Mechanical advantage

There's a lot of silly rhetoric around technology sometimes, and at its heart I think is an essential misunderstanding about what technology does. It's not magical pixie dust you can sprinkle on problems to make them disappear, nor it is it a dangerous evil to be contained. It's simply a power multiplier.

The earliest machines, so called simple machines, were things like levers and pulleys. These machines don't increase mechanical power, they just allow you to trade distance with force. Even today's machines, sophisticated as they are, still can't create energy from nothing, they can only move it around. However, by doing so they amplify a more abstract kind of power: one person can move a heavy rock with nothing but their own body and a length of wood. That person is more powerful in the sense that they have more ability to affect the world around them.

Of course, technology as a whole goes back far before simple machines, and includes wheels, fire, stone tools, and even some tools that predate humanity. What these technologies have in common is that they allow their users to do things they couldn't do before, or do them better. Every one of them allows us to use our finite energy more efficiently, or recruit other sources of energy to amplify our own. By doing so they increase our power, both collectively and individually.

Today, I can compose a piece of music on my computer, upload it to the internet, put it on an online marketplace, and (if it's good) become a successful musician. I can write my opinions somewhere and, if they're good enough, they will become popular, spread, and change the way people think. I can create software which, if it's useful enough, could be an important part of the way other people work. None of these things would be possible to do on my own if not for the enormous increase in power brought by all these forms of creative technology I have access to.

There's nothing essentially good about this, or essentially bad. If I want to help people, I can help way more people today than I could have thousands of years ago. If I want to hurt people, it's certainly possible to do that at a much larger scale than at any other time in history. It's not the technology that's causing these things, it's us. Both the best and the worst of us have become far more powerful.

It's for this reason I am somewhat nervous about the idea that technology will deliver us from our social problems. Sure, perhaps at some point we will become so powerful that we are impervious to harm. But won't the power of others to harm us increase as well? If anything, social solutions seem like they will only become more important as the people in society become more powerful and the consequences of social problems become more severe.