. It's like expecting everything to change without us changing: technology will come to save us, is there crime, violence and corruption? It does not matter, because technology will avoid all this with new forms of security, society does not have to solve its moral problems, simply technology will prevent the bad guys from acting, and most of the people, they don't have to do anything, because the technological developments will only be carried out by a handful of people, a few experts working, and voilà! The whole society is fixed. It's like a superhero. You will not do anything, everything will solve itself. In a sense, it is like a way of avoiding responsibility. "You have no reason to worry about contamination, perhaps there are no satisfactory solutions now, but in the future ..." and we continue to act the same, and it makes no sense, because if there is no solution now, then act accordingly and live as if we had this problem, what you cannot do is act as if there is no problem and leave future generations a burden that we do not know if they will be able to bear, and with the hope that they will solve all the problems, with technology and everything else.
Also, one thing people often forget about technology is that it is only as good as the people who use it. In good hands, technology can be our salvation, but in the wrong hands, it can be the end of all human life on earth. Technological advancement can be both a good and a bad thing, technology itself is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, and if there is no effective change in humanity, we cannot expect the future to be anything different from the present.
This idealization of the future is not good. Historian Arnold J. Toynbee said it was one of the symptoms of a decaying civilization, along with idealization of the past, and detachment from the present, in a process that is routine and predictable in the downfall of all civilizations. And that is something that is seen daily, at least, in Western civilization, where one sector of the population says "let's be like the past again" and the other says "the future is progress in this sense."
I often play with this idea, that the West can collapse, and with it, the whole world can take a heavy blow. Because people have this idea that it is too big to fall, but never it is too big to fall. Rome was too big to fall in its time, but it fell. People say that the barbarians finished with Rome, but it is not true, the barbarians by themselves were never able to defeat Rome, they were not rivals, Rome fell alone, by their own weight, the barbarians were only the trigger, which caused the destruction of the entire empire. Rome imploded, it fell because it was in chaos, because it was a society in decline that could not sustain itself, and would succumb to the slightest external aggression, because discord reigned in it. In the same way, if the West falls today, it will not be because of China or Russia, that is just the tip of the iceberg, it will be because of the same internal disorder that made other civilizations fall, because of their own decline.
Now, I am not saying that the West is going to fall, I am only seeing the other side of the coin, another thing that can also happen and that nobody wants to think about. I'm not usually very much into thinking about the future in a utopian or dystopian way, because let's face it, the modern world is in many ways a utopia, and in many other ways a dystopia, it depends on what you focus on, and in general, I think that the future will continue to be both and neither, because despite all the technological advances and everything that we evolve, human societies and civilizations are always more or less the same, we change a lot in appearance, superficially, but in essence we are still the same, in the most important thing, we are still the same as before, that's the reason why I think the future will simply be an extension of the present, we really can't wait much longer.
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Very good! Thank you! :)
While it is consistent to say that technology in general is not to be considered flawed, it is equally consistent to understand it individually as flawed. I do not give my consent where mankind starts to make itself superfluous by means of technology. As far as I am willing to go along with this, I would have to ask myself how many people are actually "too many", because one cannot make oneself superfluous and at the same time be many who want to bring themselves into voluntary dependence on each other, which is commonly called "cooperation". Where the many are replaced by few technological means, these many fall down as a result. Where do they fall?
Quantitatively, the machine is always superior to man. It produces more, in faster time to large numbers with less and less human need to maintain the machine.
I no longer give much weight to the argument that it is not the knife that does the evil, but always the man who wields it. This is a misconception and a very intelligent argument, admittedly, but it disguises the fact that technology, as we use and perceive it, has a rather alienating effect on humans. It is legitimate to say that the atomic bomb is a devastating weapon and yet it has been detonated. Of course, in retrospect it is possible to philosophize about it in one way or another, but how insane would someone have to be to deliberately use it again?
Just because we're dealing with more subtle technologies today doesn't mean they're less destructive. At some point I have to say: it is a stupid belief, a belief in technical utopia.
What it brings, we now see in all its glory: isolation. We have not yet landed in the actual extreme, but where we will inevitably come to if we think that a centralized control of our electricity, our water, our food and last but not least our social and individual existence can be done by computer technology. Without any relationship to our direct neighbor.
I often talk to craftsmen. Who fortunately still come into the house. I find in these people a balanced and refreshing way to deal with life. They themselves meet many people in the course of their professional life, like so many practitioners. Computer technology turns us into theoretical idiots who forget how to live, if the connection to the practical, the pragmatic and the real is not maintained at the same time.
I reject: mechanized birth of babies and mechanized death of dying people.
But I think washing machines are great.
Excellent thoughts, nothing to add, I share your conclusions. :)