The Best Part, The Worst Part

There’s no doubt that the technological changes of the last decade or so have been overwhelming.

I’m sure that our grandparents and distant ancestors said the same. As we were warned by the title of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus,” written 200 – two hundred – years ago (1818), you had to look back to the Greek story of Prometheus, a Titan and a god of fire, to see how far back the idea of the good side/bad side of technology goes. In the story of Prometheus, he steals fire from the Olympian Gods and gives the gift of technology to mankind. As it happens, this fire he has given to humankind has a positive side – warmth, cooking, changes to matter, and so on; and a bad side – weapons, destruction, pain and more. He is punished for his misdeed by being tied to a rock, where an eagle eats his liver, only to have it grow back over night and be eaten again, over and over and over, forever.

Shelley’s story of Victor Frankenstein and his transgression in creating a sentient being is her warning for human beings not to use their technological powers recklessly. Just because we can create it does not mean we should. And, while it might be argued that the fire in the story of Prometheus isn’t specifically a technology, but a naturally occurring phenomenon, it is perhaps the ability to use it, like the ability to use the naturally-occurring electricity, or sound waves, that was the problem.

I have revisited this thought many times, fascinated as I am by technological advances and the meaning of them to our daily lives, both in terms of astounding leaps forward, and the trouble they can cause, simultaneously. And I have always been respectful of Mary Shelley’s insight so many years ago, when technology, from our standpoint, was so limited.

There have been any number of lists of the greatest, or at least, most impactful, technological advances in written history, going all the way back to the wheel – which certainly can be said to have divided human civilizations into those that advanced and those that didn’t. It’s very difficult for beings as physiologically limited as humans (we can’t run very fast, have no claws or strong jaws, our skin is very vulnerable, and our children need care for about 6-7 years) to advance much beyond hunter-gatherers without some form of wheel so that the power of animals such as oxen and horse can be brought to bear. Though some would argue to the contrary, and though the wheel has been used both for simple agriculture and for advanced warfare, it’s hard to find too much to hate about the wheel.

But moving forward to more complex technological advances, we can look at something as change-inducing as refrigeration. On the plus side, the ability to cool has enabled us to store a wider variety of foods for longer periods of time – and that means we spend less time shopping, processing, and preparing it than ever before. Refrigeration has also enabled us to open geographical areas to development that were otherwise unavailable as they were simply too hot for people to comfortably live in, at least in large numbers. The downside of cooling would include our emergent problem with weight gain and industrial agriculture, as well as the over-development of some rural areas that have problems obtaining water and that require high levels of (often artificial) fertilization for crop growing.

Transportation advances have included trains, planes, and automobiles. We can easily spot the benefits of being able to go greater distances in shorter periods of time, bringing people and goods across enormous expanses and opening opportunities for trade, communication, and growth. But some would complain that combustion engines aren’t good for our environment, that we become dislocated from our roots, and that these same devices that can take us on a vacation excursion can also be used for nefarious purposes like conquests and destruction of land.

The printing press (mid-1400s) has often been lauded as the means by which people broke away from ignorance and reliance on an “elite” learned class and were able to read once impossible to obtain literature, including The Bible, for themselves. Books and educations flourished, and people began to read for the joy of it as well as the work of learning. What could possibly be the downside of that? Certainly the Protestant Reformation (mid 1600s), and all of the wars and persecutions that resulted from it, was one consequence of ordinary people being able to read The Bible and not rely on the Church to interpret it for them. While people were able to access poetry and plays and Great Books, we’ve certainly also been able to spend (waste?) a lot of time on pulp fiction, comic books and things not so positive for our growth and intellectual development, and some would even point out that when print was the norm (as opposed to our digital reading), a lot of trees were sacrificed in the pursuit of profit from cheap “literature.”

Clearly, the harnessing of electricity, and some very specific uses of it, changed our lives enormously. Think of all the many useful devices we take for granted because we can plug them in to a wall socket and they do chores for us, chill our food, cook our meals, whip our egg whites or play music to entertain us. Think only of the light bulb and how much this simple thing has lightened our lives. The movie “Sommersby,” a Richard Gere vehicle that retells the old French “Return of Martin Guerre,” was shot in natural light in the interiors, which doesn’t seem like a big deal overall. But when you see how dark life was in a big old antebellum mansion in the mid-1800s with only candles and lanterns to light them, you realize what a difference is made by simply flipping a switch to illuminate our homes – not to mention factory spaces, offices, medical facilities and offices. Our days have expanded, we can read into the night, and we have the safety of street lights and outdoor home lighting. It’s more difficult to think of a downside to these devices, though some would again remind us of wasted resources, and perhaps laziness, as a penalty for our easier, brighter lives.

Communications is, without a doubt, one thing that has moved rapidly and wildly away from the spoken word, letters, and even the simple ease of a printed page, and that has changed the world in ways that are hard to frame. The telegraph, following the printing press, was a massive shift, magically moving an encoded message from “here” to “there” in the blink of an eye. Fast on its heels came the telephone, the television, the Internet, the cell phone – and today, we simply assume that WiFi and cell technology will connect us everywhere all the time, for every purpose from staying in touch with friends and family to hearing the literal up-to-the-minute news and capturing and publishing our every thought and activity via “social media.” I recall realizing how stunning the downside of all of this was when I watched a video of a young woman talking on a video to her phone as she drove. Paying little attention to the road, she (at least, we think…) had an accident, rolled her car, and tearfully announced that she had “killed her sister” in the accident. I do suspect the whole thing was a dramatization, but whether real or fake, the upside and downside of ubiquitous instant communication can be framed in one “video” clip.

There are any number of things on the horizon, from medical advances to the threats and promises of A.I., that we won’t be able to evaluate until it’s too late to stop the trajectory. But human beings, as such, are curious creatures – perhaps what Prometheus did to incur the wrath of the Gods wasn’t so much giving mankind fire, but awakening in us the urge to see what else we could do, to both our detriment and joy.

Nancy Roberts