Jargogled Impressions.

Of late, I have been thinking about my attitude towards technology and recently been sensing a subtle shift in my degree of technophilia as I age. My conversations with people around me, on the web, or inside the pages of books makes me wonder about the spectrum from the luddites to the techno-utopians of my age. Naturally, the opinions on the web tend to be more polarized than the ones I meet in the meatspace. But it makes me wonder about the factors that push or pull us in the thoroughfare between the two ends. 

As an introvert, my thoughts tend to go back to my childhood a lot. Snippets of scenes from the wayback machine. Flashes of memories that I had no clue I had retained. Synapses in our brains are funny – they have an agency of their own. What they retain and what they forget is not just a matter of developing muscle memory. When it comes to our personal experiences and life story, they behave erratically – or so it seems to us. Who knows, these synapses may be in fact fully mature AI models that are running sophisticated algorithms, but it’s just something we are not privy to. Thanks to evolution and the millions of years of training, their operations are essentially opaque to us, maybe a different language or cognition model altogether. What parameters drive their operations we are too naive and truant to understand.

What when we will be able to break down how our brains work? What happens then? We will know more, but is that better? It is without a doubt a good thing for those who suffer from neurological ailments. But what about the rest of humanity? 

Technological progress has been broadly beneficial for us. But with each new scientific discovery, we are increasingly realizing technological progress comes with its costs. And some of these costs are not measurable as we don’t understand them through the limited arsenal of tools at our disposal. Our distant descendants may one day measure these for us. But they will have their own technological paradigms to evaluate, much as how we evaluate today the benefits and downsides of farming, fire, wheel, railways, internet, etc. 

So when we are able to understand our brains, would that be better for us? What when this understanding coupled with the development of AI coincides? What realms would they open up for us? Are we equipped to even hypothesize that today? 

I find people around me divided in their opinion about technology and its impact on our society. This makes sense as the technologies are vast and varied and our experiences around them are shaped by a number of contextual and environmental factors. 

If we were to draw a spectrum and map people based on their degree of technophilia, I bet the results would be too generic to draw any insights from. So maybe anecdotal takeaways are best for my purpose. 

So the people around me follow different principles for exhibiting their love or hatred of technology. Keep in mind, technology as I refer to here is broader than just digital technology – it’s important to clarify here because digital tech has come to dominate our lives AND our minds so much that we default to this sphere more often than we realize. No, technology here is meant to reflect everything that human progress in science and engineering has provided us with – digital technology (bytes), biological technology (cells), and physical technology (atoms). 

So when I talk about technology, the applications I am referring to are not just digital apps, but also synthetic food, genetically engineered cells, geo-engineered spaces, etc. And as you can imagine, even die-hard techno-utopians will find it hard to relate to all the various elements of technological progress given the sheer breadth and depth of these individual domains. 

For instance, I find myself drawn to digital technology – it’s accessible to me in the form of the apps, gadgets, tools I use, has TOM attributes given where I work, has temporality in the generation I come from, has relatively low entry barrier, and is something I am curious about. I think digital technology is a net positive for us and I am fairly unequivocal about it. When it comes to AI, based on its maturity and my technical proficiency, I only see snippets of its applications in the apps I use. But primarily, it’s a domain I have only scratched the surface of understanding. So my views get muddier and my ambivalence increases. 

When it comes to physical technology, it’s accessible too in some subsets like synthetic meat, supplemental drinks, solar energy, etc. but my ambivalence is higher here. Why? Because with synthetic foods (like Impossible Burger), its impact on the human body isn’t as well documented and telemetry of its side effects does not go far back to be meaningful, especially when considering the long arc of evolution. So it’s harder to trust technology when its impact on the layers hidden to us isn’t clear. I am quite unequivocal about solar energy as it’s external to me – it’s shaping my environment and not me. But doing hair transplanting? I am quite sure I don’t want to risk disturbing the equilibria of my bodily functions through an invasive procedure. 

But our attitude towards technology is also hostage to the situation we find ourselves in. We gauge the tradeoffs in non-ideal situations and decide on the path of least resistance. 

If I had a gadget like a pensieve to drop my thoughts into for posterity, what would be my reaction to such a possibility? On the one hand, I’d be able to “search” through the archives of my memory and retrieve scenes with all its intricate details – much as I can search through Netflix today. On the other hand, such ease and convenience would come at the cost of the spontaneity and the mystery we associate our memories to be. 

I sometimes wonder how my grandmother would react if she were to be brought directly from 1982 when she died to today in 2022. (It’s an age-old thought experiment of transporting our ancestors to the present or our descendants to the present and gauging the arc of technological progress through their personal experience). I wonder how she would feel about the way technology has reorganized the society around us, how morality and ethics have changed in the wake of the internet, and how our attitude to technology has evolved. I could not know her at all when she lived and I don’t know if she had a view about the arc of technological progress. But I can guess she’d be horrified of some and ecstatic of other changes.