Questions Concerning the Future of Technology

Well into the era of exponential technological change, one cannot help but ask if new technology is the cause of social decline.

Despite progress in technology, everything outside technology seems to have undergone some spiritual and material degradation. Our political institutions are less effective. Our universities are less intellectual. Our doctors ask AI, before asking themselves. Very few AI labs seem to come close to matching the scientific rigor of Bell Labs or the Manhattan Project. People are more reliant on proctoring from LLMs to complete basic tasks.

The Ancient Meaning of Technē

The ancient meaning of things perhaps can offer some light on the state of technology. The Greek word technikon literally means that which is of technē. Technē is both the skill of the technologist or craftsman as well as the art of mind to bring forth the invention. It is not as boomers would say, "a tool," or as Silicon Valley boomers say, "a product."

In Book IV of the Nichomachean Ethics (chaps. 3 and 4), Aristotle describes technē and episteme as revealing different categories of things by a different mode of knowing. Technē reveals whatever is not directly before our sight, what can turn out either way. It is a gathering of matter, say for a house, whereas the final telos is not yet revealed. Technē is not the means, and not the tool. Technē is a bringing forth, and revealing more than it is a pure systematic creating. Technology is the art of creating.

Heidegger says, "Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where alethēia, truth, happens."

Modern Technology

Modern technology is slightly different than ancient. It is not a simple revealing. It is rather an unlocking. It is strange to say an agricultural tool like a hoe unlocks the soil or that a windmill unlocks the full power of the air. Yet technology in the world of modern physics does unlock nature in a new way. Mining, hydropower, and nuclear engineering unlock some hidden power or energy source, to then store it up. Quantum chips will allow for a new computing speed and arguably break old constructs.

Technology, in the modern sense, is an interrogation of nature. A discovery of what nature has to convert it into energy. As the ancients knew, how you look at things changes what you find. To the Greeks, technē was the unveiling that brings forth truth and art, like Michelangelo carving away all the marble that according to him was not David. The best engineers and technologists have this instinct for creation. There are computer programmers that actually reveal some unknown thing happening far off in this world, hidden to the rest. These kinds of people are becoming rarer though.

The Screen and Social Conditioning

All our experience of reality is becoming more and more subdued to the screen. Social networks have become social conditioning networks. Traditional email is a true network.

I think we are witnessing what C.S. Lewis warned of in The Abolition of Man — "Human Nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to Man." Human nature is surrendering to what a few conditioners have in mind for data extraction. Some men control the moons, others the rare earths, some the world's oil and commodity supplies. But it is the digital technologists who control other men: what they see, hear, and think. Of course if these channels remain decentralized, they cannot be entirely controlled.

The Future of Technology

But what will X be in 100 years, what will this technology be in a society where there are no libertarian minded leaders? That is why the crypto community should return to building applications for cryptographic protocols, not just cryptocurrencies. The short lived NFT era is arguably as important as applying cryptographic primitives to currency. The question of digital ownership will at some point shape the world order and decide whether or not man or certain men are in charge.

If technology does not legislate decentralized control inherent in the hardware, it will be used for control. This is already being done by most statist or collectivist governments. America should implement blockchain based voting to prevent fraud. The technologists of this world should use technology to preserve civil liberties and basic freedoms. If technology is not implemented by leaders today who value the ideals of free society, they will surely be used by the men of tomorrow who want a collectivist one, or are at least too blind to read the source code.

Enotrium was created to apply technology to preserving free institutions that respect human dignity and preserve our nation in the image of its founding. This can be done in the first half of the twenty-first century only if we act as self determining individuals, but true Emersonian Americanism is long forgotten.

Today, everyone is self determining, in a slightly different way. One can choose anything, where to fly tomorrow, answers to obscure research questions, one's gender, even the eye color of one's future children.

For better or for worse, but the real matter of things is this: something is and always will be more powerful than man, and that is nature. The best technologists understand that. Oppenheimer started from uranium, if he started from scratch or from some vague principle, he would not have created what he had. I think it is fair to say those who understand physical properties of reality are at an advantage over the rest in creating new technologies. Understanding reality creates the essential framing. Most software applications that start from nowhere, end up nowhere.

Technology that starts from some end, some alteration of reality, based on a real thing, is how the world can be moved. Most foreign hackers who wanted to rig an election were better at programming than people who wanted to create the future of socializing. Nature is concrete, and the concrete always wins.

Technology is in control today. People cannot feel certain emotions without music or social media. We cannot function without it or even think without it. We would be wise to accept, technology, not man, is master of the earth.