A Matter of Ethics

     After viewing Future Shock, one thing about society is clear: We may advance quickly, but the people accept change well. he author of Future Shock theorized that technology would take us places which would cause us harm. In some cases, the author may be correct, but for the most part, technology succeeds in that it brings us more good than harm. I believe that humanity has the power and the responsibility to use the advances it creates sensibly.
     When I was a small child, learning the ways of the world, my mother had a lot to teach me about how to act and behave- She would say things like "Everyone makes accidents and makes mistakes" and "You can do what you like, as long as you clean up after yourself". But the statement that perhaps stuck with me the most is "Tools are not toys; Toys are not tools". I couldn't agree more. If you play with fire, you're going to get burned, and if you bake with an E-Z Bake Oven, you'd never make it as a professional chef. In some ways we've blurred the line between tools and toys with phones that play games, musical Tesla Coils, and the U.S. Air Force's Condor, a terrifyingly fast and efficient supercomputer built out of PS3's running Linux.

     Okay, so we have potentially destructive technology. But how have we used it in the past? We haven't annihilated ourselves with nuclear bombs, we escaped the widely-feared (but fundamentally silly) Y2K, and the Large Hadron Collider did not create a black hole. So what's going on here? Why was the last generation so afraid of technology, while we seem to embrace every advance with open arms? At least one of two things has happened here: We've either become accustomed to the changes, or (more likely in my opinion) we've seen that the changes we choose to pursue have little opportunity to hurt us and great opportunity to help us.

     Rather than the android stuck in the uncanny valley invading our homes (or worse- the one that is too far past it) we've seen the Big Dog. However, one danger does exist, straight out of science fiction. Robots have the capacity to outwork us. That is, stoplight cameras may catch more lawbreakers than a town's police force. A machine on an assembly line may produce more cars per hour than the workers who previously put it together. Technology is very good at helping us, but maybe it's helping us too much. If this is the case, then perhaps more jobs should focus towards monitoring these robots. It's not an easy shift to make- someone who's been working on the assembly line for decades shouldn't be expected to entirely redefine their job, but it seems like the current generation is certainly seeing where the demand is, and if there's one thing that capitalism is good at, it's supply and demand.

     Restricting all advancements would not only be impossible, but counter-productive. With careful consideration, common sense, and some fear, I believe the people will naturally steer technology in the right direction, and we can avoid the dystopian societies projected for us in Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and Bioshock. (Although shooting fire and electricity from your hand would be pretty cool.)

Katz, Leslie. "PlayStations power Air Force supercomputer."CNET News. (2010): n. page. Web. 26 Jan. 2012.


O'Neill, Ian. "MAN-MADE (BUT VERY TINY) BLACK HOLES POSSIBLE." Space News. (2009): n. page. Web. 26 Jan. 2012.


Big Dog is a creation of Boston Dynamics, copyright 2009.
http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html

Musical Tesla Coils invented by Steve Ward and Jeff Larson