Humanity’s thirst to change the unchangeable
In this time and age it seems like technology has become apart of our lives if we like it or not. We use technology to enhance almost every aspect of our lives. For example we now have cell phones and social media to make communication easier, we have search engines like google to satisfy our curious thoughts instead of going to the local library to read about it, and we have even electronicized most books so our need for actual libraries is dying out. An Author and researcher by the name of Jeff Douthwaite says that technological fixes are key to fix social problems. His summarized argument is that technology can fix our social problems but only for a limited time. Johnson, another author talks about how engineers will be more important than social workers because technology will soon be the fix to all social problems that we face. His critique to Douthwaite would be that technology will be used to fix all our social problems and that no other problems will arise from it. Huesemann and Huesemann would critique Douthwaite argument by saying that technology would not be able to fix human social problems because technology will not be able to disconnect the interconnectedness of the natural world so long story short for everything that we try to fix a new problem will eventually arise. I believe more along the thinking of Huesemann and Huesemann because technology will continue to become more and more apart of our lives but there will always be problems that technology can fix.
There will always be unintentional consequences when humans try to fix social and environmental problems. It has been thinking since the great enlightenment that if there’s something we do not like with our environment we can just change it. Technological fixes will always have negative repercussions because we cannot change the balance of nature. Unintended consequences should make us censor our technological changes because if we continue to play god and manipulate everything, nature will eventually come back to bite us or be the end of us. Nuclear War and global pollution are two unintended consequences that could have dire effects on humanity.