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A friend of mine just had cataract surgery. She had it at 7:30 AM, was back in the car at 8:30, and out shopping at 10. She told me that, decades, earlier, her grandmother had had cataract surgery and was laid up in bed, told not to move her head for a week. Earlier still, cataracts, common among older people, meant you’d go blind. Technology, thank you.
My father, a couple decades ago, had clogged arteries and had to undergo open-heart surgery in which they sawed open his chest. It required months of recovery. Today he probably would have been treated with a minimally-invasive quickie stent. Thank you, technology.
Alas, many of society mind-molders are not science-and-math people. They go into the communication arts: journalism, filmmaking, teaching, novel and screenwriting, etc. That tends to gives them a conscious or unconscious bias against science and technology, a bias that may not serve you. Most movies, novels, plays, and TV shows focus on technology’s downside, often apocalyptic as in movies such as The Terminator, The Matrix, Wall-E, even Spielberg movies, such as ET. That portrays children with no more tech than bicycles trumping zillions of dollars of the police’s technological wizardry. In contrast, positive characters are generally artists of some sort: writers, actors, musicians, architects: from Sunset Blvd to Sleepless in Seattle (he’s an architect,) The Pianist to At Eternity’s Gate to Bohemian Rhapsody. Rarely is more than lip service paid to such portrayals' negative impact. They've encouraged countless people to pursue a career in the arts only to find themselves never earning enough money from their creative output even to pay back their art/music/journalism student loans, let alone to sustainably make even a modest living from their art.
Meanwhile, technology is often given short shrift. Where are the movies, novels, and TV shows lauding the unquestionable life improvement that comes from technology? 3/4 of U.S. adults own a smartphone, enabling not only phoning from anywhere but thousands of life-enhancing apps, plus, thanks to Search, instant access to well-curated content that dwarfs even what’s in the Library of Congress: from health advice to finding long-lost friends and Skyping or FaceTiming with them, to nearly any product or service, reader-reviewed, to movies on demand. Ironically, all those technology-denigrating filmmakers and TV journalists are massive users of technology.
Some in the media slam nuclear energy despite even leftist authoritative entitles, for example, Yale’s School of Environmental Studies, insisting that nuclear energy is crucial to both keeping the lights on and to avoiding environmental disaster. But you wouldn’t know that from some in the media, for example, the iconic movies, The China Syndrome, Dr. Strangelove, and Silkwood, not to mention the news media and teachers that overstate the risk.
Today, some argue that the media—news and entertainment—speaks increasingly with just one voice and censors or censures dissent. If we are to live wisely, considering the full range of responsibly held views, we must be aware that the messages we’re fed might well come from a subset of people with an unreasonable bias toward the arts and away from technology, which has and likely will acceleratingly do more good for humankind.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
