I had a class in college called “Technology and Ethics”. My teacher was a fascinating man who seemed to permanently have one eyebrow cautiously cocked upward at technology. Like it was a boulder hanging above his head and may come crashing down at any point, and he couldn’t take that one eye off of it so he could sprint the other direction at the first sign of its wavering.
Aside from that characteristic, he was an excellent teacher of philosophy. The entire class period was a discussion about technology and all its aspects: convenience, revenge-effects, a move away from physical community and toward virtual community, artificial intelligence, etc. He was a Luddite, although he refused to express any opinion of technology whatsoever, seeing his role as only a conversation catalyst and thought-provoker (I think that is what made him such a great philosophy teacher).
He refused to believe that automatic dishwashers saved time.
Anyway, ever since that class, I’ve always kept this sense of technology as not just an advancement, but a foundation-rocking upgrade to humanity as a whole. I realized during that class that I was a technocrat, and that I believed in science and technology as if it were almost a spiritual movement.
So lately I’ve been reading a book called The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. It has really struck a chord in me. I love reading text that wraps up all my straggling philosophies and unpolished ideas and puts them together with statistics. It makes me feel validated, like I’m heading down the right road. I’m not finished reading it, but its scale and scope are simply mind-boggling. If you haven’t heard of the “Singularity”, read this.
This makes me feel like I’m working toward something in the field of technology. I hate thinking that I’m just a cog in the wheel of some corporation’s machine that produces a pleasing bottom line for its stockholders. I like the fact that with every project I work on, I’m moving technology forward. I’m helping to weave the threads together. I’m learning more, so that someday I can contribute to the awesome force of technical thinkers today to move our technology forward toward something monumental.
