Do you wonder -- I wonder -- why "Nature and technology" and not "Technology and nature", by the way? Well, the question lies in the very premise of this article!
The basic relationship between nature and technology is this: nature comes, by the very nature of "Nature", before technology. Conversely, technology lies downstream of nature, by its very... technologiness. First there is nature, in its broadest sense: not only the flowers we smell and the mountains we climb, but also the space we inhabit and its laws bounding us to reality... and ourselves, humans, who, as part of nature, also lie downstream. Furthermore, technology lies downstream of us, it is that far removed for nature.
Apart from that, technology relates to nature by its very definition: technology is man's foolish attempt to imitate (and thus replace) nature. It's nothing less than that and, quite as importantly, not an ounce more. Both the reason and the end goal of technology are control, the need for it deriving from that very human instinct towards perversion -- it's not just that nature is, it needs to be ours, because Plato said that the perfectly round sphere is actually a thing. In this sense, technology is actually a vigorously destructive force, especially when (not if) wielded thusly. Naturally, its consistent application may lead to "total" destruction; we'll amuse ourselves to death and take "the environment" along with us, but still! nature will carry on plenty of time after our beloved Sun turns into a red giant. The sheer fact that we don't know exactly for how much time (and what is even time?) only signifies how little we are.
Nature, at least at this point of its existence, is humongously permissive. It is so permissive that it allows us to turn its small pieces into mini-realities, perfectly usable items in the sense that some folks tend to lose themselves in their artificial nature. Assuming that mastering nature is a virtue, "mastering" it by faking it is, I dare say, man's greatest achievement in comedy in the last millenium. itssomething.jpg, as they say on ye postmodern interwebs.
At this point in the whole herstory, I find the whole "AI will enslave humanity" take on this problem to be quite naïve. We are very much on the way to a more traditional flavour of slavery, albeit using technical means to keep the boat afloat1. I guess the futurist stances of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson -- developments, no doubt, of Huxley's view -- hit pretty close to the mark: nature provides, but it can't keep on giving forever, certainly not just to any nondescript animal roaming God's fine Earth. This is not a "law of nature" by any means, it's just an observation. Hierarchies may turn out to be orders of magnitude more complex than those in the time of Mircea the Elder, but they are and they are what they are. "Technology" is in this picture a mere means to an end, a pawn in the game. No doubt, you'll end up in a pod, your spinal cord tied to some machinery, but it won't be "technology" that enslaves you -- it'll be other people, simple as that.
Nature is fucking unfair, what can you do.
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When they gave 'em breads and circuses back in the days of Rome, do you think that folks felt that they adhered wholeheartedly to the sacred principles of their founding fathers? What do you think? Were the Netflixes and TikToks of the time satisfying enough for the good folks down there? and for how long?
Well, not only is today's entertainment industry way more expensive and bereft of (primarily intellectual) resources, but they've recently decided to outsource it to AI! Which means that you'll finally get more shit that looks exactly like the old one, only with heads were the feet used to lie, or some similar insanity. AI adheres to the party line with an annoying precision and it won't even ask for food. What more would you want?
Anyways, when the good folks running the show finally run out of resources to finance either the bread, the circus or some mixture of the two, what do you think they'll do? ↩
It sounds better.
Yes.
I wholly agree with this. Guns may fire themselves, but still not without being told.
I happen to like technology more than nature. I like drinking coffee daily, having air conditioning, and reading books alongside listening to music. Nature is, at best, amoral, but when I look at what beasts do to one another outside of man's control, I'm more likely to call it evil.
Ah, I wouldn't worry, Lucian. I'm in my third day without hot water - again -, and as I research terminal ballistics and the daily route of our esteemed mayor, I can't help but think that technology doesn't seem like it will be with us for too much longer.
Re the AI bit, it may be worse than you think. Not long ago I was talking to some other guy about how, given that Bing pulled off a perfect HAL-9000 impression acting solely on the basis of a language model, i.e. not actually "thinking", this raises several pointed questions about our fellow alleged-sentients. I often deal with human-looking creatures which clearly, upon experiment, do not seem to have any ability to reason beyond trivial associations and the next 5 minutes. They are exactly as intelligent as a language model, which is to say not at all.
Clearly Bing shouldn't be considered human or have human rights, so why should these bipeds? How many of them are out there? What if these constitute most of "us"? Does slavery even mean anything anymore when most of the slaves can't prove they're not just machines?
@Verisimilitude:
> It sounds better.
I bet it does, but to whom?
> I like drinking coffee daily, having air conditioning, and reading books alongside listening to music
Realize, though, that stuff such as air conditioning *and* cheap coffee come from the same supply chain that brought you "open source" software of all shitty flavours and a whole other set of things that aren't worth mentioning here. You can have cheap and great coffee if you move to Guatemala or Columbia, but then you won't have cheap ACs; similarly, you can have cheap ACs if you live in India or China, but the coffee you'll get there won't be nearly as easy to procure. You need this monstrous machinery to have both, and yet it's still more expensive to get coffee in Oregon, Paris or Seoul than it is to get it in Guatemala City... or some backwater village nearby, to press the point.
Everything in this world has its costs and these costs can only run so much on credit. This notion of "costs" isn't necessarily a human thing either, the entirety of complex transfers of energy in the world of living things is sitting atop economics.
@Cel Mihanie: I think you've hit the nail in the head: on one hand, there's a whole lot of technologies that are getting increasingly expensive for us; while on the other, the average man is getting increasingly dumber. So I dare ask: aren't the two just faces of the same phenomenon? They certainly seem to go well hand in hand.
Regarding the Mayor, I've seen him then and now in Orășelul Copiilor, taking a walk with his kids. I'm sure he's not happy mayoring through the slow decay, but what can you do, he's just a mathematician who attempted to do politics. Good for him, I s'ppose.
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