If progress is shaped by human needs, then general shifts in needs would also bring shifts in the nature of technological innovation. The tools we invent would move through the hierarchy of needs, from tools that help safeguard our bodies on up to tools that allow us to modify our internal states, from tools of survival to tools of the self.

 

The focus, or emphasis, of innovation moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill.

 

That is a quote from Nicholas Carr who a few years ago compared Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with a parallel technological innovation pyramid. Mr. Carr has recently written a book called the “Glass Cage” where he posits that much current innovation involving automation robs humans of needed use of, and development of, capabilities. Thus impoverishing human experience. Kudos to Gary for the Carr link.

At this level of generality, one would want to be cautious of taking Mr. Carr’s speculations at face value, but certainly there’s some ideas here worth pondering, and for use as brainstorming triggers. Innovation is, like all change, going to involve pluses and minuses…and be a lot more complex in it’s effects than we are aware. Thus the need of “Understanding Media” that Marshall McLuhan alerted us to… we are still trying to “grok what innovation has wrought”there.

Being able to control bacteria in the environment can prevent some serious illnesses that in the past made childhood much more of an iffy proposition. Perhaps that comes under the “Pharmaceuticals” in “Technologies of the Self” above. But by doing so, we also decrease the capability of those child’s immune systems to function best as adults. A paradox, and change is full of them.

Speaking of Maslow, the idea that civilization proceeds with intended, and unintended consequences, was very current in the 60’s. But that wasn’t the first time humans were worried about change. Confidence in everything getting better all the time through rationality began to erode in the early 20th century pointedly with Freud’s theory of the unconscious, and Einstein’s post-Newtonian universe.

Second thoughts, and buyer’s remorse, also came along in response to the industrial revolution’s effects. In literature, Dickens pointed out the costs in human suffering, DH Lawrence tried to warn us of the dehumanizing results, Hardy of what is lost moving away from an agrarian England.

Even the Age of Enlightenment had its doubters:  Voltaire‘s “Candide” satirizing the belief that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The idea of progress itself has been critiqued, and found less “solid” than generally assumed. Even evolution has been challenged as a source of ever better and “higher” levels of organisms…with the theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium”.

Today we rely on sci-fi to explore all the bad possible outcomes that “progress” can lead to. Everything that can go wrong seems to have already been explored in an episode of Star Trek, or Hollywood version of PK Dick short story. Or something like “Zardoz” or “Planet of the Apes“.

So, in our present period of great change, the effects of which we don’t have a “handle on”, and likely won’t truly grasp until well after the fact, we are going to have fears and concerns that we are “going the wrong way”. Automation and ever more AI, certainly can be scary prospects, as we simply don’t and can’t know what change will bring.

Solace might be available with the thought that it was ever thus, and human change has never come with knowledge of what it was going to lead to, or the ability to rationally and totally control change. We can’t “go back” to an earlier age or time, and we can’t stand still. So, what remains to be determined is what we can control, and what wisdom we can come by to guide our efforts.

Sounds suspiciously like the prayer of St Francis. Which we might note comes in two versions, one asking for serenity to accept what we cannot change, and another for strength to accept what we cannot change. Which is the “true and accurate” version?

And what does it imply that we have those who want serenity, and those who want strength? Matters for another post, but curious no?