When Is Technological Innovation Good For People?

            A key element for the development and promotion of the economies of modern industrial countries today is technological innovation.  Companies try to grab market share from one another by coming up with new improvements in their products or else entirely new products that appeal to customers.  In my articles, I have discussed how the technology embedded in these products can have harmful effects on humans.  But the question is does all technological change have a harmful side to it.

            One approach to take is to examine the purposes for which products are produced.  I explored this a little bit previously, but I want to make a more thorough examination in this article.

            The first purpose on my list would be to make things easier.  I have already discussed how making life processes more and more frictionless puts people into increasing layers of an experiential vacuum and eventually makes them feel like they are in a living death.  We are at a point in our history where the average person doesn’t need more labor-saving gadgets.  If anything, we have to find a way of putting more organic friction back into daily life activity.

            A second purpose would be to make work more efficient.  There is an overlap here sometimes with machines that make tasks easier, but not always.  Power tools are not frictionless and produce a lot of recoil to the human body as well as noise, foul smells and material waste products.  Another aspect of many efficient machines is that they produce a lot of work with a minimal need for human workers.  Many complex machines and robots are replacing more and more human workers.  In my article about 3-D printers, I discussed a machine that really has the potential to eliminate practically all human workers in many areas of production.  So more and more workers in modern industrial societies are going to have difficulty finding work as a result of technological efficiency.  These workers are being put in an economic vacuum.

            A third purpose is to make life more sanitary.  Modern public bathrooms are filled with sensors.  Sensors that activate soap dispensers, water faucets, hand dryers, towel dispensers and toilets.  You don’t have to touch anything and contract all the germs from people who don’t wash their hands.  But as has been pointed out, the more we try to put ourselves in an environment free from bacteria, the less likely we are to develop good natural immunities.  So when we are exposed to pathological bacteria, we are more likely to get sick, to get infected.  These sensor machines put us in an experiential vacuum, a bubble, as far as bacteria are concerned.

            A fourth purpose is to pull us out of experiential vacuums with entertaining tension pockets, with kicks.  Loud modern pop music with its electronic instrumentation, strobe lights, amusement park rides, race cars, and motorcycles all fit into this category.  Overstimulation from these kicks causes people to psychologically defend themselves by becoming hardened and jaded and, in the end, more lifeless.

            A fifth purpose is to create substitute worlds to pull people away from the sensory distortion in modern technological living environments.  Here I am talking about the worlds of screens: movie, television, video game, computer, smartphone.  I have discussed in a previous article how these screen worlds represent attempts to create balanced configurations of infinite continuous stimuli from a vacuum and defined discrete stimuli from clusters of figures.  Ones and zeroes, pixels of discrete stimuli grouped together in configurations of figures against backdrops of the infinite continuous stimuli of vacuums.  Such screen worlds represent uneasy sensory balances that still create a sensory distortion that isolates a person from the organic connections he needs with a primary experience world.  Screen worlds do not provide a real answer to the absence of grounding in modern technological living environments.

            All of these purposes have as their ultimate result the creation of products that generate sensory distortion.  Products that put humans into some kind of experiential vacuum and products that create purposeful static, purposeful tension pockets to pull people out of the base numbness produced in modern technological society.  These are all products that contribute to the pathological side effects of understimulation and overstimulation and ultimately also contribute to robotization.  They are all products that I would use in a measured limited way.  Frankly, I would probably eliminate the sensors for bathroom devices completely if I could.

            I will now review some purposes where innovation leads to technological products that directly or indirectly increase grounding.  First, there are the products that increase health and that promote life.  These two purposes do not always seem to fully go together.  There are drugs that keep sick people alive, even though these people are, even with drugs, still incapable of living a vibrant healthy life.  Nevertheless, if life means existence in some kind of grounding and death means existence in a total vacuum, most people would probably support technological innovation that affirms the experience of life, at least in most situations.  The fact that modern technological products may also contribute to overpopulation is another story.  There are no easy postures to take with regard to the purpose of prolonging life, even though on the level of dealing with individual people, we would all feel a desire to support it.

            Another purpose of technological innovation is dealing with all the waste products created by modern technology.  These waste products poison the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil in which we grow our food.  Technology that breaks down waste products so they can be reabsorbed in nature is a technology that strengthens organic grounding for humans and ends up fighting sensory distortion.

            Another purpose of technological innovation is space travel.  For many people who have read science fiction novels, seen science fiction movies and television programs and followed all the manned space flights to the moon and to the space station, space travel seems like something very exotic and very exciting.  But space travel has the potential to be much more than just an adventure for humanity.  It could ultimately find new viable living environments on other planets where people could go and live.  This, of course, is a very long-term project, but one has to start at some point.  Other planets could provide new environments of organic grounding, where people from an overcrowded planet could go to find healthy living space.  Furthermore, if we do not do enough to restore what we poison, we might just end up destroying our planet, and then the human race will definitely need other planets, if it wants to survive.  So space travel could prove to be a very positive form of technological innovation in terms of giving people new sources of organic grounding.

            There is a pattern to my comments here.  Given the fact that we are all experiencing to a great extent the deleterious effects of sensory distortion in modern technological living environments, those technological innovations that lead to our further immersion into experiential vacuums or experiential tension pockets should be looked on with skepticism and used with a certain restraint when possible or not at all.  On the other hand, those technological innovations that lead either to a renewed grounding in ourselves or in our external world, or else lead to our discovering totally new sources of grounding, should be looked on more favorably and used more affirmatively.  For sure, we are going to need some sources of modern technology to deal in different ways with the damage created by other sources of modern technology.

© 2013 Laurence Mesirow

The Mechanical Re-creation Of Creation

            It is time to review some of the basic terms I use in my articles.  I postulate three basic categories of phenomena that humans experience.  Something is figure if it has determinate discrete defined boundaries and does not blend with other phenomena.  Something is ground or grounding if it has indeterminate blurry continual boundaries and does blend with other phenomena.  Something is vacuum if it occupies the spaces between figures and or patches of ground or grounding.  Our fields of experience are made up of different configurations of these three categories of phenomena.  It is the change in the fundamental  kind of configuration of phenomena in today’s world that has been a principle source of focus and concern of my articles.

            One of the ongoing themes of this series of articles has been the destruction of organic grounding in traditional living environments and its replacement by modern technological living environments with their vacuum and free-floating figure composition.  In an overcrowded world, the free-floating figures increasingly cluster together to form tension-pockets that overstimulate human beings, just as the vacuum aspects of modern technological living environments make them numb.  This alternation between overstimulation and understimulation is the basis for the sensory distortion that has been so harmful for human beings and that has triggered so much of the pathological behavior we have seen in modern society.

            Sometimes, the division between figure, ground and vacuum isn’t so neat.  One modern technology tries very hard to imitate organic growth and thus to encapsulate grounded processes in a machine.  I am talking here about 3-D printing.  This is a manufacturing process that is not based on cutting raw materials into defined shapes.  Instead. a so-called printer can build up layer after layer of practically any product, anything, until it is finished.  This technology allows for the creation of products in areas as diverse as space technology, engineering, furniture and jewelry. Even food.  Advances are being made in this technology on an ongoing basis, and it is projected that the technology will be able to create human organs.

            Many companies are embracing this technology, because it will involve significantly lower labor costs. If these machines are adopted universally, they could transform manufacturing, and furthermore, they could transform the way humans are connected to their living environment.  3-D printers vacuumize the process of creation.  Organic creation becomes a process of the free-floating figures of machines floating in a vacuum, disconnected from organic grounding.  Creation becomes disconnected from what humans can make using their hands, their eyes and their brains.  And the realm of what humans can do directly to advance their own lives becomes further diminished into irrelevancy.  As 3-D printing increasingly moves beyond the world of making prototypes into the world of rapid manufacturing, what place will there be for most humans as active participants in their own world of primary experience?  Between 3-D printers and robots, there will be little left to be done by humans.  Most humans will be redundant to the significant processes in their society.  It is primarily the creators of the machines and the programmers who will continue to have a relevant place for a period of time, at least until 3-D printers can create 3-D printers and robots can replicate robots.  Meanwhile, most other people will see their daily life activities trivialized.

            3-D printers are another important example of a machine squeezing human beings out of a major area of life activity.  The world of creative activity in human endeavor – an important vehicle by which humans create figures that are embedded in their grounded field of experience and that help to hold this grounding in place much as roots can hold soil in place – is now encapsulated in the vacuum of modern technological living environments.  The free-floating figures of 3-D printers mimic creation in 3-D layers and, in so doing, indirectly detach many workers from their grounded attachment to the world.  And people lose their organic bonding not only to their means of production but also to the artifacts created by this new means of production.

            Yes it is amazing that a 3-D printer could possibly produce a human liver.  This could theoretically diminish the need for wait lists for donated livers from dead people.  But think of the larger picture.  If, at first, we can create human livers with 3-D printers, why not create whole humans?  Such a process would make cloning seem primitive.  But how would such a printed human organically connect with other human beings.  Existentially, such a human would truly be a free-floating figure in an experiential vacuum with no meaningful family connections to other humans.  Workers could be created as human-like robots to fill certain specific functions in a factory or in other areas of the economy.  Ordinary humans produced by biological reproduction would seem too inefficient and too unfocused.

            And then there is the very real possibility that 3-D printers could print out guns for your average criminal or terrorist.  This would be the ultimate perversion of a perfected mechanical creativity.

            I know all this sounds very melodramatic, but technological change is moving at such an accelerated pace and even twenty years ago, would most people have been able to conceive of the possibility of 3-D printers?  And again technological innovation is advancing with relatively little ethical discussion about moving forward in certain technological directions.  What motivation will there be for anyone to engage in crafts, when he will have a 3-D printer to produce most of the things that he might want?  Everybody will be his own magician, producing something out of what would appear to be thin air.

            There is definitely a psychological price to pay for using these machines.  So just because the machines exist does not mean that a person has to use them.  As a matter of fact, whenever possible, a person should avoid using these machines.  When possible, a person should try to obtain things that are made by traditional manufacturing and that involve more human workers in the work process.  Even better, a person should try to obtain artifacts that are made by hand.  Even better, a person should try to make some artifacts himself.  Now more than ever, getting involved in different kinds of crafts can act as a means to help a person connect directly to the materials in his field of experience.  Doing crafts becomes a means of bonding to these materials and a means of creating grounded processes in his field of experience.

            Obviously crafts cannot replicate everything that is done in 3-D printing.  But that is not the point.  The point is that 3-D printing is one more step in the ongoing historical trend of increasingly making the average human irrelevant to his living environment.

(c) 2013 Laurence Mesirow

The Ethics Of Life And Sex In A Technological Environment

            One of the most common things one hears from older people is how they are concerned about the decline of moral principles in society.  Perhaps this is something one hears in every generation as society evolves and customary behavior changes.  Today, however, this is not simply a casual concern of older people in their conversations, but of many other groups of people as well.  Groups of more conservative-oriented people stake out strong moral principles as a defense against what they perceive as the onslaught of dangerous moral change.  A moral decay that they perceive in the behavior of so many of the people they see around them.  These supposedly fallen people include everyone from teenagers to politicians to Wall Street businesspeople to ordinary everyday people.  There is the sense that something is different this time when people proclaim the decline of morals in society.  This is because customary behavior appears to be so disconnected in so many areas of life from what traditional moral principles teach us. 

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            I know that I have discussed moral behavior in modern technological society in several of my previous articles, but it is something which I feel the need to continue to explore.  It has been much easier for me to diagnose the problems of modern life than to find easy solutions to these problems.

            I was at a philosophy conference a few weeks ago at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  The focus of the conference was teaching morals in modern education.  In other words, there was a focus on how to teach moral virtues in modern schools in order to combat the perceived decline in moral behavior among students.  The presenters and the audience at this conference were not particularly oriented towards morality in a religious way.  As a matter of fact, they focused on the moral principles of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.  After all, this conference was sponsored, at least in part, by the philosophy department of Northwestern.  For many people at the conference, the perceived moral problems of young people today would diminish considerably, if only they could absorb the virtues taught by Aristotle.  Socrates and Plato were brought into the mix as well.

            All three of these philosophers are wonderful thinkers and among the foundational thinkers of our Western Civilization.  But times have changed significantly since these three were alive.  When Aristotle and Plato wrote, there was a great emphasis on principle-based morality (as there was with the prophets and moral teachers of Western religion).  Moral philosophy was based on the need to develop strongly defined figure principles as a way of psychologically transcending above the organic perishability that surrounded people in traditional living environments.  These principles were an attempt to prevent people from giving in to their lusts and degenerating into animals.

            But in a living environment that is enveloped by a modern technology that is evolving at an accelerated pace, people are becoming increasingly detached from any natural living environments that would threaten organic perishability.  Today the degeneration of the human nature in a person could be in a different direction,  Today, the influences in the living environment lead to a person becoming robotized.  As a result, a very different approach to morality is needed.

            Rather than concentrating on strongly defined transcendent figure moral principles, the focus today should be on establishing a strong contextual grounding for dealing with the larger circumstances in which human actions are carried out in modern technological living environments.  Context-based morality is the use of strong contextual understanding to keep people moral within the sensory distortion from the vacuum and the free-floating figures in the vacuum that are being experienced today.  Technologically-based sensory distortion influences people to behave in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise behave.

            If technological figures are constantly evolving, new reactions from people are constantly being elicited.  Sometimes, these reactions constitute behavior suitable to being judged from a moral dimension.  The context of the reaction becomes as important, if not more important, than the abstract principle by itself.  There is a need to judge the reaction within the new specific situation.

            Yes we still need principles.  But in the old days, the application of principles could shape how we mentally configured our perception of the contexts of life situations.  Now we first really have to see and experience life situations as much as possible free from the judgments of standard moral principles.  And then we have to let the actual problems created by our life situations shape not only the applications of moral principles but even new basic moral principles.  This latter concept is going to appear radical.  Religions as well as the judges in our legal system have always tried to fit applications of standard fixed principles to new situations.  But modern technology has ripple effects throughout human life and human society today, and it is generating so many situations for which there are simply no good precedents.  Not only is it creating new situations, but with the rapid evolution of technology today, it is creating constantly new unprecedented situations.  This is why rigid discrete figure principles are not adequate anymore for arriving at many moral decisions.  Blind application of abstract figure principles in today’s world leads to a person degenerating into a robot.  And the one constant today to all of our specific potential moral choices should be that they keep us bonded to our animal natures and receptive to organic blendable continual stimuli.  Both of these are important for maintain a strong coherent sense of self in a human being and preventing him from becoming a robot.

            Sex may be a perfect area of life to use in order to understand the importance of contextual understanding to making moral decisions.  I have shifted a little bit in my comparative interpretation of sex outside of marriage in traditional societies vs. sex outside of marriage in modern technological societies.  I used to focus on unmarried sex in preliterate societies as a way of reinforcing community bonding and creating a collective imprint from a particular generation. This was in distinction to unmarried sex in modern technological society, which is a way of getting a variety of organic blendable continual stimuli from different bodies as a way of compensating for the lack of variety of organic stimuli in modern living environments.  In most so-called civilized societies, sex was primarily supposed to be reserved for marriage, where one could leave a strong personal imprint with one partner and where one could leave a strong personal imprint with the children one had.  Sex outside of marriage was considered immoral, because it blurred one’s capacity to make and preserve personal imprints, and more important, because a person became less fully human in a transcendent sense, by giving in to animal lusts.

           
            Sex in modern technological society serves a different purpose.  People today aren’t so concerned with being able to preserve imprints in the face of organic perishability.  Today people are concerned with being able to even have the opportunity to make organic imprints in the face of a field of experience that is lacking in organic surfaces.  And people today experience sex not so much as a giving into animal lusts, but rather as a desperate attempt to fight numbness and to use the organic stimuli from sex to fight degenerating into becoming robots.

            This context of sex today is totally different from when Western religious principles were first formulated.  Young people feel a need for sex, at least partly because of sensory distortion, way before they are in a position to be economically independent adults.  And having sex with different bodies gives them the variety of organic stimulation they no longer get in traditional living environments.  Unfortunately, with more casual sex, young people diminish the opportunity to create deeper bonds, to preserve organic imprints with their partners.  But the deeper enemy today is robotization, and the priority is actions to maintain a human balance within today’s living situation.  What should be discussed at some point is if there is a way to put some formal boundaries to casual sex, so that young people can get the opportunity to create some deeper bonds within sexual diversity.  Before the sexual revolution came into full force, adolescents used to go steady.  Perhaps such steady relationships with mature sex can be institutionalized – sort of like early trial marriages.  The one thing for sure is that the traditional purposes of sex are clashing with newly developed modern purposes for sex, and some way has to be developed to reconcile these different needs.

            In today’s world, sensory distortion from modern technology has been undermining the very foundations of our patterns of life, our rhythms of life.  It has created new human life situations and new configurations of human life situations which require radically new responses from people in order that they may survive psychologically.  And with regard to morality, a moral solution to a human life situation cannot be developed today without first taking into account how modern technology has directly or indirectly affected the situation.  Modern technology is so incredibly pervasive in its effects on all aspects of human life.

© 2013 Laurence Mesirow

           

When Machines Displace Humans In Factories and Offices

            I have begun to reevaluate my concept of human organic imprints.  Initially I was focusing too much on pure organic imprints, on those life situations where a person created something or did something unique.  But particularly when one thinks in terms of value added to any work task, the unique style that a person adds to even routine basic tasks should be focused on as an organic imprint component.  This style is intrinsically tied up with a particular work task that the person completes in order to give him work value for his effort.  The basic work task that a person completes leads to the completion of an organic imprint.  The work task of the person is not the same as the total work process which also includes the contribution of tools and machines. 

            To the extent that a human being contributes individual value to a work process, it can be attributed to the amount of the work process that is his unique organic imprint component.  This is in addition to the general human effort the person puts in so he can complete a task according to certain prescribed rules.  Both of these together make up the organic imprint.  Part of what determines the specific parameters of a task has to do with the nature of the tools and machines that help a person to complete a task.  In preliterate and other traditional societies, when people would use basic tools to complete tasks, the amount of value in a given task that could be attributed to human style and effort was considerable.  If a person made his own tools, then his organic imprints accounted for his whole work process.  If, as in many advanced traditional societies, tools were purchased, the amount of a human task that could be attributed to a worker’s organic imprints was still considerable.  A knife, a hoe, a rake, a hammer, an anvil, a saw, and a needle all require the strategy and skill of a human to be effective in the tasks for which they were created.  The tool’s markings are in the service of the human’s organic imprints.

            With the dawn of the industrial revolution, machines were created that increased the quantity and sometimes the quality in the production of a product, that performed tasks that required a strength and endurance that humans were incapable of, and that performed tasks that increased human mobility over longer and longer distances and over shorter and shorter periods of time.  Although the contribution of these machines, that ran more on fossil fuels rather than direct human force, was a lot greater within the total work process than more basic tools that were like appendages to humans, humans were still required to fill in steps that the machines couldn’t do as well as guide the machines in their work operation.  Guiding the machines could take a lot of skill, and man and advanced machine could produce a larger and more complex work output than man and more basic tools.  So factory workers, once unions were created to protect worker value in capitalist societies, could earn good wages that would give them and their families a good life.  The workers were still indispensable, even if the percentage of the work process that was their organic imprint was smaller.

            And then along came more advance machines, computers, robots, and automation.  Work processes required fewer and fewer people to perform smaller and smaller tasks.  Machines started pretty much to work by themselves.  Yes, there was still a need for people to make the machines and to program the machines, although far fewer of the former than in traditional factories where the human component was still so important.  Granted there are still a lot of traditional factories, but automation is the direction of the future.  Automation saves stock holders and management in terms of wages, pension plans and health insurance.  The fact that many workers lose their jobs is irrelevant to the owners and the people in charge.  For the time being, there are still jobs in the service sector like flipping hamburgers at MacDonald’s.  But because such jobs require no special expertise – no strategizing, no craft skills, no risk-taking – that would allow a person to leave some kind of meaningful organic imprint, the salaries are low.

            For many business owners, eliminating jobs to save money is a number one priority.  But apart from eliminating the sources of income for millions of workers, there is also the elimination of an organic grounded community of workers to which a worker can go and find support.  Many workers can’t even find low-paying jobs and end up a part of the permanently unemployed.  So there develops a vacuum of income and a vacuum of communal life experience.

            And then there are robots, some of which have already been created to replicate themselves.  As these robots become more and more sophisticated, not only factory jobs, but many office jobs, could be eliminated.  Humans will appear to management as less efficient and as an obstacle to profits.  And this is true, even though I believe that robots, being non-organic, will never have a fully coherent, grounded sense of self capable of making complex contextual grounded decisions.  Robots, running on discrete stimuli and oriented toward linear figure goals, will never be able to replace humans, although they will be able to displace humans.  This is true of androids, which give the appearance of displaying and dealing with feelings and emotions.  And cyborgs will never have the fully coherent, grounded sense of self of beings that are fully human. 

            Nevertheless, as computers and robots get more and more complex and more capable of doing more and more complex tasks, owners of companies will be able to attempt to replace people higher and higher up the ladder of employment in the company.  Conceivably, we could have a society where the vast majority of people live outside of the main flow of economic activity within their communities.  Where the vast majority of people lack the opportunity to leave their organic imprints directly for economic purposes and where they lack the opportunity to even leave imprints guiding the usage of machines that make the mechanical markings to create products and services for a society.  In a situation like this, an important question arises.  How will the economic benefits created by these advanced computers and robots be distributed to the people who have been left outside the main flow of economic activity?  The fact is that if much of the economic activity in most modern technological societies continues to be in private hands, will these owners of private companies be at all motivated to distribute some of their wealth to people who are structurally prevented from making a living?

            And the fundamental concern is that when people are unable to find outlets for leaving organic imprints in some form through their work, how is a value base to be created for determining what a person is worth and therefore to what kind of economic remuneration the person is to be entitled?  Granted taxes could be raised significantly on big corporations and wealthy individuals, and the government could take over the redistribution of wealth.  But this is socialism, and corporations and wealthy individuals would fight this in every way they could.  And anyway, this still leaves open the question of how to determine the economic worth of an unemployable person.  It is possible that without a framework for work for a large proportion of people, it could simply throw a society into chaos.  Without a structure for remuneration, people will be floating in an economic vacuum where there will be no method to ascribe economic worth to them.  The unemployment of an economic vacuum combined with the sensory distortion of an experiential vacuum would be a dangerous mix.  As people start to grow more and more numb from their multiple disconnections, the situation could lead to a growth in what I have called in the past process-oriented violence.  This is the use of violence as a form of overstimulation to jolt the perpetrator out of a deep sense of numbness.  As can be found in the growing number of mass murderers in the United States.

            Throughout the history of modern humans, there has been a great deal of positive value placed on technological innovation to increase economic prosperity as well as existential protection from organic perishability.  But now technological development has reached a point where it threatens to create economic impoverishment as well as a new kind of existential insecurity created by sensory distortion. 

            If this is where modern technological societies are headed, then we have to start reconsidering fast the fundamental relationship between humans and machines.  People who are creating this displacement technology or buying up this displacement technology are thinking ultimately only of the bottom line – the economic health of a business as an abstract entity – an economic process floating in a vacuum and pretty much divorced from the grounding of human purpose and need.  Machines ideally are created to promote economic prosperity for communities of people and not just small select groups of owners and managers.  When computers, robots and machines begin to displace almost everybody, how will human society configure itself?  This is a nightmare we have to start thinking about now, before it is too late.

© 2013 Laurence Mesirow