Are You Afraid of Technology?

According to Business Insider, thousands of Swedish people recently embedded grain-sized microchips under their skin to replace ID cards. Following the trend of wearable technology and interconnected devices like watches and rings, the idea is to make people’s daily lives easier – users can waft a hand over a machine to unlock doors, pay for services, even travel by train. Sounds convenient, and fun – like being Darth Vader!

Possible downsides of course include a risk of infection, the body reacting to the device, hacking and unauthorised surveillance – although users claim not to be concerned because the data collected and shared is “too limited”. Bionyfiken founder Hannes Sjöblad told Tech Insider in 2015 that, “all of the wearables we wear today will be implantable in five to ten years”. Are we excited or concerned about this?

Anyone who’s read M.T. Anderson’s near-future dystopian novel ‘Feed’ might be concerned. I read the book recently while tutoring one of my high school students HSC English, and loved it – especially its opening line: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” With a satirical humour, the book deals with issues like consumerism, technology, environmental decay and data mining. In particular, characters have a ‘feed’ implanted in their brains to give them constant access to the internet and social media. Needless to say, things don’t go smoothly!

But it’s okay for things not to go well in fiction, where we have the opportunity to safely explore possible consequences of the way we live and the technology/science we develop to improve our lives. I love writing science fiction for that very reason. What if machines become sentient? Would human clones have human rights? What if we could live for centuries, erase or alter our memories, or tamper with our DNA? What if we reintroduced dinosaurs into our ecosystem?

As Jeff Goldblum’s character Ian Malcolm says in ‘Jurassic Park’, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Countless books and movies offer different perspectives on this, exploring the consequences of scientific or technological ‘progress’, questioning whether it’s progress at all. Take for example:

And there are so many other stories – there are an easy 100 science fiction books listed over here – stories that resonate with us because of the terrible scientific or technological doom they forewarn us to avoid, stories that help us understand where we are and where we’re going, stories that also offer hope…

In fact, stories might be the very things to save us, because it’s through exploring concepts and dangers in the safety of story that we might predict dangers to avoid, and act accordingly.

A friend recently told me the story of how his car keys stopped working down the beach one day, due to saltwater getting into the batteries; it meant he couldn’t start his car. Did you know you can insert the key fob into a slot in the dashboard of those types of car to start the engine regardless of whether the key’s working or not? His story might save me from being stranded if I’m ever in the same situation!

Another friend recently told me the story of how she dropped her smartphone into water, but because she buried it in rice and the rice absorbed the water, it continued functioning. That story might save my own phone if I ever do the same.

What about electric car windows? In the movies, passengers trapped inside cars sinking slowly underwater can never buzz their windows down, and there are no longer handles to wind them up or down manually. So if you’re ever in a car heading into water, buzz the windows down in mid-flight! Now there’s a story that might literally save your life!

Stories can save us!

So when friends talk about the dangers of unrestrained technological innovation, of creating AIs (Artificial Intelligence) that understand us better than we understand ourselves (and might use that against us), or of ‘singularity’  –  the point at which machines become so powerful no one can predict the future – I turn to stories for reassurance.

It’s harder jogging with a bulky Walkman for music, rather than a smartphone. I couldn’t operate my mobile office without the internet. I love stuffing clothes in my washing machine, pressing ‘start’, then walking away. So technology definitely plays a substantial role in my life. But am I concerned? Not while I have stories to guide me.

How about you?