Our species is nothing without technology. From the first pointed sticks to Voyager I now transmitting from interstellar space, humans stand (mostly) alone in using abstract ideas to overcome our biological limitations and to craft the world around us to satisfy our needs and desires.
We have come to regard future technological advancement as an inevitability, some inherent chronological fate for which we must wait impatiently, tapping our toes and sighing heavily as we fumble through this uncomfortable adolescence, narrowly avoiding self-extinction and holding on juuust long enough to sort it all out. Surely the next technological advancement will save the planet, and the next one will eradicate hunger, and the next one will usher in our well-deserved Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.
There is no question that “technology”, in the broadest use of the word, is beneficial. Fire, clay, medicine, electricity, quantum computing… every rung on the ladder of human history has propelled us skyward from the animal plane ever-further into the realm of gods… the very gods we invented in order to ascribe our brief existences with purpose and meaning beyond the simple role of genetic replicators.
And so with every rung that we ascend, every limit we erase, we redefine what it is to be human. Already from these great heights, we have long lost sign of and can hardly remember our original forms, so far below.
Is this inherently bad? Are we not overthrowing the tyrannical fascism of nature? Whatever setbacks we may endure on this uncharted path, are we not inching towards an egalitarian democracy? Although our biological evolution may have stalled long ago, we have continued evolving as a super-organism and transcending to a higher plane of existence, gaining ever deeper knowledge of the universe and perhaps creating entirely new forms of consciousness, as we are slowly subsumed by an omnipotent, omniscient singularity that ultimately promises us immortality.
Certainly, we are aiming for the throne of those gods we invented.
But there is a cost to this progress, a cost accumulated so gradually that it escapes recognition… to borrow a useful (but ultimately untrue) apalogue, we are the frogs to civilization’s slowly boiling water. The Agricultural Revolution gave us a relatively stable food supply, but rendered us stationary and dulled our senses. The Industrial Revolution unleashed unthinkable productivity and churned out superficial quality-of-life improvements for the masses, but it stripped us of individuality, community, and artisanry, to say nothing of the incalculable damage and destruction done to our planet.
Now, in the span of just sixty-odd years, the Digital Revolution has rendered the world unrecognizable and incomprehensible to our ancestors from just a mere century before. We have enthusiastically embraced its conveniences, even as it has reshaped our cognition and mental wiring. We have unquestioningly believed that it is a tool for connectivity, though it continually diminishes human interaction and replaces it with a problematic facsimile that leaves us all more isolated and alienated.
Is this progress inevitable? Was our species ontologically ordained to create infinity and to postulate the very birth of the universe on our journey of transcendence to a singularity? Is all organic biology merely a pupal form of existence until we reach our intended maturity as beings of pure energy? Or is all life a cosmic fluke and our particular evolutionary path gave us hyper-developed brains as a survival mechanism, the byproducts of which were self-awareness and a fear of mortality, which in turn produced science and religion and everything in between as a way of “defeating” mortality?
Given these brains that were forged in the evolutionary furnace over countless millennia, would it be possible as humans to be satisfied with the unknown? To rely on lore and mythos to explain the world’s mysteries, to accept our limitations and reflect soberly on the propositions of technological progress and reject them? The small, traditional communities that continue to exist around the world suggest that perhaps we can, although their dwindling numbers suggest not. And while a small group can choose to do so, the super-organism of the larger population becomes its own emergent system, unable to consider the branching consequences of each small step it takes.
The more relevant question is: Does any of it matter materially? We have created countless tools to alleviate our suffering and even mostly our mere discomfort (at least for some percentage of our global population), but , we continue to find new ways to suffer, to inflict harm, wasting away most of our waking hours fulfilling obligations that bring us no fulfillment until we expire. Surely our trials and hardships are different now than they were a thousand years ago, but are they really any fewer?
This is a neo-Luddism argument, clearly. The romanticizing of some noble essence de l’humanité that has gradually eroded as we clothed ourselves, mastered nature, and eventually became sanitized, hermetically-sealed, gadget-obsessed, anxiety-ridden, shells, regurgitating pop-culture references and manufacturing conflict in a desperate attempt to feel some semblance of connection to our lost selves and the communities of our ancestral ghosts.
Perhaps the exaggerated caricature described above is simply a “growing pain” as we build towards the next definition of humanity, one that is finally liberated from the messiness of our obsolete biological forms and all their shortcomings.
On a more existential level, is the end goal to escape biology completely and achieve immortality in a digital singularity? Will that be our ultimate rejection of memetic replication, or our ultimate embrace of it? For a self-actualized creature, death is a threshold to an infinite unknown which cannot be meaningfully comprehended, and is therefore understandably terror-inducing. But, is the concept of “infinite” existence– whether in a traditional religious afterlife or a modern virtual metaverse– any less terrifying?
