Technological Tsunamis: How We Forget
By Ed Ayres
01 April, 2011
Countercurrents.org
With the nuclear disaster in Japan , once again we are forced to pause in our rush to the future, and wonder—briefly—whether the technologies we humans have unleashed prove that Pandora's Box was not just a myth. But if past behavior is any indication, our anxieties will soon fade and the rush will resume.
We too easily forget, if indeed we ever recognize to begin with, that the history of human invention has been one of relentlessly repeated cycles of hubris and catastrophe. And that isn't a fact of merely academic interest. As our power to manipulate both our physical and our mental experience increases, the catastrophes are escalating. Growing legions of scientists—the last people you'd expect to be Luddites—now worry out loud that as a species, we may have gone too far.
In the past 70 years, particularly, we've experienced three major technological tsunamis—times of intense public anxiety about whether our industries should be allowed free rein to exploit new technological powers to whatever extent pleases their investors. With each of these waves, the investors—and the public officials they fund—have paid sober lip service to the victims of technological catastrophe, but behind the scenes have been annoyed by the delays to their business plans, and have spent heavily to dissipate public worries.
The first of the tsunamis came in the 1950s, following the wave of new inventions that brought the marvels of time-saving “conveniences” to post-World War II America. Washing machines liberated housewives from laborious scrubbing and wringing; new cars liberated us all from walking to the trolley or train. A thousand new inventions eliminated work not only for housewives but for manufacturers, builders, and retailers. But then, with all that, came the shadow of automation . Millions of people who had made a good living working with their hands lost their jobs. Fortunately, as the structure of the economy changed, new jobs appeared and the fear of automation passed. Or did it?
The second tsunami began in the 1960s, with the warnings by environmental scientists that some of our most powerful technologies were not as safe as we had thought. In the 50s, we had all heard the PR slogan “Better living through chemistry,” and photos from that time show smiling nurses spraying grateful citizens with clouds of DDT to keep off the mosquitoes. Rachel Carson's landmark book, Silent Spring , came as an abrupt wake-up. Three years later, Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed brought attention to the dark side of cars, which were killing more Americans each year in crashes than would die in seven years of the Vietnam War. And it was also in that decade that the nuclear physicist Theodore (Ted) Taylor, who had designed the largest fission atomic bomb ever exploded (the SuperOralloy, 37 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb), came to the realization that the nuclear technology he'd helped to develop was indeed a Pandora's Box. Taylor began doing intensive research documenting that what Rachel Carson had revealed about the careless dispersal of chemicals was also happening—albeit less visibly—with nuclear information and materials. In the 70s, he wrote a journal (which I helped edit) detailing the hundreds of ways nuclear materials were being—or could be—leaked, spilled, diverted, or stolen from both the military and the new nuclear power industry by what he called “non-national” organizations or terrorists. Al Qaeda was not yet on the horizon. This second technological tsunami— unforeseen consequences —was under way. Alarming disclosures of unforeseen consequences quickly spread to the realms of industrial agriculture, biological engineering, and the burning of fossil fuels.
The third techno-tsunami has only just begun. A seemingly trivial indicator is the recent research finding that taxi drivers who have been using GPS devices have a smaller hippocampus (the brain's reasoning center) than those who have had to find their way around town the old way. In our hunter-gatherer past, early humans evidently developed acute abilities to build “mental maps” of their forest or grassland habitat. Now that we have GPS, those abilities go unused and may be starting to atrophy. Similarly, we have calculators replacing our basic math skills; “smart” cars which anticipate and avoid collisions relieving us of some of our need to be smart drivers; medical loop recorders and other devices reducing our need to understand our own body signals; weather reports reducing our need to understand the significance of certain cloud formations or sudden changes in temperature or wind direction. We are being systemically dumbed down. Automation is back, like one of those pesticide-resistant pests that now plague our crops.
Perhaps most dangerous of all, in part because you wouldn't expect it, are the technologies of entertainment. Video games and “virtual football” keep kids away from outdoor physical play of the kind that has nurtured the development of the human organism as an integrated whole for the past million years. If our technologies increasingly cut us off—from our environment, our bodies, and even from key functions of our brains—we will be ill equipped to adapt to the rising pressures of disrupted climate, nuclear accidents, chemical pollution run amok, and all the other unforeseen impacts of technology that, in fact, have not gone away at all. The three tsunamis have merged into one mother of a perfect storm. And if we're to have any hope of coping successfully with the first two, it is this third one, the one that replaces and shuts down our native sensibilities, that we will probably have to tackle first.
Ed Ayres publishes the website www.willhumansendure.com . He is a retired editorial director of the Worldwatch Institute (publisher of the annual State of the World). He is also the author of "God's Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future".
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