Technology
Technology is a force-multiplier: a tool which either makes more efficient those things its users naturally undertake, or which enables the exploration of new undertakings not otherwise possible. It overcomes limitations and compensates for deficiencies, supercharges efficiency and productivity, and opens new realms of inquiry, comprehension, and performance.
It's also a mixed blessing. Increases in productivity more frequently fuel demand for increased availability and/or decreased cost of the produced asset(s) than they increase leisure; an ever-more-interdependent set of globalized infrastructures, though contributing significantly to the quality and duration of life, do so at great (even unsustainable) costs in other areas (or to other beings); expectations of performance and engagement move the needle of human values and activity toward complexity and exhaustion.
But there is no idyllic past to be re-created through eschewing technological advance, nor easy answers for the problems created or exacerbated through the proliferation of technology; as usual, the issues and factors are involved and nuanced. The way out is probably through, not back, and will require an involved and literate population.
For my part, I see this largely inseperable from the sciences, which serve as the foundation for all feats of engineering, technopolitical or otherwise.
Specific Areas of Interest
- Software: the use of logical instruction sets to instill or modify the behavior of machines. I use this as a facilitator to other activities, and for exploration of disciplines and areas of interests (like VR, or physics, or getting paid) more than I study it in its own right. But as the common underpinning to so many other things, it's probably cumulatively received more of my attention than any of those, and so deserves some consideration.
- VR: a good portion of our reality is and has been virtual since the first glimmers of the information age; what's fun and interesting now are the tools we have for bringing those virtual elements closer to what our senses perceive as tangible and acting upon them. Simulation of existing physical environments is a common theme and the strongest case for the technology to date; but it's only just getting into the hands of the masses, where we're likely to see amazing independent developments. Will it be enough? Will VR have a killer app?
- Futurism: given who we are, what we know, and what we've been doing, is it possible to extrapolate tangents and vectors over time to predict where we're headed with it all? Probably, at least at the macro scale and with decent error bars; it has to involve more than one specific game-changing technology, and more than simply turning up the volume on current societal deviations (which doesn't really change much, rather it caricatures the present as a distorted lens - a common trope in entertainment, and lazy world-building for the creative writer). With real change, can we recognize ourselves then/there from here/now?
2024 Paul L. Tomlinson