Cartoonists open windows into the soul of a society. One such artist, Walt Kelly, drew Pogo speaking to our species as to where much blame for new technology and new tools is found.
Today the Pogo meme challenges the common understanding of new and rapidly growing technology as dangerous, even evil. The enemy is not new technology, it is not smartphones, AI, or any number of other tools. The enemy is us.
The human race is fairly unique in its continual creation and usage of tools. Whether it was the first knife, hammer, fishing hook, etc., our species projected our abilities and expanded our growth through discovery, creation, and use of tools. But tools enter life without souls. There is no internal, driving energy moving a tool towards good or bad outcomes. And, borrowing a phrase from my son, the larger the bandwidth and resolution of new tools and technology, the greater the importance of developing cultural habits and structures to enhance good uses and limit bad uses.
When a new tool is developed, or as new technology comes into the marketplace, there is a (largely unmet) need to develop habits and culture for that technology. The urgency and importance of this need is proportional to the bandwidth and resolution of the technology. It is interesting to note the propensity for man, usually older, people today to project blame onto the technology. New tools and technology can create value, but they can also be monetized, exploited, and abused. Another proverb, sometimes attributed to Lincoln, notes that to “test a man’s character, give him power.” Perhaps tools and technology, when created by humanity, test our character.
Unfortunately, that is not what happens today. New technology becomes part of the “blame it or claim it” game. AI, Smartphones, or ?? is either “blamed” for every conceivable societal and personal ill or “claimed” as a mystical magical solution to said ills. There is scant talk on how to understand and humanize new technology. Indeed, this bad habit of “claiming or blaming” is accelerating and continues to obscure the challenge of projecting the better angels of human character into the tool / technology .
How does humanity’s soul express itself as it looks at new technology? Through the uses we put that technology to. Our species perceives both good and evil potential in how tools are used. It is our species’ soul that drives the usages of technology – whether the sudden discovery of what AI can do on is used to feed the world or accelerates an entirely new arms race.