From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sun Mar 24 2002 - 03:50:47 MST
>From: Samantha Atkins <samantha@objectent.com>, Thu, 21 Mar 2002 15:48:32
>Amara Graps wrote:
> > John Benner, continuing his _very polite_ discussion:
> >> The field I feel we are furthest
> >> behind in is the adaption of people to technology.
> >
> > Isn't it just as, or, more important, to 'adapt the technology to the
>> people'? Your question seems to assume that technology is forced on
>> the individual.
>Under a suitable interpretation I think the first is correct.
>The technology is moving radically faster than human beings and
>their institutions are evolving. Thus, if we are to make best
>use of the technology, we and our institutions need to catch up
>or at least successfully incorporate the technologies into our
>lives. Another way to say it is that highly augmented or
>uploaded only partially evolved apes would not necessarily be a
>good thing.
The reason I don't like this ('adapt people to technology')
perspective is that it can easily skew the humans' value system to
one of: technology has a higher value than humans. I think that
_humans_ are first and foremost and from here, we seek means of
survival (*and growth*) on this planet/outwards working, as best we
can, with the complex interaction between the Earth's biology,
sociology, chemistry, physics, politics, ... It is our (humans')
imaginative minds and values and ethics and hard work that create
technology to advance ours and the living beings on our planets'
lives. I agree that technology moves faster than we can keep up with
it, but we should always keep in mind that _it is 'us'_ who are
creating it.
If you put something like technology 'above' us, then you are
playing host to a wide range of items used (by governments, others)
to claim have more importance than humans.
(The items that humans create, which take on a different life of
their own, such as AI, falls into a different value system category.
Maybe that is more what you are referring for humans to adapt to?)
I really think that we can't emphasize enough the value of
humans/transhumans. It is from this position of our high value, that
we will/can address the problems of which technology can bring. It's
useful to take a step back to see the larger picture: remove, for a
moment, the technologies, and see humans/transhumans. What do we
want and need to survive and grow? What values, ethics, politics
enable that? Then add the technologies to learn how those can aid
us, not only to survive, but to grow in our human societies (don't
forget that we are embedded in that!), and to be 'better' (smarter,
healthier, live longer, etc etc)
==========================
Here's some (rather historical) text that you might find
interesting. It was written in 1911 (revised through 1931). The
author: a Brit namded Alfred Zimmern, in his book: _The Greek
Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens_, was
commenting on the fact that the Greek imagination lived in a freer
and simpler atmosphere, not needing to dig through problem after
problem of 'material organization' (please substitute 'technology'
when you see those words), in order to reach the important social
strata. Zimmern also admits that H.G. Wells' _A Modern Utopia_
influenced these next words. In his text, he is explaining what
position wealth (i.e. technology, riches) was placed in the Greek
world, which, because it was much simpler than ours, enabled the
Greeks to think through social problems and their need for wealth
more clearly. He also shows how tightly interwoven and bound the
Greek individual was to their society. No other society, except
perhaps the Japanese, have been so tightly bound. Many here would
not approve of such a tightly woven fabric between individual
and society, but I think that it is always important to remember
that we are embedded within the society, that we created:
we must use it, work with it (can even try to transform it),
if we, as humans/transhumans want to grow.
<begin LONG quote>
"When they [the Greeks] wished to discuss the perfect society, or
rather, the perfect life for human beings in society, they did not
have first to settle such business questions as whether the city or
groups of private citizens should manage the gas and tramways, or
what should be the proportion between direct and indirect taxation.
[..] They could leave on one side as irrelevant the familiar modern
problems of material organization and give their undivided attention
to 'those most interesting objects to be met with in life, human
beings'. So they lingered over such subjects as how to secure a
right relation between the sexes, or how to find the artist his
proper place in society, over the influence of professions upon
character, or of environment and example upon the young, discussing
them sometimes wisely and sometimes crudely, but always freshly and
sincerely: and it is humans along that never grow state, Greek
speculation on these topics is fruitful and suggestive to us still.
Strictly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a problem of
material organization. All problems, from gas and tramways to
education and women's rights, are human problems, concerned with
people rather than with things. Even dividends and output would not
matter if there were no one to receive them. Yet men often act as if
they had forgotten this elementary truth.
Here we come upon another characteristic present-day difficulty
which the Greek thinkers were spared - the increase in the scale and
range of the modern world and of the sphere embraced by the modern
thinker. What to Plato and Aristotle were problems of city life,
bounded by the walls of the country town in which they lived, are
now removed for the modern thinker to the wider and more complex
sphere of national and international life. In other words, these
problems have not only grown in scale but, by so doing, they have
changed in character.
It is this impersonality of the world in which their thought is
forced to move which tempts modern political thinkers to stop one
step short of reality, to think in terms of things instead of
pushing the problem further back and thinking in terms of human
beings. An educational administrator, for instance, is inclined when
he discusses education, to think more of desks and blackboards and
apparatus and new buildings and teachers' salaries, than of children
and teachers; or to think of children and teachers, not as
individual living souls, but as so much accumulated human material.
The Greeks were not thus in danger of losing touch with the living
world around them. The social discussion never outran the natural
range of their senses and emotions; it it was always fresh and vivid
and personal, always invested with the feeling of reality which
springs from a close and evident relations between the intellect and
the objects of its thought.
[...]
It is well nigh impossible for us to think ourselves back into the
unearthly quietness and conservatism of this old Greek world which
has for ever passed away, into a civilized society from which the
stress and hurry and complexity and ceaseless change and 'progress'
of to-day are wholly absent. Yet this is what we must do if we would
put ourselves in the mood to understand the economic basis of Greek
society. We must get behind the Industrial Revolution, which has
altered the daily life of ordinary people more profoundly than any
other change since recorded history begin, behind wholesale
production and machinery and the rush of new patents and processes,
back into a sequestered and stable world where competition and
unemployment are unknown terms, where hardly any one is working
precariously for money wages or a salary, where life goes on
without visible change or desire of change from generation to
generation and century to century.
[...]
But surely the people in our Greek city were men like ourselves and
subject to the same human impulses and weaknesses? Surely the blood
of the 'economic man' ran in their veins, and like all sensible
people to-day, they desired to be rich?
That is just the point where the older Greeks differed most
profoundly from ourselves, or rather from the interpretation of the
modern man, given by some of his nineteenth-century leaders. The
older Greeks did not want to be rich for the sake of riches. They
were too sane and well-balanced to harbor such a desire. One of the
central facts about their life, expressed over and over again, in
their art and conduct and institutions, was their sense of harmony
and proportion. They had overcome the wild passion of the child or
the savage for 'too much'. They only desired riches when they had
convinced themselves that riches were necessary to social
well-being. They had sense enough to correlate the values of wealth
and well-being. [...] The older Greek tried to be faithful to the
doctrine that Solon preached, and, judged by any modern standard of
comparison, they were faithful indeed. What drove them into
economic activity and into the development we shall to trace was not
simply our senseless greed for more, a kind of insatiable craving
which would have run counter to some of their deepest instincts, but
the sober conviction that they needed wealth for the purposes of
their civilization. In other words, civilization, which means not
yachts and motor-cars but a refined and many-sided and effort-loving
society, costs money, and money cannot be had without economic
activity. So there is a point in the growth of every developing
society when it is driven by its own needs, however reluctant it may
be, into the atmosphere of money-getting, with all its attendant
temptations towards wrong standards of living. This is what happened
to the Greeks, and, above all, to Athens, just at the culminating
point of her greatness."
<end quote>
==========================
Amara
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." --Anais Nin
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