What is the aim of technological development?

The post-industrial era has been called the Information Age for the very good reason that the thrust of this era's technological progress is primarily concerned with the accumulation, organization, storage, retrieval, and use of information.

We are the only species of life on this planet that can store information and pass it on to our descendants. So far the more primitive data storage technologies (paper and ink) have played major roles in the advance of our culture. It's unlikely that the Renaissance or Reformation could have happened without written language, and the Enlightenment would have been impossible.

Today electronically stored and transmitted information is arguably the greatest single force in the twin inexorable trends of more democracy and less poverty. People who can communicate over long distances are able to share ideas and spread good news and encouragement, as well as planning and organizing what they're going to do about their problems.

Electronic information transmission is even the major tool in the final transition of our species from rival tribes fighting each other into a single global civilization. As I have noted before, the U.S. government has been telling us for three decades that Iranians are our enemies. Yet when Neda Agha Soltan was gunned down in the streets of Tehran by agents of a repressive theocratic government, people on the scene transmitted real-time cellphone images of her death around the world... and Americans wept for her. Country/western singers, who represent the most xenophobic portion of our population, wrote songs about her.

Neda was our sister, our daughter, our friend. We are all one people.

So yes, we need to continue advancing in this direction, and technology is the means.

 

Indeed there has almost always been a down side to every technology, and certainly to the major paradigm-shifting technologies.

Look at agriculture, the twin technologies of farming and animal husbandry that lifted us out of the multi-million-year-long Paleolithic Era. At the end of the Paleolithic, life expectancy for an adult who had survived childhood (infant mortality was an almost constant 80% until less than 200 years ago) was 50-55 years. But once humans became dependent on grains for sustenance, they unknowingly brought on horrible vitamin and mineral deficiencies. In the Roman Empire, life expectancy for the common people, who had very little access to nutritionally complete meat and dairy products, was about 25.

The Iron Age allowed us to build weapons no one could have imagined in the past. War became a major cause of death.

The Industrial Era is only now drawing to a close so almost everyone alive is familiar with its pitfalls. Pollution, deforestation, habitat destruction, social inequity, clashes between civilizations on opposite sides of the planet who in earlier eras would barely have known of each other's existence.

Yet, if you just look at the beginning and ending points, who could say with a straight face that in aggregate we are not better off today than the nomadic hunter-gatherers 12KYA? Only the few misfits who assume that they could live successfully in the wilderness with nothing but a knife, a spear and a bow and arrows--most of whom have never spent more than a few weeks in the wilderness with a car, a cellphone, a carton of matches, a well-stocked medicine chest, and thirty cases of beer.

Technology is the set of tools we use for taming nature and ourselves.

 

"Probably more so?" Every invention, from flint blades to the taming of fire to clothing to spoken language to musical instruments to antibiotics is a technology. Are you really suggesting with a straight face that because money, gunpowder and videogames are also technology, that the detriments of technology might outweigh its benefits??? Can you say "Luddite"?

To overcome the limitations of nature: both the external nature of our environment and the genetic programming of our own internal nature. I usually use the verb "transcend" instead of "overcome" but the nitpickers among us have descended upon it.

We will never completely overcome the limitations of nature. But to speak to the specific wording of your question, it's quite acceptable for one's aim to be a process rather than a goal. "Continuous improvement" (or words to that effect) has become a slogan in I.T. and other business sectors.

You can't always see your ultimate goal until you successfully complete the milestones along the way.

People are fond of asking that question because it's so fascinating. But it's absurd.

Put yourself in the place of an average citizen in 1840. I.e., a farmer (like 99.999% of the human race before industrialization) working 100-hour weeks with only hand tools and draft animals for help. You'll never travel more than 20 miles from your birthplace. The odds are about 80% that you're illiterate. You use lanterns and candles for lighting, fire for heating and cooking. Your family makes many of their clothes and tools, most of their bedding, and grows all of their food. You're lucky to hear professionally composed and performed music three or four times a year, unless you live close enough to a big town to hear the (mostly amateur) church choir on Sunday morning, and/or are prosperous enough to visit the tavern on Saturday night and listen to a (barely professional-quality) pianist and singer. News of the outside world is scant and slow. In other words, you live the way people have lived since the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age three thousand years ago.

You may be familiar with the latest technological advances, such as the steam engine, mass production and the telegraph.

Okay, go! Predict what life will be like in 400 years, in the year 2240. Engines powered by fossil fuels replacing the power of human and animal muscles. Universal literacy. Heat and light at the touch of a button. Food, clothing and other products of astounding quality for sale at reasonable prices a short distance from home. Nearly instant communication with nearly every point on earth. Airplanes. Satellites. Professionally composed and performed music available 24/7--as well as a cornucopia of other culture and entertainment, plus news and commentary. Scientific medicine that looks like witchcraft but is more effective. You work in a job spending the entire day sitting comfortably and staring at words and numbers on a sheet of plastic (whatever that is)--and only 40 hours a week. And then there's...

Oh wait. I'm not describing the world 400 years beyond 1840. I'm describing today's world, only 172 years later!

So if you want to guess what life will be like 400 years from now, be my guest. I'm sure the people of 2412 (or even 2184, a mere 172 years from now) will get a good laugh out of it.

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Someone once suggested that the way to tell who is running civilization in any era is to find the tallest buildings. At various times it was the forts (the military running civilization), the palaces (civil government running civilization), the cathedrals (religion)... then the banks (commerce). Today if you look up in the sky you might see a communication satellite flying high above the roofs of all of those edifices. Information technology now runs civilization.

Who will be next?