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It’s easy to argue that responsibility for many of the world’s biggest problems can be laid at the door of modern industrial technology. That’s because there is abundant evidence for it: cars, planes, electrically powered devices of every kind and massive amounts of transportation. The net result has been depletion of the earth’s precious resources and pollution on an unprecedented level.

A central issue is that we have been burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil to provide the energy that powers our modern technologies. The fact is that more has now been burned than remains in the ground, and if that isn’t depressing enough, all the fuel that has been burned to date has been relentlessly pumping surplus CO2 into the atmosphere.

So it would seem that the good times are gone. Soon the barrel will run dry and we shall have to sober up with sore heads and a hazy memory of how we got here. The final touch might be a pandemic of biblical proportions with the contagion spread to all parts of the globe thanks, ironically, to our modern transportation networks.

But how likely is this scenario really and can the blame all be laid at the door of technology? The fact is that this is hardly a first offence – as a species we have a pretty poor record when it comes bad behaviour leading to unfortunate consequences. But every time we’ve somehow managed to survive and emerge stronger.

The fact is that you cannot separate people from technology. It’s what defines us. Go back however far you like into prehistory and wherever a few old bones are identified as being human in origin you will find evidence of technology.

Tracing the human race back as far as possible we can never find a period when we actually didn’t engage in making clothes, decorations, tools and weapons, or cooking food, painting pictures and making music. These things in a sense define what it is to be human, just as wings or a poisonous bite help define other creatures. We are compelled to invent and employ technology just in order to get by.

Whoever first painted animal shapes on a cave wall set us inexorably on the path to writing, printing, and now digital telecommunication. That first flint spear head was destined to lead eventually to nuclear armaments, just as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would not have been possible had someone not thought to hollow out a small animal bone to make a simple flute.

Human technology constantly evolves, improving on and adapting earlier technologies – quite commonly in order to address the shortcomings of that existing technology. There are always side-effects; the inventors of steam technology may have foreseen an Industrial Revolution as a possible outcome, but they would never have guessed that vast sewage systems would also be a consequence (needed to contain disease caused by urban crowding).

So one thing is certain then; technology may have gotten us into a mess, but it is also our only hope of salvation. It is futile to try and rollback or un-invent existing technology, whatever its failings. The solution lies in superseding it with new so-called eco-technologies such as ultra low power LED lights, thin film solar panels and ever expanding use of the Internet.

The eco-technologies promise to be orders of magnitude less wasteful and waste creating and also help avoid much of the excessive travel that has become a feature of modern life. But they also offer possibilities to actually improve our lives and widen our horizons. That said, it’s almost certain that in the future we will find out that these technologies themselves fall short of all we hoped for, and what do you suppose we will then do about that?

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