Both the development of technological tools and uses to which humanity has put them have
created modern civilization in which loneliness is ever increasing.
As we knew that the invention of the Cotton Gin triggered the Civil War. Before the emergency
of the cotton gin, the demanding of black slave had mitigated.
Technology, broadly defined as the use of tools, has a long history. Ever since Erg the
caveman first conked an animal with a rock, people have been using technology.
For thousands of years, the use of tools allowed people to move ever closer together. Becasue
fields could be cultivated and the technology to store food existed, people would live in cities
rather than in small nomads tribes. Only very lately have Erg's descendants come to question
the benefits of technology. The Industrial Revolution introduced and spread technologies that
mechanized many tasks. As a result of the drive toward more efficient production and
distribution (so the ever larger cities would be supported), people began to act as cogs in the
technological machine. Clothing was no longer produced by groups of women sewing and gossiping together, but by down-trodden automation's operating machinery in grim factories.
The benefits of new technology of today, computers and the Internet, are particularly ambiguous. They have made work ever more efficient and knit the world together in a web of
information and phone lines. Some visionaries speak of a world in which Erg need not check in
to his office; He won't need to go to a bar to pick up women because there are all those chat
room. Hungry ? Erg orders his groceries from an online delivery service. Bored ?
Download a new game. And yet ?
Many people, myself included, are a little queasy about that vision. Erg may be doing work, but
is it real work ?Are his online friends real friends ? Does anything count in a spiritual way if it's
just digital ? Since the Industrial Revolution, we have been haunted by the prospect that we are
turning into our machines : efficient, productive, souless. The latest technologies, we fear, are
making us flat as out screens, turning us into streams of bits of interchangeable data. We may
know a lot of people, but we have few real friends. We have a lot of things to do, but no reason
to do them. In short, the new technology emphasizes a spiritual crisis that has been building
for quite some time.
As I try to unravel which I believe about the relative merits of technology, I think it is instructive to
remember technology's original result. A better plow meant easier farming,
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