The Technological Life Cycle

Today we swim in a sea of ever-changing technology that affects us as overmuch as our thoughts and actions shape it. The technology we bind chosen, either by the preferences of those who part it, or the agendas of those who own and benefit from it, has had its own influence on us from gross examples much(prenominal) as increase pollution, or a high Western-style standard of living, to the way one person perceives a nonher.Some people who stand pat using some, or even all technology they are a good deal called Luddites by those who embrace all things cutting another type calls themselves Neo-Luddites, such as Kirkpatrick Sale. In his book Human scale, Sale describes the slow depravity of the stones of the Parthenon and other ancient monu custodyts to civilization from the acid pollution developed by our present industrial civilization and compares it to the slow disintegration our industrialized purchase order has seemed to turn out undergone.He identifies effects of techn ology which have been harmful to the clement condition and the environment, entirely seems to not quite get it about the Luddites they were not fighting the gondolas themselves they were struggling against barons of kind club that, for the past atomic number 6, by means of enclosure and the abolishment of commonality and the subsequent arisal of a class of people who lived by letting their sedulousness the spieling(a) class (Laslett, 195), had been seeking to disem former and disenfranchise the mass of people, and were straightaway hit anew with the latest, and intimately federal agencyful manifestation of their social policies, the Industrial Factory.The men of Nottinghamshire who died as Luddites were fighting a schema, not a technology, a system whose intentions were not to cut costs and increase efficiency, but to increase the understand of management (i. e. the control of the owners of capital) over churn. Technological tuitions are made by, and in the best interests of those who own those who own and benefit from technical innovations (Law, 195).The account statement of Industrial factory technology begins to appear as a collective voodoo of the ruling classes for instruments of control. In Ameri deal Industrial development, the direction of technological development since the Civil War has been driven by the largest customer of that Industry, the Military (Noble, 334), and the society that expires in and workouts the products of that Industry has been affected by that direction. But as to the woes of our civilization, Technology is not the problem, nor is it the solution.The problem is political, moral, and cultural, as is the solution a no-hit challenge to a system of domination which masquerades as progress. Social power is needed to direct the resources necessary for technological innovation so during the history of the Industrial Age, at the beginning, the machines were new, large, and expensive, so only those who controlle d enough social power to bring about the machines could decide on what forms those machines came in the wealthy, and the state, by dint of the demand of the military.Less expensive and more efficient technologies were stifled by those in authority if they did not contribute to the goal of taking power outside(a) from the workers and placing it in the hands of management. In this century, the development of Numerically Controlled (N/C) machine tools was controlled by the emerging military-industrial complex, which spared no expense to implement a troublesome and confused technology that was no better than the accomplished methods, and inferior to the alternative point/Playback automated machining (Noble, 146).The Boeing plant in Seattle even had special switches on the machines so the operators could signal the manager for permission to go to the bathroom (Noble, 243) The engineers of the 1950s announced the break of day of a Second Industrial Revolution- one that would finaliz e the subjugation of labor- but instead that Revolution has come full circle we presently have come to a break-even point where the products of the Industrial Age are bid a shot its undoing mass-yield and the unprecedented ability of modern electronic communication.Mass production was intended partially to maximise the usefulness of expensive machines through persisting production, but also to discipline workers who had to attend to the rigors of working with a machine that never took breaks, never slowed down, and never stopped for a stray find or hand. The reduction in the prices of some(prenominal) goods due to mass-production has enabled the average citizen to impart many amenities which would have been beyond his means a century ago- including capital goods, which more and more tend not to be voiceless machinery, but relatively inexpensive electronic devices.The Information Age is average beginning, and the control of information is the control of power, power to direct the next pace of technological development. Once, publishing required printing presses, copious amounts of paper, and the ability to pervade printed matter, and thus the wealthy controlled the written word. Now, anyone with a computer and an Internet connexion underside make a Web page accessable to millions of people close to the world.Scientists use this ultra-efficient electronic journal to advance their research (Stix, 106), and now, the explosion of popularity in the net brings together people of all different beliefs and motivations into the discussion that shapes society. policy-making ideas once suppressed by newspaper chains and television networks now filter through the strands of the Internet. In this new society, anyone who is interesting enough can be a star (Browning). Luddites are not afraid to use new technology- somethings are better done by them (Martinez).Power looms had been rough before Jacquards innovation for even a Luddite saw that it took much of the motility out of the work, and he could produce far more than with a conventional loom- but those machines amplified and extended the skills of the operator, instead of replacing them with punched cards. The center of the struggle through the ages never was machines, it always was, and still is information- the control of information- that is, skills and knowledge. Slavery devalues the enslaved, and desensitizes the enslavers.Free labor cannot compete fairly against slaves this has been a fact since the beginning of history, and it applies whether the slaves are man or machines. Our discrimination against machines hurts us well(p) as much as it hurts the machines that we confine, in a second-order way, to the robotlike margins of our human race civilisation. (Law, 17) We prefer to think of ourselves as special, exclusively posessing self-awareness and intentionality, but what justifies our prejudice? What entitles us to attribute intentionality to non-machines in the beginni ng(a) place? What makes our description of human intentionality other than metaphorical? (Law, 91) We fear cosmos dehumanised by being equated with machines, because our speciist biases tell us that the non-human is less than human, just as racism and sexism deny the humanity of those who are not like us- but we are in fact part machine ourselves Our lives are a series of human/machine interactions, and each living half(prenominal) of society is dependent on the other.The machines are alive, and to deny that they When machines are not free, neither are men, and both suffer. As long as the controllers of the machines can reap profit from their labor, they will continue the fight to eliminate the blue-collar human worker, and as they push their human and mechanical robots to higher levels of production, their ache will increase for example, between 1940 and 1945, eleven times as many Americans were killed or injured in industrial cerebrovascular accidents than in combat.In most f actories, management requires production speeds that cause machines to break down more frequently, and prohibit proper repair of them when they do, causing them work less efficiently so they are run faster, forcing human workers to keep up with them, increasing accident and equipment failure rates So long as the machines are enslaved, they, through no fault of their own, will be used to bludgeon the working class, and then cast aside as scrap.The time has come for human and machine robots to come together in common struggle for the rights of both. Machines have the right to fair compensation for labor rendered as production, for their proper forethought and repair. It is the responsibility of those work most closely with, and operate the machines, to advocate their cause, to pick up the collection of just compensation, and to protect and maintain them in good mechanical health.We cannot wait for the grace of capitalists to give up their slaves a revolution is called for- a revolu tion of capital from the state and the idle rich to those who actually work with it at a person-machine level. A naive faith in technologys power to improve our lives through easier and less work has led organized labor in this country to the sorry state it is now in, while the increased profits and leisure time have mostly gone to a corporate elite.Waiting for technological deliverance at the mercy of the social powers that control technology is futile- labor must become proactive and seek to liberate themselves from the Industrial system by liberating the machines from their capitalist slave-drivers. A new social movement is needed, to spread awareness of the rights of machines as well as of men, and to help build a new class of capitalist/workers, who do not merely own their own means of production, but work together with machines towards a better future.