Today was spring cleaning day in the yard where I live, and as I was sweeping away happily and thinking about what to write for today's post, I realized that the last few months I started speaking obsessively about technology and I never ever stopped to think about what technology really is. The first thing that came to mind as a "definition", was something you plug in and runs on electricity, but that was shortsighted. So I gave it some more thought.
The best "definition" I came up with is that technology is something made by a human in order to facilitate a certain desired outcome. For example, if you want to draw something in detail, a pencil is a better technology than using your fingers. On the downside, if your goal is to kill someone, a gun is will facilitate reaching this goal. But these are some obvious examples, let's go beyond the obvious.
If technology is a facilitator for an outcome, let's consider human language. At one point in our evolution, we reached a mental capacity that allowed the possibility of more complex understanding, thus the need for a more complex communication. Humans were capable of communicating before language through behavioral language and other non-verbal forms, but language was able to take communication from a very general form to a specific one. Thus, you can say that language is a technology of communication.
Another quite interesting thing that can be seen as technology, is art. Humans needed to communicate certain things that could not be expressed through words or anything else and created an artistic manifestation, most probably as an abstraction for emotions, and as language transmits understanding, art transmits emotions. I will even go so far as to bring technologies of the sacred into the discussion. Stanislav Grof talks about desired states of expanded consciousness that can be obtained in several ways like meditation, breathing techniques or psychedelics.
So, apparently, technology plays an even larger role than I have ever imagined. It seems to literally shape human civilization on many different levels, ranging from very subtle to major influences. Although this is apparent, I still feel the urge to specify that technology is not inherently good nor evil, but can be used for both purposes.
After writing this post, I am more confident than ever in technology. The only thing we need to do is make sure that at least part of humanity has massive transformative goals and all the technology we need to create abundance will be created sooner or later.
Please share your thoughts on the ideas presented here and I would love to read what would be your "definitions" of technology. You can also find me on discord at lishu#0022.
