The future; an unknown frontier. A world with technology right at the limit of what’s possible… sometimes freaking us right out!
People have always feared the unknown. We’ve always had a complicated relationship with technology… lil’ bit of fear, lil’ bit of hope. History is full of tech panic. But the thing is… Fear of technology doesn’t come from nowhere. For every goofy overreaction, there’s some advancement that really did end up having terrible consequences… Like, pesticides that increase food production but kill bees… And the really tricky thing is, you don’t know what’s going to be good and what’s going to be bad! And sometimes it’s both! Just look at climate change, the same advancements that caused global warming also gave us synthetic fertilizers, sterile medical tools, cars, indoor lights. All of the things that make modern life more comfortable and longer than before. Each of these new technologies came with complications, both good and bad, that were impossible to predict… which leads me to this week’s topic… The question of whether we should attempt to solve the man-made technology-induced climate crisis… With more technology!
I mean, we already are; At this very moment, there are teams of people working on advanced carbon capture machines. Geneticists designing enzymes that can eat plastic. Even people developing robot minds that could solve the problem for us… But should we? Knowing it could potentially go wrong?