Technology
[1] The word technology can also mean the products resulting from such efforts,[2][3] including both tangible tools such as utensils or machines, and intangible ones such as software.
The earliest known technology is the stone tool, used during prehistory, followed by the control of fire—which in turn contributed to the growth of the human brain and the development of language during the Ice Age, according to the cooking hypothesis.
More recent technological inventions, including the printing press, telephone, and the Internet, have lowered barriers to communication and ushered in the knowledge economy.
[9] In the 20th century, as a result of scientific progress and the Second Industrial Revolution, technology stopped being considered a distinct academic discipline and took on the meaning: the systemic use of knowledge to practical ends.
[11] Around 2 Mya (million years ago), they learned to make the first stone tools by hammering flakes off a pebble, forming a sharp hand axe.
[29] Agriculture fed larger populations, and the transition to sedentism allowed for the simultaneous raising of more children, as infants no longer needed to be carried around by nomads.
[32] What triggered the progression from early Neolithic villages to the first cities, such as Uruk, and the first civilizations, such as Sumer, is not specifically known; however, the emergence of increasingly hierarchical social structures and specialized labor, of trade and war among adjacent cultures, and the need for collective action to overcome environmental challenges such as irrigation, are all thought to have played a role.
[34] Continuing improvements led to the furnace and bellows and provided, for the first time, the ability to smelt and forge gold, copper, silver, and lead – native metals found in relatively pure form in nature.
[40] The ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia used a complex system of canals and levees to divert water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for irrigation.
[41] Archaeologists estimate that the wheel was invented independently and concurrently in Mesopotamia (in present-day Iraq), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture), and Central Europe.
[54] The Renaissance era produced many innovations, including the introduction of the movable type printing press to Europe, which facilitated the communication of knowledge.
In medicine, new technologies were developed for diagnosis (CT, PET, and MRI scanning), treatment (like the dialysis machine, defibrillator, pacemaker, and a wide array of new pharmaceutical drugs), and research (like interferon cloning and DNA microarrays).
[64] Technologies have contributed to human welfare through increased prosperity, improved comfort and quality of life, and medical progress, but they can also disrupt existing social hierarchies, cause pollution, and harm individuals or groups.
[67] Due to artificial intelligence being far more capable than computers, and still being in its infancy, it is not known whether it will follow the same trend; the question has been debated at length among economists and policymakers.
[82] Emerging technologies in the fields of climate engineering may be able to halt or reverse global warming and its environmental impacts,[83] although this remains highly controversial.
[89] Marx framed it as a tool used by capitalists to oppress the proletariat, but believed that technology would be a fundamentally liberating force once it was "freed from societal deformations".
Second-wave philosophers like Ortega later shifted their focus from economics and politics to "daily life and living in a techno-material culture", arguing that technology could oppress "even the members of the bourgeoisie who were its ostensible masters and possessors."
Third-stage philosophers like Don Ihde and Albert Borgmann represent a turn toward de-generalization and empiricism, and considered how humans can learn to live with technology.
Modern scholarship has shifted towards an analysis of sociotechnical systems, "assemblages of things, people, practices, and meanings", looking at the value judgments that shape technology.
[94] Prominent debates have surrounded genetically modified organisms, the use of robotic soldiers, algorithmic bias, and the issue of aligning AI behavior with human values.
Nanoethics examines issues surrounding the alteration of matter at the atomic and molecular level in various disciplines including computer science, engineering, and biology.
Some thinkers believe that this may shatter our sense of self, and have urged for renewed public debate exploring the issue more thoroughly;[106] others fear that directed evolution could lead to eugenics or extreme social inequality.
[109] Autonomous robots have undergone rapid progress, and are expected to replace humans at many dangerous tasks, including search and rescue, bomb disposal, firefighting, and war.
[111] This expected technological unemployment has led to calls for increased emphasis on computer science education and debates about universal basic income.
[112] Examples of techno-utopian goals include post-scarcity economics, life extension, mind uploading, cryonics, and the creation of artificial superintelligence.
Between the 1970s and 1990s, American terrorist Ted Kaczynski carried out a series of bombings across America and published the Unabomber Manifesto denouncing technology's negative impacts on nature and human freedom.
[125]: 217–240 For example, in the 1940s and 1950s, when knowledge of turbulent combustion or fluid dynamics was still crude, jet engines were invented through "running the device to destruction, analyzing what broke [...] and repeating the process".
[135][136] For example, researchers have observed wild chimpanzees using basic foraging tools, pestles, levers, using leaves as sponges, and tree bark or vines as probes to fish termites.
[137] West African chimpanzees use stone hammers and anvils for cracking nuts,[138] as do capuchin monkeys of Boa Vista, Brazil.
[140] The relationship of humanity with technology has been explored in science-fiction literature, for example in Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Isaac Asimov's essays, and movies like Minority Report, Total Recall, Gattaca, and Inception.
