I owe quite a few book reviews; the books are all rather good, and I’ll be writing them out in succession in the near future. Of course, as long as a book is good overall, my reviews will still tend to praise it, while using the review as an occasion to talk about my own thoughts; in fact, that does not amount to a particularly strong recommendation of the book itself. This article was published in China Science Daily (July 9, 2020, page 7, Book Review)
Everything has two sides, and even the best technology is a “double-edged sword”: it can strike down the enemy, but it can also wound oneself. — This “double-edged sword” metaphor for understanding technology is hardly unfamiliar to us; indeed, one could say it is the vulgar public view of technology.
In the field of philosophy of technology, such a vulgar view is not particularly popular. Marx, Heidegger, Ellul, Marcuse, and so on—these famous philosophers of technology usually think much more deeply. For the double-edged sword metaphor still treats technology as a completely neutral tool, whose proper and improper uses are measured only by fixed values. But in fact technology often carries a certain built-in tendency. For example, if a person always keeps a sword at hand, then he will very likely lean toward using the sword to solve problems. As the saying goes, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Hunters, farmers, swordsmen, knights, the gun barrel, the pen barrel… these concepts not only denote skilled use of a certain technology, but also imply a certain cultural or political identity. Seen this way, rather than saying that every technology has a good side and a bad side, it is better to say that every technology contains a certain standard for judging good and bad. A double-edged sword may not only cut the swordsman’s flesh, but also shape his spiritual world and become part of his values.
Philosophers of technology often reflect on modern technology from precisely this level as well. Marx believed that new modes make people alienated, and Marcuse said that modern technology makes people one-dimensional.
But the profound insights of philosophers of technology are rarely accepted by the public. After all, people are always more concerned with practical questions of how to apply technology, and not so interested in grand questions such as human nature or the essence of technology. To be fair, philosophers really are not very down-to-earth; those clouds-and-mist terms keep ordinary people at a distance.
Philosophers’ concerns are of course deeply meaningful, but in popular contexts many questions are more concrete and more urgent. When I am waving a double-edged sword, then compared with questions like “Will it affect my values?”, the more urgent and practical question is “Will I be cut by it myself?”
Peter Townsend is a retired experimental physicist, and he clearly received no training in the philosophy of technology. His The Dark Side of Technology, as its name suggests, is precisely a popular science book based on the “double-edged sword” metaphor. The author’s position is almost identical to that of the mainstream public: technology is merely a completely neutral tool. He says, “Although much of this book is concerned with the dark side of technological innovation, I believe that the truly catastrophic potential of global development and destruction is not related to technology, but to population expansion and human self-interest and human nature. Technology is only the means and the avenue for self-destruction, not the cause.” (p. 137) Even his attitude is optimistic and progressive; he confidently believes: “If we can keep the best and discard the dross, the progress we have already achieved will continue to benefit all people in the future.” (p. 2)
Even so, readers can still feel a sense of tragedy and urgency in this book, because the author’s optimism rests on the premise that humanity can act in time. As he says, “If our generation still does not take action, it will inevitably lead to the collapse of civilization, and even the collapse of humanity” (p. 302).
The author believes that the crisis leading to human collapse does not lie in technology itself, but comes from natural disasters and from the self-destructive tendency of human nature. However, the author reveals that the development of technology has not made humanity more adept at handling disasters; on the contrary, the advanced often intensify the danger posed by natural disasters and by the evil in human nature.
The first typical case is solar flare eruptions. Large-scale geomagnetic storms are not especially rare; on average, there is one major solar flare eruption every hundred-odd years, and on average every 500 years there may be a solar flare that triggers a large geomagnetic storm on Earth. But there are not many disaster records in human history, because in the ancient world geomagnetic storms would not trigger any disasters. The only exception was 1859. By then humanity had not yet entered the Edison era, but telegraph systems had just begun to become popular. The nascent telegraph system was hit by a huge geomagnetic storm, causing communication paralysis and fires. Since 1859, the Earth has never again experienced such a “solar flare event of a similar scale or greater on Earth” (p. 18). But it is easy for us to imagine that if an eruption of similar magnitude were to happen again, the disasters it would cause would be far greater than those of the nineteenth century, because our lives are increasingly dependent on global electronic networks, on satellites and radio.
As technology advances day by day, humanity becomes increasingly dependent on the technological environment it has created. But the entire technological environment was built in a very short span of time: the history of agricultural technology is only ten thousand years old, information technology less than a century, and the mobile internet only a little over a decade. Yet the operation of our human civilization very quickly came to depend on the support of these advanced technologies. Chasing new technologies is of course unobjectionable, but when the old is replaced too quickly, and outdated habits of life and memories are forgotten too early, humanity will increasingly lose room to maneuver in the face of sudden disasters.
Many natural disasters can be foreseen, but the range of prediction is on a scale of hundreds of years or even tens of millions of years. We know that this seismic zone will certainly experience a major earthquake in the future, but the time may be 500 years from now, or 5 days from now. We know that this volcano will certainly erupt violently in the future; the time may be 5 years from now, or 50,000 years from now… So what should we do? That is where “human nature” must be put to the test. People often focus only on the immediate, the benefits right at hand, while consciously or unconsciously ignoring distant and uncertain dangers. The result is that humanity, in the face of various known disasters, is often blind to them even before they truly occur, let alone expect people to sacrifice present efficiency in order to prevent unknown disasters.
The logic of profit-seeking even prompts people to ignore harms that have already occurred. For example, people discovered long ago that asbestos causes lung damage, but “people continued using asbestos for nearly another century” (p. 63), because the utility and economics of this material were too alluring.
The climate issue is also a typical example. Aside from a few anti-intellectual groups, the overwhelming majority of scientists and politicians actually have no dispute about the fact of global warming; at most they dispute the details and the degree. But even the most optimistic people agree that global warming will cause huge disasters. Yet people “raise their arms and cry out in alarm, talk at length, but act very little.” (p. 85)
Beyond these natural disasters amplified by technological progress, new technologies also bring many new problems. Modern technology, always striving for perfection, has proved that adding tiny trace substances can have global effects. In advanced chips and medicines, minute elements present in extremely small quantities can play a decisive role. But this effect can also occur in a negative way: releasing even a tiny amount of a new substance into the environment may eventually lead to an irreversible global catastrophe. DDT is one example. Although the pesticide residue left on each leaf is very small, through layer upon layer of accumulation it will cause severe damage to the entire biosphere.
Thanks to Rachel Carson, humanity curbed the abuse of DDT in time, but who can guarantee that other new technologies are safe as well? If the accumulation of DDT had been slower, if the harm to humanity had been more slight, would we still have been able to react in time? “If some changes do not appear until two or more generations later, then it is very difficult for contemporary people to recognize this possibility (recent animal studies show that the harms of Agent Orange did not become apparent until the fourth generation).” (p. 309)
The limits of human knowledge also determine that we cannot possibly have complete foreknowledge of the potential effects of new technologies. Faraday’s contemporaries could hardly imagine that the applications of electricity would become so widespread; people in the ENIAC era also could not imagine that in the future every household might own a computer… But what is difficult to foresee is not only the positive side of technology; the dark side of technology is likewise even harder to foresee. What is more, people are always more willing to devote their imagination to envisioning how new technologies will bring a beautiful future, and less willing, right from the beginning of a new technology’s development, to pour cold water on it by every possible means.
The author also does not expect humanity to possess much in the way of foresight; instead, he emphasizes “hindsight” more, emphasizing learning from history as it has already unfolded. Although history cannot help us determine exactly which disaster will occur, when, and in what form, history at least proves that technological progress always contains uncertainty or a two-sided character.
Historical experience cannot guide us to predict the future, but it can at least correct people’s blind arrogance. At the very least, what we can do is this: when facing each new technology, while looking ahead to how it may bring positive progress, we should devote the same energy to assessing its potential negative effects.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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