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Socrates said books were dumbing down humanity because, since people could just look things up in books they wouldn’t have to memorise information anymore, and that made their brains soft.
Ever since society began, some people have been convinced the next generation’s technology was going to be society’s downfall, whether it was Socrates’ books, the telegraph in the 1800s, radio, the (land line) telephone, dishwashers (women will become lazy and unsuitable wives and mothers), screened windows (society will collapse because you won’t hear your neighbours and pedestrians on the street, we’ll all become hermits and die holed up in our homes), comic books would rot the brains of the youth, then music, then video games… it goes on and on.
So far, those predictions have never been true. Every older generation freaks out when the ones after come of age. It’s like societal growing pains.
I think this is one step further, that technology has become so abstract and complex that people who focus on different crafts and careers are using magical black boxes. It blows my mind how my neighbour goes through life without any concept of what a phone app is. He just uses functionality and memorized the associated logo. I'm an engineering wizard to him.
Isn’t that true of pretty much everu technology, though? I remember in the late 70s there’d occasionally be a loud pop and a puff of smoke from the television, and I’d tag along with my dad to the tv shop to buy new vacuum tubes, then we’d remove the back of the television and do minor repairs. Everyone knew how to do that.
My television today is a magic black box.
Exactly, my television is an ips lcd with an arm based programmable microcomputer with software that translates input signals for the display, LED backlighting and an internal power supply. Although, I wouldn't be able to repair it, there are no spare parts.
Every washing machine has an embedded system that controls the washing cycle and needed programming for that. That's not common knowledge and they rather put functionality in their marketing than function.
We need a right to repair and common instructions how to fix things, maybe that helps dissolving the magic.
Some technologies actually have had unintended side effects, but not always the ones we saw coming. Artificial lights are killing all the insects which nobody really worried about and cars do kill tons of people, which we worried about in the 1920s. I don't know what the deal was with leaded gasoline, that one was just bizarre.
All in all, it's just really hard to anticipate how society and technology will interact. We think about the environment now but I don't know if any systematic progress has been made on predicting the human factor.
screened windows (society will collapse because you won’t hear your neighbours and pedestrians on the street, we’ll all become hermits and die holed up in our homes)
This one has actually come true to a certain measurable degree (see Bowling Alone, written at what is now the midpoint of the trend), but I don't think it's down to window screens.
Leaded gasoline has a really crazy story. People have known that lead is highly toxic since the mid 1800s, and when tetraethyl lead was invented by Thomas midgley Jr in the 1910s, pretty much everybody at GM knew how toxic it was. Dozens of workers died from exposure, and Thomas himself was sick with lead poisoning when it was unveiled to the public. GM even went as far as naming it "ethyl" to avoid public backlash.
The reason it wasn't banned until the 90s was because health officials in the 20s thought that exposure to drivers was so low that it wouldn't reach toxic levels until decades down the line. Like, the 1970s. This wasn't reviewed until the mid 70s and by that point the consequences were disastrous.There were some studies between the 20s and 70s, but most didn't gain much traction. Many adults and children had increased levels of lead in their blood and lead has contaminated the groundwater and polluted the air. For instance, there is NO safe level of lead in blood, and Herbert needleman in the early 70s found some American schoolchildren had as much as 14 micrograms per deciliter This is the reason it wasn't banned until the 90s in most countries. One could say we're still recovering from that in some ways.
And the worst part? They could have used ethanol, an organic substance that's a major additive in alcoholic beverages. It also prevents engine knocking and is highly flammable, but otherwise not even close to as toxic as TEL was. You still woudlnt want to breathe it in, but it probably wouldn't have polluted our air and ground so much. GM refused to use ethanol though because it couldn't be patented (being naturally produced?) and it wouldn't be very profitable to use it to prevent knocking. TEL was far more profitable.
Right? The general public could be told that it was a tiny amount that was harmless, but any doctor could have done the napkin math, so how did it gain traction in the first place? GM pulled off quite something there. I've seen a pretty convincing argument that the lead poisoning was responsible for the high 1970s crime rate.
They could have used ethanol, an organic substance that’s a major additive in alcoholic beverages.
That literally is the alcohol, actually. It's not quite as good though, which is why small planes still use leaded.
Mandatory mention that Thomas Midgley Jr. also invented the CFCs that fucked the ozone layer, and was eventually strangled by his own mobility pulley system invention. Truly a legend of cursedness.
Thanks for the correction about ethanol, I'm not big into alcohol so I didn't know what to write lol