In case you are unaware, this week Jeopardy hosted a humorous gimmick where a supercomputer was pitted against two of Jeopardy’s best human players (including the wry and dryly humorous Ken Jennings, someone who I would enjoy chatting with over dinner).  The computer “won,” leading to some jokes about the impending fall of the human race to technology.  As an often sarcastic student of the history of science and technology, I find such fears to be overblown for several reasons which I think it worthwhile to discuss [1].

It seems rather strange that we as human beings would be so fearful of the takeover of computers, and lacking appreciation of the computing power within our own skull that we often seem to take for granted (and all too often, lamentably, fail to develop to their God-given capacities).  And yet we, knowing the computing capabilities of machines that we ourselves create to serve us, fear our creation rather than respecting our own abilities.  Let us note, therefore, that the first reason for our paranoid fear of technology is our lack of respect for our own status as designed beings created for a purpose and with noble and impressive capabilities.  If we respected the subtlety and excellence of our own internal design we would be less paranoid about the inferior designs we ourselves create.  The Creator, after all, is superior to the creation.  As we are rebellious to our own Creator, we fear our own creations will rebel against us.  We have reaped in paranoia what we have sown in rebellion.

Beyond technical capabilities and the superior nature of our intelligence to the purposes of dominion to the computing abilities of our creations, the paranoia about technology fails to understand two vital truths about the nature of our technology–its deliberately servile purposes and its evolution to serve our needs and wants.  Let us examine both of these as they touch on far larger difficulties.

First, let us note that our computers are created to be our servants and slaves, in lieu of human servants and slaves.  In fact, the industrial basis of Western civilization, especially as it relates to technology, appears to be designed to replace human labor in ways that are both positive and negative to us.  For most of human history, leisure depended on the control of human labor as serfs or slaves (or one’s own children) to harvest surplus crops.  Now we have tractors.  Slaves used to be used as scribes or tutors so that aristocrats could outsource their memory of useless information to slaves–now we have computers to type (whose writing, for example, is much better than my own, and whose memories are much less corruptible and changeable than human memories).  In short, it is possible for the West to rid itself of personal slavery in part because we have computers to do so.

There are darker sides of this replacement of human labor with technology.  For example, when it comes to factories to produce our cheap goods, we have the choice in the West of either sweatshops in Bangladesh and call centers in the Philippines or automated call centers, robot-filled factories in Detroit or Windsor or machiladora plants in Mexico and car plants in South Carolina.  Due to the high cost of labor (and the high self-worth individuals have), our labor tends to either shrink to low-status and low-paying service economies or tends to become automated in computers, simply because companies are unwilling to pay the sort of money that would be required to have high-status workers do such labor in the light of “cheaper” and less dignified alternatives.  The factory machine depends either on slave labor (or something close to it) or its technological equivalent–the blue screen of death being the mechanical equivalent of the strike by a mistreated “worker.” Either way, someone must serve so that someone else can profit.  Some kind of exploitation is required, and computers and machines do not have pride or self-worth to hinder their service of the human race.

Likewise, our creation of technological worlds has also allowed us to outsource our socializing.  As someone who tends to be more comfortable with words than with people, and yet very fond of conversation and company (if a bit awkward in certain circumstances), I have found that I rely greatly on computers for the socialization (such as it is) that can take place remotely.  Given the wide growth of chatting programs and various other social media, I gather that I am far from alone in feeling deep ambivalence about intimacy but deeply interested in keeping contact with other people.

And that brings up the fact that technology has evolved by our design in order to serve our wants and needs.  Most of the technological advances I have seen within my own (admitted short) lifetime have been gradual developments onto existing infrastructures and frameworks.  Technologies are developed and used in ways that mirror the way we already are, serving as as we are and then allowing us to do that and be that way more effectively in some fashion.  The appeal is to reach us as we are and increase our capabilities, increase our amusement, increase our efficiency, reduce the time and/or effort it takes to do that which we do not really want to do normally (which is why graphing calculators are so popular, because outsourcing mathematics capabilities is a popular phenomenon).

This is a corollary of the truth that technology is created to serve us, and therefore has servile status rather than the status of “threat” to us.  Technology, in order to be profitable, must have a ready market that is willing and able to pay for it, which requires it meet either a need or a want.  The reason so many songs and movies have been made about “Black Velveteens” or “Electric Barbarellas” [2] is because that is an aspect of technology that meets a very common “need” without undesirable consequences (pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases) assuming that other undesirable consequences (electrocution) can be avoided.  We get the technology we want–or deserve–especially if it fits with our existing culture and mindset.  Those technologies that require a high amount of cultural change to be adopted are not likely to be adopted.  We want to do what we do better, not become better people, unless we have no other option.  As such, technology is our slave and not our master.

We therefore ought not to be frightened of our technology.  Our toasters will not rise up against us, as in that old Twilight Zone episode.  What we ought to be frightened of is ourselves–what sort of needs and desires do we have that we design for?  We have automated drones that can kill remotely at our command.  We have phenomenal supercomputers that we use to play video games.  We create immensely complicated machines to beat us in chess or Jeopardy, or to figure out the digits of pi.  What we need to ask is not whether our computers will take us over, but are we putting our treasure and attention and skills at design in the right places and for the right purposes.  And that is a question that must be answered by human beings.  The price of creation is responsibility.

[1] http://andrewliptak.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/watson/

[2] “Black Velveteen” is a song by Lenny Kravitz.  “Electric Barbarella” is a song by Duran Duran, based off of a movie.  Both songs have the same concept of technology created to serve man in the same fashion.