Humanity and technology

I have a recollection of a scene in a Star Trek NG film, where there was a comment on our relationship with machines. The speaker was making a complex textile piece and expressed the feeling that when we replace anything with technology, we reduce our humanity.

Certainly when things are made by hand, to be kept and cherished we have a very different relationship with them to items made industrially to be thrown away. Ideas of fashion and consumerism depend on having no longevity in our possessions. 

There are things machines do very well, and I find I’m wholly in favour of using technology for things we otherwise have no means of doing. Medical technology is an excellent case in point here. Using machines to make life possible and comfortable for people strikes me as being a really good idea. Using devices to do the bits of jobs that are efforty but don’t give you much is worth a thought. Cooking from scratch but having a food blender can make a lot more sense than having to hand mash or whisk everything. Having workarounds for things your body can’t do opens up more possibilities.

I love the internet, and I greatly appreciate the things computers allow us to do. Books work far better for being easier to distribute and I see no advantage in books being something you have to meticulously copy out by hand. Clearly sometimes the slowest way is not the best way.

It seems to me that there’s a question to ask here about whether mechanising a process gives us something truly helpful, or takes something away from us. I think it’s also worth asking to what degree the ‘mechanised’ things really are that, and to what degree work is actually being done by people obliged to work like machines. I’m thinking about workers in Amazon warehouses and clothing sweatshops here, to take some obvious examples. The way in which people are deployed to support tech driven industry can be brutal.

Clothes are to a large degree made by people. Mechanised clothes making involves dangerous work places, long hours and little pay. We haven’t spared anyone any drudgery or misery by this means. Factory floor work is often tedious and the environments are unpleasant – it’s not work I’ve done personally, but I know people who have. While mechanising can reduce the number of jobs in such spaces, it doesn’t result in nice working environments, necessarily, or well paid jobs, or meaningful jobs, which inclines me to think that we’re going about it all in entirely the wrong way.