[wordup] The technologies we refuse

[Adam Shand]

From: http://www.rushkoff.com/2006/03/welcome-to-future.php

Welcome to the Future
By Douglas Rushkoff

I just spent three hours recording a special for CNN called Welcome  
to the Future, along with Jeff Greenfield, Ray Kurzweil, Mirka De  
Arellano, and the spectabulous (yes, she deserves her own adjective)  
Margaret Cho, which will air on CNN the evening of March 25.

It was a strange and long journey into various utopian and dystopian  
high-tech scenarios concerning everything from nano-bots implanted in  
two-year-olds so they can compete for places at increasingly  
selective nursery schools to why we never got to ride go carts on  
Mars even though Lost in Space was set in 1997.

I found Kurzweil brilliant but a little creepy. I'm usually on the  
gung-ho pro-technology side of discussions, so it was fun to be  
voicing some of the more cautionary concerns for a change. Of course,  
I've never really been pro-tech or anti-tech - just pro "life" (in  
the living things sense) and pro consciousness. While Mirka would  
argue against, say, genetic selection techniques on religious grounds  
(we should raise the children as God gave them to us), I was in the  
interesting position of suggesting how a balance could be struck  
between human agency and new technology. Do we *want* to choose our  
child's talents? If so, what does that say about why we want to have  
a child in the first place? Is it to have the opportunity to care for  
another human being, or simply to extend our own obsessions to  
another generation?

It all came down to "human nature" for Jeff Greenfield; you know, the  
idea that we can develop all sorts of technologies but human nature  
will stay the same, and use them for the same good and bad reasons.  
And that's when, for me, it became about the opposite: yes, human  
beings may have their biases, but so do the technologies we develop  
and implement. And we don't always know those biases when we set out  
to invent this stuff in the first place.

For example, Marconi thought radio would create understanding across  
cultures when in reality, as every media student learns, radio is  
such a "hot" medium that it gave leaders the ability to stoke mass  
racist violence in Nazi Germany and more recently in Rwanda. Does  
that mean that radio should never have been invented? Of course not -  
only that we don't always know the ways our technologies influence us  
until after they've been implemented.

Was there a take home from all this? Sure. I think we're moving into  
an era when we will define ourselves more by the technologies we  
refuse than the ones we accept.