Technology in the Modern Age
Spring lingers in Alaska and the glaciers in the Sierras are melting - bringing with the sense of possible doom as well as a reminder that the technology that is the lifeblood of the modern world comes at a distinct price. But while we might think that the hand-wringing that is present in at least some circles about what we - and our machines - hath wrought, this concern about the relationship between technology and human history is in fact an old one, having been heard at least as a faint strain in Western discourse since the classical world and - as the readings for this paper suggest - rising to a chorus by the beginning of the 20th century as the effects of the Industrial Revolution were The idea of technology and its effects cannot be separated from the concept of work, for the purpose of technology, we are always told, is to make us all work less. But this is demonstrably not true: We are all still working as hard as we can. There are in fact are two ways to look at technology and its relationship to work, at least if we are to follow the standard Western dualism of considering the world in term of
edu/resources/texts/adams_h_eha/eha_ch25. Henry Adams, writing at the last turn of the century, would make this contrast in his work "The Dynamo and the Virgin", for his comparison of the power of the new age of the machine in America and the ancient power of the goddess in the Old World is simply another phrasing of this same dilemma. But Searle argued that the leap from human labor to machine labor was one that could never actually quite be made because labor directed by the human mind down to human hands would always be essentially different from machine labor: Above all, consciousness is a biological phenomenon. Given how hard people work in the 21st century, even in affluent countries like the United States, it is hard not to imagine that this second model has a great deal to be said for it. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. As more and more of the product that the world makes is information based, we have become both the producer and the produced. However, though consciousness is a biological phenomenon, it has some important features that other biological phenomena do not have. ) Modernity is a trope, an idea that a group of thinkers made up to try to understand what life meant in an age in which the machines had finally won, in which not only the heavy lifting would be done by mechanical devices but also the thinking would be done by computers and the art would be made by machines with no eyes. Searle, in "Consciousness As a Biological Problem" would not go as far as Turkle, for he understands in a way that Turkle does not seem to, that the mysteriousness of consciousness must lie in the biological. The first way is what might be called the traditional Christian doctrine, in which work is a punishment for original sin. Work and freedom mean very different things in a world of machines, and modernity was above all else an attempt to come to an understanding of the relationship between the human body and the machine.
Common topics in this essay:
Marx Dynamo,
Revolution England,
Past Future,
,
Adam Eve,
Industrial Revolution,
Dynamo Virgin,
Yourself Machine,
Decorum Est,
Biological Turkle,
consciousness biological,
tickles itches feelings,
pains tickles itches,
humanity defined,
biological phenomenon,
modern world,
world machines,
machine labor,
related pains tickles,
industrial revolution,
consciousness biological phenomenon,
itches feelings,
tickles itches,
related pains,
|
Acceptance Essays
