Our amazing modern technology

Kirk Ericson | Mar 24, 20220

When people remark about how amazing our modern technology is — sometimes after discovering something else their cellphones can do — I wonder what time in human history they’re comparing “modern” to.

Is modern technology more amazing than inventions of the 1920s: television, the altimeter and liquid-fueled rockets?

How about the Renaissance when the printing press, eyeglasses and the musket emerged?

What about the Han Dynasty in China when paper and the blast furnace were created?

How about the first century A.D. when carbon steel was likely invented in present-day Tanzania?

Are they thinking modern technology is more amazing than the era that produced the internal combustion engine? The wheel? Gunpowder? The flush toilet? Metallurgy?

What about prehistoric days when amazing modern technology was a stout, well-balanced club that meshed with the arc of a human arm, making the club an excellent tool for mashing heads? The cave-dweller who figured that out probably got a lot of congratulatory grunts that day. Maybe they all walked around, knuckles scraping the dirt, thinking how modern they were.

I know.

“Amazing modern technology” is a figure of speech and people who use that phrase are only making an idle comment about how remarkable some newly invented application of science is. But figures of speech reveal assumptions of how we view the world, and in this case, it reveals our sense of self-regard.

We humans in the 21st century are much like any prior generation: We think we live in the most modern, technologically advanced world ever, which is, of course, true, but it’s so constantly true that it is meaningless. It’s like being on a road trip and pronouncing, “This is the farthest we’ve ever been from where we started.”

We are merely the latest installment in a long line of two-legged creatures with magic thumbs and self-reflective brains who spend a lot of time wondering how we can improve our lives.

As a species, we’re a rare branch on the animal tree of life. We humans come and go and some do manage to leave a folder in civilization’s file cabinet, but the future rarely regards individuals as being as important as they regarded themselves.

Our “amazing modern technology” takes us in directions that can kill us and save us. It’s like what some comedy writer had TV dad Homer Simpson say: “To alcohol! The cause of and the solution to all of life’s problems.”

I was dead-stop stuck in traffic for nearly 30 minutes some years ago in a lane approaching an intersection of two arterials. I was stopped there because runoff from a deluge had flooded the intersection, reducing the four packed lanes in every direction into four unmoving lanes in every direction. It wasn’t possible to go forward or backward, left or right.

The technology that helped create that mess — the internal combustion engine, the harnessing of electricity, and the ability to mass-produce asphalt and concrete — has also helped produce a standard of comfort that prior humans would envy. But the production of carbon dioxide from those technologies could also end up being the death of us, if Vlad the Truly Awful doesn’t get us first.

But technology could also be what saves us from that carbon-producing technology. Now that would truly be amazing modern technology.

■ Contact Kirk Ericson at [email protected]