Competing with Machines
There are still many people around who resist using a computer. The fear of technology and the resistance to the change it brings is not new.
In nineteenth century England, Ned Ludd, a famous English malcontent, felt so threatened by machines that he destroyed a stocking knitting machine at the factory where he worked. People who followed his example became known as Luddites.
One of the reasons for some of the modern day antipathy to machines may be the realization that in many ways the machine can perform much better than we can. For example, we can only hear between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second, but a machine can respond to frequencies from one to one million cycles per second. We can only see colours in a limited region from red to violet, but machines can respond to everything from X-rays to long radio waves. We can only survive close to atmospheric pressure, but machines can operate in a vacuum or a hundred thousand atmospheres. We last less than a hundred years, where as machines can operate for up to a thousand years often in extreme conditions.
So where do we have the edge on machines? Well: we’re versatile; we have automatic repair systems built into the body. Moreover, machine production requires a factory, but for us, reproduction is usually fairly easy!
So next time you feel threatened by a machine, remember Ned, and take it easy.
People have varied reactions to technology. Some, like Ned, would like to live the simple life - relatively machine-free. Others embrace new forms of technology. For them it is like an ongoing supply of Christmas toys. Many find themselves somewhere between these two positions (depending perhaps on their frustration level with cranky machines on any particular day!)
Machines are tools which have revolutionized the way we communicate, cook, perform scientific experiments, transport ourselves, deliver medical treatments, and build, to name but a few. There seems little chance that this field of machine research and development will stall. Machines do make our lives easier. They even make possible things we could not do ourselves.
Machines are not however, an unmixed blessing. We choose to invest our time and money in them because we believe that the benefits they offer are worth it. At the same time, having access to a machine increases our expectations and standards. For example, the expectations for household cleanliness rose as we developed clothes washers and vacuum cleaners and hot water tanks. Similarly, the fact that you are accessing the Internet means that your ability to tap into knowledge worldwide is now a part of your expectations in life. This wasn’t so in your parents’ day when knowledge was limited by the availability of local experts and by the books in local libraries.
Another implication of having machines and technology is that they require us to make ethical choices on their use. By putting before us options and possibilities which didn’t exist before, technologies call for us to ask new questions or rework old answers. This is particularly so in today’s society when we struggle with the micro-technologies of the biological sciences - cloning, stem cell research, genetic modification. We have to wrestle with the appropriate use and limitations of their place in our society. We will need to ask some deep questions about what it means to be human. We will have to think morally about technology.
Professor Leon Kass, a medical doctor and biochemist is leading the US Presidential Council on Bioethics. He has this to say: By bioethics I mean the domain of difficulties that arise when human life as ordinarily lived is challenged by ideas and practices coming from modern biomedical science and technology....We need thoughtful reflection about the riches and goodness (the ethics) of human life (bios), as they might be fostered and threatened by these new advances.
He further points out that the “challenges that confront us are not mainly issues of good versus evil but rather issues of competing goods.”
As we consider modern machinery and technology we realize how far we have come since Ned Ludd’s attack on an industrial knitting machine. Today, we find ourselves debating not merely the nature of human work but of our very humanity itself.
Above quotes from: June 10, 2002, Vol. 46, No. 7, Page 42
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/007/5.42.html
David Humphreys and Debbie Hughes
© August 2004
