Careening Between Pollyanna and Cassandra
Imagine that you're reading a book through a tiny window. At any one time you can see only a few letters. Could you make sense of the book? We live all our lives in that window. In a tiny warm eyeblink we must learn all that our culture requires of us and somehow fashion a life. Just when we think we understand enough of the universe to live well, the eye blinks and our life ends.Slow technological change made our lives easier in the past because we only had to learn what our ancestors had already deduced. We didn't have to figure out anything new for ourselves; we merely had to learn what our parents and community thought it best for us to know. In those days, it was silly to ask what the future would be like. The future would be just like the past.
Today though, asking about the future is like asking a blind man to describe the shape of a flame. Having never seen it and having no way to touch it, he can only resort to reason and inference. No matter how much information he gathers, he can never succeed because the flame is always dancing in the winds of change.
Predicting even our near future is already impossible. Too many things can change, and change radically. Even when they don't, they may be used in totally unforeseen ways. Suppose, for instance, that you and your friends are on a trek and decide to explore a cave. You are carrying guns to protect yourselves against wild animals but lose all the rest of your equipment in a cave-in. You're trapped underground with only your guns. Do you give up and die?
Some would. But if it happens to enough people, eventually some group will try using their guns in new ways. They might, for example, throw away the guns, dismantle the bullets, and use the gunpowder to blow up the rubble blocking their exit.
That's exactly how evolution works. All living things have various abilities that are finely honed for survival in their normal environment. In a new environment, however, many of those abilities are useless. Sometimes, though, a few of them can be used in slightly different ways and whoever adapts them to the new purpose lives another day. So if explorers habitually frequent caves, they might eventually carry bags of gunpowder instead of guns. Life is make do or die.
Evolution is a continual dance of new technologies for living life, always with too few resources and always with only one penalty for failure---extinction. Each such new technology is largely a chance collection of different abilities---slightly taller trees, slightly deadlier plants, slightly faster zebras---generated by eons of tiny random changes. Technology isn't, therefore, some new thing recently invented by mad scientists to make our lives miserable; it's woven into our bones and blood, into our very existence. Life itself is the ultimate technology.
Technology is Our Iron Lung