Technology presents various potential harms to modern society and contributes to discrimination and creating gaps between people.
Harmful Aspects of Technology:
Technology, while offering opportunities, also carries significant risks and negative consequences:
- Technology is seen as potentially reducing human beings to "technical animals" or "technological man/woman" due to its dominance over life.
- It can limit people's outlook, leading to consumer, materialistic, and military orientations.
- The dominance of technology raises ethical, legal, and social issues.
- Technologisation poses the danger of the commodification of life, treating human beings as commodities or objects for use.
- While intended to increase human possibilities, undesirable consequences are recognised, and technology is not always considered neutral.
- Technology can contribute to human hubris (excessive pride leading to destruction).
- Despite tremendous progress, the fundamental problem remains at a moral or spiritual level, and humanity's inability to handle this is extremely dangerous given the technology at our disposal.
Specific technologies discussed in the sources with potential harmful aspects include:
- Chaos Theory: Warns that sensitive dependence on initial conditions can lead to bifurcations causing serious consequences, such as an uprising leading to war or nuclear war. It suggests that very complicated systems involving new technologies can break down unpredictably.
- Nanotechnology: Involves profound social and environmental risks. It is an enabling technology for biotech, which brings risks. There is a risk of domination by nano-robos, making human intervention difficult or impossible. Hazards are posed by inhaling nanoparticles. Environmentalists question the safety of nanoparticles. Potential dangers include rampant nano-devices, military weapons, and invasive surveillance. Philosophers predict a need to negotiate significant uncertainties with its advent. A potential disaster is tiny self-reproducing machines spreading worldwide in a 'gray goo' calamity.
- Genetic Engineering/Biotechnology: Offers both benefits and demerits. It is described as a radical technology that breaks fundamental genetic barriers between species, including humans, animals, and plants. Genetic manipulation is questioned as potentially "playing God" or "tampering with nature". Cloning can risk individuality and diversity, potentially making man "just another man-made thing". Gene therapy may manifest side effects, and manipulating genes is complex. Non-reproductive cloning requires abortion, as life is created specifically for the purpose of destroying it for parts. It raises questions about what is considered normal, a disability, or a disease, and who decides this.
- Human Genome Project (HGP): While a great achievement, it has potential for abuse. It can be misused due to unethical, immoral, and anti-social elements. Knowledge from the HGP may be used in ways not related to health. It raises questions about human responsibility, free will versus genetic determinism, and concepts of health and disease. Concerns exist regarding genetically modified foods (GMFs) and microbes. The history of eugenics under the Nazi regime shows the potential for horrifying misuse of genetic science.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, and Cyborgs: Coupled with nanotechnology and biotechnology, they enable human beings to drastically redefine themselves. The danger is that human identity may become superfluous, and cyborgs may take over human destiny. An advanced computer might be superior to humans. Scholars argue that humanity may eventually be supplanted and replaced by AI or artificial life, leading to a technological singularity. An AI capable of recursively improving itself beyond human intelligence is seen as a means to singularity. The integration of technology into the human body (cyborgs, fyborgs) leads to an almost total technologisation.
Technology Creating Discrimination and Gaps:
The sources highlight several ways technology contributes to discrimination and widens societal gaps:
- Technology limits outlook to consumer and materialistic orientations, which can influence social dynamics.
- Nanotechnology will inevitably produce inequalities in society.
- There is a concern about the monopoly of technology and control over many nations and social groups.
- Research in fields like nanotechnology and genetics is often carried out based on the interests of advanced nations and market forces in corporate laboratories. This leads to the privatisation of science and a staggering concentration of power in the hands of giant multinational enterprises.
- The commercialisation of technology gives these corporations greater monopoly control.
- Nanotechnology is predicted to reinforce global inequalities between the rich and the poor, increasing disparity as only those with sufficient wealth may have access to the technology.
- There is a negative vision of a future where the ruling elite has unlimited surveillance capacity at the nanoscale, leading to an Orwellian scenario.
- Genetic tests from the HGP present issues regarding their delivery to the public and medical communities, who are often unaware of their social implications.
- Patients taking genetic tests face significant risks of jeopardizing their employment or insurance status, and these risks can extend to their family members.
- The likelihood of genetic technologies being available only to some people but not others, determined largely by wealth, raises profound social issues. Being denied access to beneficial technologies is a threat.
- Regulating access to HGP information and technologies is difficult due to international differences in opinion.
- Genetic discrimination is a fear, potentially leading to a population of socially marginalised individuals unable to obtain jobs, insurance, or healthcare. Insurance companies may use genetic information in risk assessment and refuse coverage or increase costs for those with "risky" genes.
- Public insurance schemes may face pressure to make policy decisions based on genetic predisposition within populations.
- The high cost of technologies like gene therapy may make them available only to the wealthy, creating an ever-widening gap between groups in society based on both money and genetic inheritance.
- Employers might use genetic information to screen out workers based on susceptibility or perceived behavioural traits.
- The "gentrification" of life, interpreting individual choices and behaviours (like alcoholism or aggressive behaviour) as ultimately constituted at the genetic level, could affect how differences are perceived.
- The use of genetic technology might make society less accepting of people who are different, questioning how society will react to children with preventable genetic disorders if cures are available.
- It raises the possibility of a "campaign against difference" or using technology as a stratagem to create a new kind of inferiority. The potential for eugenics, aiming to eradicate certain genetic variations, is alarming and raises questions about demeaning those who currently carry those genes and defining acceptable diversity.
- The potential emergence of a "trans-human species" due to genetic manipulation raises questions about the future of present Homo sapiens, who might be looked down upon.
- Technology forces questions about whether humans can still speak of individuality and dignity apart from the social structures that shape them.
- A philosopher's role is to bring these concerns to public discourse, as humanity must collectively decide on these issues, not just "experts".
In summary, the sources describe concerns that contemporary technology, particularly in areas like genetics, nanotechnology, and AI, brings risks of reducing human identity, unpredictable disasters, military dangers, environmental harm, and the commodification of life. Furthermore, the control, cost, and application of these technologies in a profit-driven and unequal world threaten to exacerbate existing social and economic divides, lead to genetic discrimination, limit access for the less wealthy, reinforce corporate power, and potentially make society less accepting of human diversity.