Date: Sat, 21 May 1994 17:51:28 -0500
To: technology-AT-world.std.com
From: kirez-AT-cornell.edu (kirez korgan)
Subject: Re: The technological "we"


hi folks,
        Boy have I been flung from my ivory (silicon) tower into the icy
waters of social reality!  I think your beliefs as revealed most recently
are way off on fundamental terms, and I see little hope of addressing all
of the problems.  I'm going to try to make a start, though.  Also, I'm
sensitive to the requests to avoid dense scholarship, so I'll strive to be
simple, readable and avoid a lot of jargon and academicspeak.

Malgosia writes:
>  But this is not the case: even though 
>there are more and more machines around, there seems to be no change
>in the social arrangements which forces people to work in order to
>make a living.  If the craftsman is lucky, he will get retrained
>and thus, through no choice of his own, learn to adjust to a means
>of production which he did not help create.  If he is unlucky, he may
>have to endure the humiliations of unemployment.  Yet it is common to
>talk about technology as "our" technology, as if "we" (who?) 
>could be thought to represent a cohesive, unified set of interests in 
>this context.
>
>
>- malgosia 

Malgosia, the fact that people have to work 'in order to make a living' is
not a product of the social order.  This is the nature of life, of reality.
 A living organism dies if it does not sustain itself by protecting its
body from nature and reallocating specific organic chemicals from its
environment for its metabolism.  Animals do this instinctively,
automatically, cyclically.  Humans don't.  Humans have to create the
resources that keep them alive.  This is an ongoing, necessary process.

Humans are a product of natural selection - meaning, our *minds* are a
product of natural selection.  Consciousness is a product of evolution.  It
exists in higher-order animals, because it brings them greater awareness of
their environments and thus better enables their survival.  They can better
find the resources they need in their environment with the faculty of
consciousness.  They can better manipulate those resources for their
survival.

The amoeba, the bacteria, the plant - are all passive.  If no resources are
present, they don't live.
The animal is active.  It hunts and searches for its needs.  The wolves
pack hunt.  The bear instinctively knows berries (and honey) are sources of
nutrition.  They seek these resources out.

The plant is vegetative, the animal is active.  The human is animal, with a
new ability:  the human is creative and scientific.

The human was once at the level of hunting and foraging.  Then something
happened.  Higher level consciousness evolved because it proved to have
survival value.  Understanding of causality developed.  

Fire was likely the first technology.  Suddenly humans could cook food and
keep caves warm.  Clothes were probably a contemporary invention.  Humans
could survive harsh weather.

With these new abilities, more humans survived, more reproduced. 
Population grew.  Ability to hunt further from base was an economic
success.  Ability to travel developed.  With warm clothes and fire they
could work longer and camp.

No wonder the rational faculty, the human mind, was naturally selected! 
Look at how it quickly increased the ability of the species, in which it
evolved, to flourish.  (it did so by being better able to understand the
world around them; it developed an understanding of causality through the
ability to form concepts and include in the concept of the entities it
dealt with the behaviors which were essential to their nature.)

The faculty which understood causality meant that agriculture developed,
replacing foraging.  But not instinctually: it was a form of knowledge, and
not automatic.  It had to be learned.  Concepts do not form automatically;
that is why we must learn over the course of our lives.  We do not all
arrive at the conceptual achievements of Aristotle, Galileo or Einstein. 
It takes significant effort and the learning of prior, more basic knowledge
- like arithmetic.  The knowledge had to be transmitted from older
generations to younger.  The same is true of the knowledge of
clothes-making and hunting and fire-building and basic herbal medicine.

Thus those groups that failed to learn these new knowledges, the first
technologies, were likely outcompeted, and at any rate weren't as
productive and didn't grow.  Only the groups that could develop the
knowledge, and communicate it to younger generations, succeeded and
survived.

>From the beginning technology enabled the human animal to better
re-allocate resources from its environment.  It better protected their
bodies from the harshness of raw nature.  It enabled their survival.  It
liberated the human from the  animal cyclical processes of consantly
tending metabolism.

This is the development of the human economy.  The emergence of the first
garden tools, like the first weapons, means that the employer of this
technology gets a drastically better profit off of his labor investment. 
Rather than taking 20 hunters 6 hours - a total of 120 man-hours - to fell
a large beast, a single man with a powerful weapon could fell it in a few
hours.

Suddenly the tribe can put in several man-hours a day into hunting and get
greater returns on this investment.  No wonder entertainment arose!! 
Suddenly  humans inherited, from the creators of their primitive
technologies, free time.

This is critical.  Before everyone had to work full time at the ominous
task of subsistence.  Now people are getting free time.  At first this is
most certainly only the leaders and the sick - who before were dying, but
now are enabled to survive by the greater productivity of the group.

Specialization came into existence with the first technology.  With hunting
and foraging, as necessary actions to survive, involving different skills,
people began to specialize.  (arguably we specialized when it happened that
females bore offspring; and males, being stronger, hunted; and thus females
stayed at home for warmth and protection and could do the 'domestic' tasks
- this is necessary physiological specialization for early humans.)

Specialization meant that one individual could do one task - and a
technology makes that possible.  With a technology, an individual could
hunt and produce the profits formerly achievable by a large group.  Another
individual can produce clothing; and because of technology, their
productivity is so great that they can provide for more than themselves and
trade their products for the products of other peoples specializations.

Technology thus takes this form with regard to human flourishing: it
increases the productivity of each person who utilizes it to do previously
more time-consuming, laborious tasks.  Thus value is created for others,
who similarly, benefitting from the increased production, can improve their
specialization and produce more value.

This is the birth of the first economy, the first industry, culture and
civilization.  The new wealth produced by technology enabled some people to
be "unemployed" in the sense that they could devote themselves to
non-wealth producing jobs like artists and philosophers.  

These are the basic facts of human existence and technology which cannot be
ignored in discussing today's situation.  It's no different.  We're still
human; we still have to achieve certain values to survive - food, shelter,
clothing, etc. 

We still benefit by specialization - in fact, since specialization and
technology completely enabled our growth from subsistence hunters and
foragers to our present wealth and population - enabled your life and mine
- we should earnestly desire specialization.  You don't have to build a hut
or live in a cave while growing, hunting or foraging all your own food and
somehow making clothes and maintaining warmth, etc.

We still are born in the state of stupidity and must learn.  There is no
guarantee that we will come to understand math and science and reading and
art.  It depends largely on an individual's effort as well as availability
of resources.  In a single generation we could, conceivably, return to the
state of primtives, losing the knowledge of people like aristotle, galileo,
newton and john locke, if all the individuals of that generation fail to
learn this knowledge.  Indeed, most of us are far from understanding the
work of these people.  Or, as evidenced by the discussion of 'smoothing
out' logic on this list, for example - utterly lacking an understanding of
the actual meaning of Aristotle's law of the excluded middle.  Or lacking
the understanding of the basic nature of human life and economy and the
role of technology - as the ONLY means of human survival.

that's a meager beginning.  I got carried away, but I needed to get some
basics covered.  I'll return for more specific statements.

to be continued.

Kirez



___________________________________________
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data."
                                                - Sherlock Holmes

Kirez Korgan, hardcore technophile
kirez-AT-cornell.edu