Seth's Blog : Progress
Progress
Technology is not neutral. It can’t be, because by definition, advances in tech create change, and change always creates positives and negatives.
We now live in a time of rapid technological change, perhaps the biggest in 150 years. In the face of the overwhelming impact of tech, we might not be enjoying the ride.
Sometimes the problem is the tech itself, and sometimes it’s about our fear of change and unknown.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about which technology we’d rather live without–in other words, when was the golden age that we’re nostalgic for, the one that technology has tarnished in the name of progress?
They’re not in a perfect order, but if you had to draw the line, where and when would you put it?
Housing
Toilets
Money
Debt
Culverts and water supplies
Books
Libraries
Handwashing and germ theory
Eyeglasses
The scientific method
Clocks
Trains
The cotton gin
The loom
The origin of species
Electricity
Voting machines
The telephone
Gas-powered cars
Credit cards
Vaccines
Television
Antibiotics
Sunscreen
Birth control
Portable telephones
GPS
Electric cars
Solar panels and windmills
Email
Online bookstores
Search engines
Cochlear implants
Mapping DNA
Podcasts
Machine learning
Image recognition for reading x-rays
Wikipedia
Facial recognition
Augmented memory implants
GPT and AI writing and creation
Cloning
Gene repair
Quantum computing
The internet of things
…
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