Is Technology Our Friend

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If we are going to evaluate the beneficial relationship with technology, we should define it first. The word itself derives from the Ancient Greek word, techne, meaning craft or cunning of the hand. In the modern vernacular, it represents items that change or manipulate the human environment.  

Among humanity's first forays into manipulating their environment is fire, and from it is a long connected line to today's inventions. From our first steps as a species, we have been tool users, and being tool users have shaped us as we shaped our surroundings. Deprived of fur, we created tools to harvest the skin of other creatures to protect us from both the cold and sun's harmful rays against our hairless bodies. We are not creatures of fang and claw, so we developed weapons to offset that deficiency.  Our eyes have fewer cone cells than other animals, so we created tools to illuminate the darkness. We shaped stone to create safe spaces, weapons to defend us from predators, then tools to make better safe areas and weapons. We shifted from gathering food to farming it, with it came to the need for even greater tools. Each invention, each new coupling to technology removed us from dependency on the random and haphazard whims of nature.

In humanities hands, copper-laden stones used in fire pits gave us the secret of metal and ushered in a new era of copper tools and devices. This knowledge spurred the discovery of other metals, metals humanity used to shape their surroundings even further. Cities spawned, and with that urban craftsman, soldier castes and artists dependent on the food production of a now agricultural caste. The tools that enabled farms allowed for larger populations than hunter-gatherer societies and with it a vicious cycle of technological growth. Farms enabled larger communal centers, which in turn needed metals to defend which in turn need larger farms to feed the specialists.

Mastering our environment through the use of tools enabled us to explore the world and spread across the planet. Such exploration created the need for more and different items of technology to overcome the challenges of Earth’s topographical differences and defeat competitors, who are likewise crafting technological items of their own.

The items of technology we created from stone and then metal to not only enabled us to overcome survival challenges but make our lives easier.  In the 2.5 million years since Homo habilis started flaking stone to make tools, we are now utterly dependent on devices. We can no longer survival naked and afraid.  Our creations of technology now dominate our lives in unimaginable ways. They connect us with not only our family but to the global population. We use technology to communicate both near and far;  have the entirety of humanity's collected knowledge, quite literally, in the palm of our own hand; to share our thoughts, dreams, and desires with the entire planet at the tap of a graphic image on a screen.  We can repair the damage to our bodies the environment and our own tools might inflict upon us. Our technology relieves the boredom it itself creates via the leisure hours and ease of living unprecedented in human history.

Technology has its dark sides too. In the most extreme cases, humanity has become unhealthily addicted to the technology, preferring its company to that of our fellow human beings.  Too many have abandoned verbal communication, merely talking, and prefer the tap-tap-tap of texting. Robotic companionship raises the question of procreation, or rather the lack of it for the first time in human history. From the first moment the rock gave an advantage over the fist, the march of weapons has continued unabated. Today, the technological weapons we have created can destroy all life on the planet. Our lust for greater and greater tools swamps the environmental damage the creation of such brings. We are poisoning the world faster than we can clean it up. Like an invasive species, we are consuming raw materials to create our tools faster than the Earth can spawn them.

Technology is the friend we created out of need and becomes our foe when it overtakes us. We locked in an eons-long parasitic relationship with technology. We need it to survive a hostile world, and the more we create, the more we need it.