Advanced Technology, Part Two
Here in the second part of this discussion, having explained that the concept “advanced” admits of various measurements, corresponding to the various senses in which a new technology may be judged relative to its antecedents, I took a moment to prepare the pathway to a more specific reply to my student’s third and final question about my views concerning which innovations, according to my way of thinking, constitute genuine technological advances.
I began this part of our exchange with a reiteration of her final question:
3. Then what makes something advanced? I would like to know the examples of advances from your point of view.
As I outlined in my previous reply, my general answer to this question must be prefaced by clarifying what sense of “advance” we are focusing on, i.e., which standard we are applying to determine whether an innovation constitutes a change in the direction of improvement. And although I qualified my answer to that standards question by explaining that there are often many different standards of judgment which are possible – to return to our example, CDs may be judged as an advance with regard to efficiency, durability, and storage capacity, but not with regard to sound reproduction – if we are talking about ultimate judgments, rather than provisional or contextual judgments, then I suppose we ought to favor the standard that we regard as the most essential or definitive in each case.
Furthermore, I pointed out at the end of the previous reply that in the case of technology, which derives its purpose (its reason for existing) entirely from human needs and choices, we should probably judge whether or not a new development is an improvement by referring to the standard of human intention. However, even this is complicated, because we can talk about the standard of intention in two ways: (1) What did the inventors of this technology want it to do?, or (2) What real improvement does this technology bring to the world from the point of view of human nature?
The first of those questions is easier to answer, because it only requires looking at the development of the technology from historical and practical perspectives. Who developed it? What problem were those developers trying to solve? How was their new technology supposed solve the problem better than the previous solutions, whether those were technological or pre-technological?
The second question is much more difficult, but also, from the point of view of truth and the good, far more important, because if the true goal of everything we do is to enhance our lives as humans, then nothing may be called an advance on this standard unless we can show how it genuinely improves human existence, which is to say our ability to live more fully as humans.
Since the philosophic perspective is the highest and most essential angle from which to view everything, I will emphasize the second question here. In other words, I was previously content to explain the various senses of “advancement” when I was merely trying to clarify the different ways we may judge changes, depending on which standard we use; but now, when you ask me to talk about what I would name as an example of an advance, my nature tells me that I should discuss this question not from the point of view of “various standards,” but from that of the ultimate standard, as far as I know it. And that ultimate standard, to formulate it as clearly as I can, is this: Any new invention or development may be considered an advance if it can be shown to improve the human condition (actually or potentially), in some way that is consistent with, and furthermore helps to promote our growth in accordance with, human nature.
Of course, this approach is much more difficult, since in order to judge advances according to the standard of human nature…well, you can see the problem you have to solve first, and it is the biggest problem there is. But without solving that problem, or at least formulating a reasonable working hypothesis to guide your reasoning, it will be impossible to say for sure that anything constitutes a true advance or improvement, even though we might agree that it is an improvement from a purely technical point of view. For example, without the development of sound recording and plastics, the LP could never have been developed, so we can say that the LP was a technical advance over the original sound recordings. And without that development, along with the growth of personal computers, the CD would never have been invented, so we can say that the CD represents a technical advance over the LP. But none of this shows that sound recording itself, let alone the LP or CD, represents a genuine advance according to the standard of human nature. Has this modern recording and music distribution technology made humans more artistic? More appreciative of the beautiful? More focused on the good and the true? More subtle and rational in their thinking? In other words, has it made us more civilized and spiritually developed? But if it has not done that, then it has not improved our lives in the ultimate sense, in which case would we not have to say that it is only an advance from the point of view of material efficiency and entertainment (amusement, immediate pleasure), but not from the point of view of human nature?
Okay, so now you can see the rabbit hole you have invited me into by asking me to identify real examples of technological advancement. This is, however, the happiest rabbit hole to go down into: the meaning-of-life rabbit hole. I have no fear of descending into that hole; on the contrary, I am excited to explore the strange world beyond it, as we shall try to do in Part Three of this discussion.
