I am a Software Engineer, and have been interested in technology since I was spawned into this reality always as an outlet for creativity, but also to study what seems… very unnatural. As I have gotten older and seen technology evolve, I have so many mixed feelings about it. Science has a lack of answers for the questions I seek. God and the devil is far more fitting for what I wonder about.
I often remind myself of a quote I heard somewhere: "Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms."
Here is what I mean. When you go out into nature and leave your phone, wallet, and keys at home, it dawns on you, there is unbounded complete potential for… anything as far as the eye sees. So much hope, wonder, and existence to be had. But then you come back to "civilization," which is technology, and you have to cross a street by pressing the walk sign button… and get your phone to check email… and you are controlled. The natural realm provides almost limitless potential, bounded only by the laws of nature. Technology is just creating bounds within nature's for no other reason than to control and manipulate humans for individual gain. So what we call individual power is only the illusion of individual power.
Year by year, decade by decade, we just move further and further into the grasps of the machine world. I would imagine life in say 1000 years — barring some complete wipe of civilization — is just the most elaborate version of Plato's allegory of a cave where all citizens are completely controlled. BUT then I think you must have the illusion of free will or else you get a revolution, or mass suicide, or… there is some line that a structure created within nature simply can't cross or it will crumble and be absorbed / reset by nature.
I flip flop between individual power vis-à-vis creativity and complete control… and I keep landing on complete control. As you can tell, I am at conflict with myself on this topic.
So my question is: is there a book that provides a scientific or even better spiritual framework for understanding what technology fundamentally is? Not what it could become, but what it is?
Sidenote: I'm not looking for Brave New World, 1984, or anything that is "look at a future with technology" and then I have to come up with my own conclusion. I want something that confronts this directly.
by traceenforce