This is why I have added Jill Lepore’s Rise and Fall of the Artificial State to our reading list for PHIL 3340-Environmental Ethics in the spring:
“… I’ve written about this brave new world before—in 2003 I published a book called Enough about advanced robotics, human genetic engineering, nanotechnology, the harbingers of this wave of technology. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, an assault on human meaning. We are limited; it is in engaging with those limits that we find joy. Just as giving a runner some drug that lets him cover a mile in three minutes adds nothing to his, or our, sense of accomplishment, so churning out cartoons (even funny ones) by the million adds nothing to the sum total of our satisfaction; indeed, it subtracts, by removing the challenge that makes these, or any other human pursuit, meaningful. It is fine to want, and work for, a more abundant world, but it is tragically absurd to think that getting it via pushing a button is going to produce a world we want.
This is not an argument against technology. I spend most of my time working on spreading the technologies of sun, wind, and batteries. But that technology allows us to be more human, not less—it reduces our impact on the planet on which we depend, and on the handful of oligarchs who currently control our energy supply. It offers the chance of less death, from pollution and war, and more local control and meaning on a world where the rise in temperature that also threatens its own brand of extinction begins to slow. Technology has to somehow be set in service to humanity; either that or put in a box and contained, if that is still possible...”
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