Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of the best-selling book ‘The Long Tail‘, recently blogged about ‘living with no visible technology‘, pointing to the fact that technology has reached the point where it can be put out of sight, become background once again, whereas before it used to be foreground, dictating, consuming and constraining human space (physical and mental). We already blogged about related lines of thought in terms of calm technology, ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, pervasive computing etc., core strategies in many of today’s consumer electronics companies. Yet, the title of Chris Anderson’s blog post ‘living with no visible technology’ also triggered another brainwave.

In McLuhan‘s view of media and technology in general as extensions of man, there are a few things about the evolution of our extensions and where it is heading that are intriguing to say the least.

One aspect is that the unstoppable trend of miniaturization, ongoing since several ages, is coming to the point where its effects upon the proportional relationship with human nature will take on a whole new form. Once crossing the barriers of our senses, slipping below their natural radar, miniaturized technology makes for new opportunities as well as new threats to arise.

Think about the marvellous applications of nano-technology in the medical world, the opportunities opened up by the extreme portability of memory, promising developments in synthetic biology etc. The smaller things get, the more interesting and applicable they often become in a ever-wider range of domains. Last month, for example, the Israeli security department announced it will be investing heavily in nanotechnology in order to develop prototypes of new, small weaponry such as supergloves and bionic hornets within 3 years. The project is reminiscent of the Pentagon’s plans to develop a full scale cyber-insect army. The development of smart dust for both sensing and acting is on the research agenda for both civil and military purposes since several years. But also consider developments in the biochemical area, i.e. designer viruses, bacteriophages etc. In this case, like in any case of technology, there are benevolent uses and malicious ones.

As miniaturization progresses, many wonder about what will happen when the inability of our senses to warn us about certain human-engineered threats becomes pervasive? Among the main worries is that the further our technologies range, the further their reach into our world becomes in terms of distance, scale, number and autonomy, the smaller and less predictable their margins of error might become along with their ‘visibility’. The decrease of effort needed to operate many ‘small’ technologies, the increase of access to them, along with a much wider (often less predictable ) range and scale of impact (e.g. consequences of converging technologies such as the mingling of GMO’s with ‘traditional’ species etc.) raises questions of safety and worries of things getting out of hand much more easily. In other words, the veil of a perceived extension of control might increasingly obscure the loss of it. Scale can be a tricky thing.
How fragile we are …

Image shows the University of Berkeley’s robotic fly project

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at 18:37 and is filed under envision, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.