Tech is a tool. In our society, tools have owners, wielders and people who commission their making. Tools are designed to have certain benefits and limitations; purposes they amplify and dampen. (For example, DRM is designed to dampen the ability to copy without permission.)
Later, you define tech as "human capability of solving problems and adapting environments". To that, we can add, "And in particular, the constraints we put on that capability." Tech is a massively collaborative venture (from children who mine raw materials, to societies that fund a certain kind of tech and not others). Therefore it's social. Absent "an exponential improvement" in social organization, "an exponential improvement in technology" may just amplify dystopian impulses.
I used to be a technofile, at least an internet-ofile, that's for sure, but I kept reading the same and same discourses about how this time things will be different while in reality things were becoming worse and as such I've started changing my mind.
> This is pretty much obvious.
Honestly, I don't see the obvious in that, quite the contrary, what you're basically saying is that we have used thing A (technology) to dig ourselves into a very big hole but we will dig ourselves out if only we would keep using the same thing A (albeit in a changed, improved form?). I can't really understand this type of reasoning.
Care to give any examples? Things are almost universally becoming better for most of humanity. Of course, we know a lot of this is unsustainable and will come back to bite us later (unless we develop new techology to cope), but if you compare this year to pretty much any year in the past, things are better.
> what you're basically saying is that we have used thing A (technology) to dig ourselves into a very big hole but we will dig ourselves out if only we would keep using the same thing A (albeit in a changed, improved form?)
Yes, because if you're willing to talk about a single "thing A", then this "thing A", or "technology", is literally human capability of solving problems and adapting environments. Viewed like that, there's no other solution by definition.
And yes, I'm sort of saying that. It's easy to think "technology" is just smartphones and cat memes and bullshit SaaS startups. But technology is much more than that. An Internet company isn't going to save us. But small & safe nuclear reactors just might. Breakthroughs in carbon sequestration just might. New farming methods, new fertilizers, new GMOs. Better batteries, better renewables, improved recyclers, might be just enough to stave off the next disaster, to relieve the pressure we've been putting on the environment for the past couple centuries, and start to repair the damage.
Ultimately, what are the alternatives? Doing nothing? Prayer? Mass depopulation (which is also a likely consequence of the prior two)?
Global warming correlates pretty well with the Industrial Revolution and with technology's breakthroughs from the last 150 years, give or take.
And the second one, which has started actually scaring me more and more lately, is the rate of insects' decline. A couple of years ago I was commenting on this very website about how I could still see lots of dead insects on my car's windshield after a highway trip, while HN-ers from countries like Germany and Austria couldn't (I live in Eastern Europe), but this summer I've noticed for the first time that I've started seeing the same phenomenon, i.e. my windshield is almost clear from insects now after a highway trip. More than that, my dad (60+, has never accessed the Internet, not an environmentalist by any means) has also started noticing this phenomenon while recently making hay in a remote village close to the Carpathians, he told my brother that there weren't that many insects and bugs anymore compared to other summers (when you're making hay you kind of notice the presence of insects and bugs). My brother confirmed that that is true, but that it's a good thing, as those bugs tended to bite the hay-makers.
Particular technologies are highly intertwined - both directly and causally - so you can't really micromanage this. You have to push for technological develoment as a whole, and trim developments here, encourage there. For instance, we wouldn't be talking about renewable energy sources were it not for coal furnaces and internal combustion engines that allowed the world to progress to the point we even can exploit renewables. In this case not only we need the ladder because of the spade, but we also can have a ladder because of a spade.
- Policy: With regards to technology, who's in charge, how we use it.
- Laws: How do we protect vulnerable (defenseless) people from the negative repercussions of technology.
- Philosophy: How we think about things, treat other humans, our environment.
And I'm saying all of this as a technophile. The same tool that got you into the hole is likely not the tool that will be useful for getting you out.
In other words: we dug a hole for ourselves with technology, but the only way we can dig ourselves out of it is with more technology. This is pretty much obvious.