Technology and Change

However I think of it this way. A car makes a lousy horse. In hindsight we might say that the automobile was a mistake. Pollution, wars over oil and gas, accidents, drunk driving, the suburbs: there are a lot of reasons to complain about cars. But there’s no way we could go back to horse-drawn carriages, not without unmaking our society in fundamental ways (as in some post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie). If we used cars the same way we used horses, then there would be no point in having cars. Or here’s another example: calculators. If we only used calculators to perform the same calculations that we used to do with pencil and paper, there wouldn’t be much purpose to them. Indeed few people would carry a calculator around them because the need for making calculations in daily life is not worth the bother. Of course computers allow us to make calculations not possible by humans and open new avenues of knowledge and investigation.