Can Technology and Freedom Co-Exist?

Technological advances are generally viewed as blessings. Improved technologies often enable us to satisfy our needs and desires more successfully. They also enable individuals to do things by themselves that could only be accomplished in the past by large groups of people. Many tasks that used to require great outlays of time and resources can now be accomplished more quickly and economically.

With all these benefits it may be difficult to keep in mind some hidden dangers that technological advances bring with them, dangers that might someday threaten the very existence of personal freedom.

One of the dangerous features of technology is that it cares not at all for human values. It simply increases our ability to do things. Whether those things are good or evil makes no difference whatsoever as far as technology is concerned.

An even more dangerous feature of technology is that it seems to have no limits. It just goes on and on, putting more and more power into the hands of more people. As the power of individuals increases, seemingly without end - as we become more and more capable of doing greater and greater harm to larger and larger numbers of our fellow-citizens - there is likely to be an ever-increasing pressure to restrict personal liberty.

We can find many examples in history that illustrate the way technology has increased the power of individuals or relatively small groups. In 1950 only the richest and most advanced nations in the world could produce atomic weapons. Now it is likely that any nation with the desire to do so could equip itself with nuclear devices. Advances in technology have made it possible for poor countries to do what only the rich could do in the past. This trend will continue. With every year that passes it will became easier and more economical to build an atomic bomb.

What will happen when an individual has the capacity to build an atomic bomb in his or her basement? This possibility may be much closer than we think. More than twenty years ago a book appeared describing a college student’s physics project: to design, but not build, an atomic bomb. The project was successfully completed and caused serious concerns for a number of federal agencies. (Phillips, John Aristotle and David Michaelis. Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid. William Morrow & Company, 1978.)

As technology advances, homemade atomic bombs may be the least of our worries. Genetic engineering, once the domain of Nobel laureates and million-dollar labs, is already within the reach of the weekend hobbyist. If you want to, you can already try to engineer lethal bacteria in your garage workshop. How should your neighbors feel about something like that? What should the government do about it? Bacteria are everywhere and certainly can’t be outlawed. The equipment needed is relatively simple; if we make it illegal to buy, you can probably construct it yourself. The knowledge needed is already in the public domain. What else can we do? Monitor what people are up to in their garages?

Computer technology has also put vastly greater power into the hands of individuals than they have ever known before. Experienced hackers can now cause difficulties for millions of people, and cause millions of dollars worth of damage. In 1900 no teenager in the world had any chance of causing confusion or devastation across an entire nation. Now any teenager with a little knowledge and access to a computer can take a shot at it. How do we respond to a threat like this? Monitor what people are doing on the Internet?

These are only a few examples. As technology continues to progress, the power of individual human beings to do harm will continue to increase in many areas. Efforts to restrict the flow of potentially dangerous information will probably fail. Knowledge about reality and the way the world works - which is really what technology is - will be hard to keep secret. Efforts to outlaw tools or raw materials with potentially dangerous applications are also likely to fail. If such materials cannot be purchased legally they will be purchased illegally. If they cannot be purchased illegally they will be built or produced from scratch. If they cannot be built or produced from scratch technological ingenuity will simply find a new method for producing the desired result - a method that does not use the outlawed tools or raw materials.

We have always known that an excess of governmental power is a danger to freedom. Will we find that an excess of personal power makes freedom impossible? We may one day discover that a prerequisite to individual freedom is individual weakness. A world in which private individuals have the power to harm, destroy, or kill on scales never before imagined may be a world entirely incompatible with personal freedom. As the power of individuals comes to rival the power once wielded by entire nations will it not become necessary to monitor the activities of those individuals as closely as nations try to monitor each others activities now?

Technology will continue to advance. There is no way to stop it. The power we have to harm each other will continue to grow. Demands for individual freedom and personal privacy will become ever more difficult to justify. There may come a day when individual human beings are simply too powerful to be left alone- when we are simply too powerful, and too dangerous, to be free. I am not sure if there is a solution to this problem. I AM sure we need to start thinking about it.

***

[This book discusses some of the unintended consequences future technological advances may have on human society.]

[If you want to support "Anything Smart" just click on book links like the one below and the other ones throughout this blog to buy your books. "Anything Smart" will receive a commission. Thanks!]

***

Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Wayne Gadway