Re:Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, s...
by pixl97 on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @03:42PM
(#10081655)
A rabbit in Australia, circa 1788.
The biggest issue with our era of technological growth, is we really have no idea if it is sustainable socially or ecologically over periods of time.
If we take human social structures out of current growth and look at the 'people like to work and create to survive issue as an individual' we can easily destroy the world around us. This occurs all the time in biological systems. The great oxygen catastrophe is a prime example. Each individual bacteria produced oxygen in order to survive. This worked fine for around a billion years. The bacteria had no means to realized that free iron and other rocks in the crust would absorb their byproduct only for so long. Once the saturation point was reached free oxygen filled the atmosphere and essentially poisoned the Earth for a time.
The question is, 'is there a technological saturation point'? How quickly will technology continue to grow even if it is poisoning the social structures it was built on? Will people and society adapt quickly enough?
The biggest issue with our era of technological growth, is we really have no idea if it is sustainable socially or ecologically over periods of time.
If we take human social structures out of current growth and look at the 'people like to work and create to survive issue as an individual' we can easily destroy the world around us. This occurs all the time in biological systems. The great oxygen catastrophe is a prime example. Each individual bacteria produced oxygen in order to survive. This worked fine for around a billion years. The bacteria had no means to realized that free iron and other rocks in the crust would absorb their byproduct only for so long. Once the saturation point was reached free oxygen filled the atmosphere and essentially poisoned the Earth for a time.
The question is, 'is there a technological saturation point'? How quickly will technology continue to grow even if it is poisoning the social structures it was built on? Will people and society adapt quickly enough?