What I read: I can only promise you that it's going to get weirder by Noah Smith (excellent Substack). Published January 19, 2022.
Let me preface this post by saying that I work and have worked for a long time in the technology field, specifically software, from desktop to enterprise levels. That fact likely creates a bias in me about technology. I’ve worked off and on in various roles in the computer software field since the early 1980s. When you’ve made a lot of your income from technology it’s inevitable it colors your perspective. I don’t think technology for technology’s sake is always a good thing, but I’m generally one who readily embraces it.
When I read this article, it struck me that it spoke directly to the oddness of some people's resistance to technological change while those same people go about their daily lives utilizing the technology that they might have ranted angrily about just a few years prior.
I type this on my laptop that contains more computing technology in its thin frame than was in an entire room of such technology at the computer's inception. We carry around smartphones that rival the power of mainframe computers not that long ago and most of us can't imagine our lives without them.
Tell a young person today that the only way we used to meet and arrange connections was by phone call and going out somewhere like a bar and watch them recoil in disbelief. Technology always advances over time, humanity adapts to that technology, and it becomes entirely normal and humdrum until the next big breakthrough or device ups the ante, restarting the introduction > adoption > acceptance cycle.
We are now entering an era when artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics are going to upend a lot of what we now do each day. It will change lives, wipe out entire professions, and seem entirely normal.
If you're a young person, someday you will voice command your device that you want to travel to a certain address. The autonomous car will arrive at your door. After you unlock the vehicle with your phone you’ll get inside and the car will ask you what kind of music you like to hear or if you want silence. The car will drop you off at your destination and take off ready to pick up another passenger. To reduce street clogging and because many city roads will by then have been turned into plazas where only people and bicycles move about without cars, the autonomous car will probably park itself in one of the many spaces reserved just for such vehicles since so few people use cars while within a city or large town anymore. This will all seem 100% normal, just as normal as the text you're going to send or receive later today on your smartphone.
Admittedly, the first technological development Noah Smith highlights in his article is artificial wombs that might reduce the physical and economic burden of child-bearing, promote greater equality, and perhaps help stabilize fertility rates. That’s not exactly a topic that’s likely to go unchallenged or avoid serious and heated discussion.
I’m not going to haggle over the pros and cons of artificial wombs specifically here. I think Smith presents his stance eloquently and I’ll leave him to it.
Maybe in China the government will try to force womb tanks on people to try to raise the birth rate; in America, it’ll start out as a luxury purchased by the rich and the infertile, and then in a few years we’ll have online socialists angrily demanding that the tech be provided free of charge to all via a program of universal health care. Eventually we’ll wonder how we ever did things any other way.
And this.
But in order to embrace biotech innovation, we need to understand that it’s not really any weirder or more unnatural than the kinds of innovation we’ve been almost continually embracing for a century and a half now. Technology isn’t becoming weird; technology has always been weird. In fact, in a very deep sense, that’s what technology does — by increasing human capabilities, it changes the fundamental shape of human life.
The remainder of Smith’s article addresses what’s really interesting to me, how technology appears, becomes the fodder of churn and sometimes scorn, then is subsequently adopted and considered entirely normal in one’s day-to-day experience. As he puts it, it “weirds the world.”
In other words, what it means to live a human life — at least in a technologically advanced country — has fundamentally and radically changed over the years. The lives of 1980 would seem as bizarre to someone who grew up with social media and cell phones and the lives of 1900 would seem to someone who grew up with cars, television, and electric appliances.
Technology doesn’t just increase human capabilities. Technology weirds the world.
Smith then elaborates on just some of the technological innovations that while groundbreaking and sometimes remarkable at their inception are now considered mainstays in our lives.
GPS. Remember not having that? I can’t remember the last time I looked at a map to drive or walk anywhere. I simply let my phone’s GPS guide me there.
Google Images. It’s almost motor memory at this point when I think of someplace on Earth I haven’t seen to immediately search Google Images for a photo of it.
Smartphone cameras. I recall when we carefully determined exactly what we wanted to take a photograph of because we only had a limited number of shots available on our film cameras. We even more carefully determined what we would record when we were doing so with moving film recording devices. Now I take so many photos and videos and have so much associated storage space I lose track of of them all rather easily. But they’re there when I want them.
Communicating with others. I’m old enough to remember needing to write or type a letter to someone if I wanted written communications. Phone calls were less frequent. I even recall the last vestiges of party lines and switchboard operators as part of the telephone network. Today? We tap out a text, fire off an email, chat over social media. or talk to whoever we want while walking to work using our ear buds.
Knowledge. I recall the wall of Encyclopædia Britannica volumes along the living room wall in my childhood home. If I wanted to know something, that was my first point of reference. I spent countless hours fingering through these volumes to look up things or learn something about which I was curious. Now? Wikipedia is the great world encyclopedia and there are an abundance of information, knowledge, and instructional sources online available with a few clicks. I still love libraries though. I hope those never disappear.
Community and connection. While by no means do I consider social media a full replacement for in-person connections, it has absolutely connected people in powerful ways (and we know the downsides of social media too all too well) and the ability to reach out to people, even relative strangers, has indeed helped in many instances to foster community and enable deeper connections.
Porn. Well, he does mention it. And as the famous song lyric from the wonderful Broadway musical, Avenue Q, suggests, “The internet is for porn.” While it might not now be specifically for porn, no one who dives into the early or current traffic data for accessing adult content can arrive at any conclusion than there’s a lot of porn being easily consumed from the comfort of people’s laptops and phones.
Individual discoverability. This might not be the best of ramifications for technology, but your personal history will follow you regardless of where you move. This is why I always tell people never act any way online that you wouldn’t be entirely comfortable with just about anyone seeing (work, family, and so on).
Vaccines. This is certainly a hot button issue right now, but it shouldn’t be. I still have the small scar from the smallpox vaccine given to me at my school. They just did it, because it protected lives. I’m grateful for that. Thanks to the varicella vaccines, chicken pox is mostly non-existent. And of course, COVID-19 vaccines have already saved countless lives and are allowing us to return to some degree of daily normalcy without every hospital overrun with dead bodies.
Smith also mentions parents can now quickly know the sex of their baby if they so desire, but I hope the point has been made that we already live with technologies that at the time were life changing and unthinkable just a few years prior.
One might consider biotech advances entirely different than computing and computerized device advances, but they’re not really.
Well, first of all, no, I don’t think it’s that different; I think our experiences of life are what count, and whether these experiences change because of things that affect our bodies or things that affect the world around us doesn’t make a huge amount of difference. But that’s a bit beside the point, because technology is already changing our bodies and our physical experiences of life, and indeed has already changed it deeply
The bottom line is that technology dramatically alters our lives constantly and that’s not going to change. Using Smith’s wording, life is just going to get “weirder.”
Ultimately, that’s how technology changes human life — step by step, piece by piece. You barely realize how much life has changed until decades later you look back and can barely remember what it was like before the changes. For better or for worse, that’s the course that modern industrial innovative scientific society has set us on. Our lives have been continuous processes of technological change since we were born, and that will be true for the rest of our lives. We can and should do our utmost to make sure that those changes create a better society — one that’s more prosperous, equal, happy and free — instead of a dystopia. We get to choose whether our future is more like Aldous Huxley’s or more like Lois McMaster Bujold’s.
But one thing’s for certain: There’s no stopping this bus. I can only promise you that it’s going to get weirder.
Now, let me get back to my laptop on which I’m working since I need to log on to a meeting enabled by technology as I scroll my Instagram account so I can find out what my friends are up to.
Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Let’s enjoy the magic all around us.
You can use this link to access all my writings and social media and ways to support my work.
A lot of people bemoan technology as something that is inscrutable, something that requires a PhD in nerdology to understand. (Try explaining how to use a Google search page to my 85-year-old father!) But it's not just that. My then-97-year-old grandmother once told me that the greatest invention in her life was the washing machine. But for me, it's medical advances. Twenty years ago, my own mother was out of the hospital five days after an emergency quintuple bypass when that used to be a month's stay. You typically walk on the same day as a hip replacement and you're out of the hospital in a day or two. We can make breathtakingly detailed images to help diagnose and treat what used to be intractable problems (such as at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/worlds-brightest-x-rays-reveal-covid-19-damage-to-the-body). While not all innovations are welcome, but most of us evolve to use the tools available to us and I'm happy about that.