TO THE EDITOR:
A global conversation about technology is looming. All of this generation’s most pressing problems — climate change, antibiotic resistance, ecological destruction, drones, mass surveillance — are caused by technology at their root.
What’s worse, companies like Google are pushing for more technologies that exacerbate these problems, notably Google Glass. Chancellor Carol Folt wore Google Glasses at this year’s convocation, taking pictures of the audience and even advertising the UNC Glass Explorer program. No doubt, the Chancellor thought what she was doing was innocuous and mundane. After all, technology is just a tool, right?
Wrong.
From Henry David Thoreau to Jacques Ellul, from Mark Twain to Ted Kaczynski, great thinkers have proposed that technology is, in fact, a system with its own values: efficiency, artificiality and rationality. Humans, these thinkers assert, are actually changed by technology more than they change it, and the result is less freedom, less dignity and less wildness.
The chancellor, by granting legitimacy to an experimental technology, has actively contributed to the furtherance of technological values, even if she did not consciously do so.
Again, a global conversation about technology is looming. The technocrats know it, too. The founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, allegedly once said, “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.” It’s time for our generation to decide if they agree.
John Fleshman
Information and Library Science
