Why Do Humans Need Technology?
It’s not just us Homo Sapiens that have long used technology. We know that Neanderthals and likely Denisovans used technology. As in stone tools. Around 1.8 Million years ago. It is often said that our use of technology is related to our brain size, but we know that Neanderthals had larger brains than us sapiens. So we’re still not entirely sure why Homo Sapiens outlasted the seven other hominid species that once puttered around this mucky sphere. Yet without technology, we wouldn’t be able to survive. We’d be wiped out.
We know too, that other animals use tools, like crows, raccoons and apes. Tool use is not exclusive to humans. For millennia we assumed humans were an animal species separate from other animals because of our tool use. This isn’t so.
If we didn’t have technology, it would probably be the dolphins running the oceans and the elephants the land. Which some days, may not seem such a bad thing.
Technology is part of who we are as modern humans. We may curse our desktop printers and the fact that despite there being 25 years of websites most companies still haven’t figured them out. Especially eCommerce. We both love and hate our smartphones, cars and toasters.
Technology, tool use, goes hand in hand with the two primary means of human survival. Biological evolution and cultural evolution. Biology moves a little too slow for us. Just ask anyone addicted to TikTok. But culture is the code we invented to enable us to survive and tools are the technology that ensures we can do that. There are few aspects too, of human biology, that haven’t been shaped by culture. Our culture has even shaped some fellow animals.
Even “reality” TV shows like Naked & Afraid have participants using some tools. Naked & Afraid, with absolutely no use of technology allowed, would be a guarantee that the participants will be dinner for some predator. Watching a lion eat a human is not good TV viewing. For most of us anyway. Also not very good for getting a TV series to last. We even need technology to watch such shows.
The debate around how much technology we need, such as social media today, smartphones, so many screens, Artificial Intelligence, genetic engineering, is not new. Every time someone has come up with some newfangled technology that upends a society and culture, we tend to get a bit sideways. Sometimes, we get feisty and hold protests.
Humans often don’t like new technologies because it signals change. Change is constant and inevitable. We don’t like it at a larger societal level and often not personally either. We’ve been fussy about change for many thousands of years.
A culture may reject certain technologies, but every single culture on earth (there are about 3,800 while some believe there is more than 7,000. We can’t be entirely sure) uses a variety of technologies. From language and music to physical tools for hunting, food preparation, shelter building, for tweeting and so on. Every single one.
How and why we use different technologies, how we select the ones that will work in our culture or society, varies as much as our cultures. Generational preferences also come into play. Typically, a younger generation is more open to a new technology. After all, pissing off our parents is often quite delightful in most any culture. Especially when we are teenagers.
Our use of tools grew quite significantly when we figured out ways to make fire. That meant meat and plants tasted good. It also made it less likely that lions and tigers would eat us at night. As a result, the science suggests, our brains got bigger. It’s not just delicious BBQ that made our brains grow bigger, it’s also because we figured out that hanging out together was a good survival technique too. Combine fire and a bunch of club wielding folks and it is more likely Mr. Tiger is going to be dinner than one of us.
But we also got bored sitting around a fire just staring at one another. So we started grunting at one another (probably) and mixing that up with gestures. Then someone cracked a joke and we all started laughing. Language was born. Probably not exactly like that.
This is where culture started to evolve. Culture includes language, family and social systems, politics, military and governance as well as music, fashion, dance and art. It also includes rituals. We have long used rituals, traditions and customs to put rules around how technologies are to be used. This is how we bind them into who we are as humans and evolve societies.
We create a technology because it helps solve problems. Technologies are formed from our imaginations. We shape the technology, then it shapes us and then we shape it through rituals, traditions, customs and norms. Eventually a technology becomes so commonplace that it in effect, becomes invisible. Like a telephone, hammer, screwdriver, knife and so on.
We also screw it up with technologies sometimes. Like making nuclear weapons. Or using AI in a bad way (you know we will, because, well, we’re human. There’s already ChaosGPT) All technologies are a double-edged sword. All technologies have unintended consequences. For example, social media was going to make the entire world democratic and bring humans closer together. It has in some ways, but it hasn’t in others.
Over time, we use the code of culture to determine how a technology should be used in the longer term, when it should be rejected and how it should be governed. Remember, governance and politics are a part of culture.
The challenge that lies ahead of us is digital technologies. They are different from prior, analog, technologies. Why? Because they can literally change our physiology and what it even means to be human. It’s why we have Humanity+ and transhumanist movements who see humans evolving in a very different way.
How we evolve, how we decide to use digital technologies will be something that we use culture to resolve. That’s for another article.
But the simple fact is, humans cannot survive without technology. Be it as basic as a stone axe and for making tools from smartphones to Artificial Intelligence. As our societies become ever larger and more complex, technology compounds in its importance to our very survival. Humanity is evolving. This is a fact. So must our technologies evolve with us. We don’t have a choice. Technology is just part of who we are as a species.
