Technology and Human Thinking

It's quite obvious that technology affects all dimensions of our lives. Technology impacts the way we think, our individual and collective behavior, religion beliefs, scientific advancements, economic and political organization systems and, even more, life itself.  In fact, the total world population relies on a big technological net that allows the production, distribution and sales of different goods and services to many countries and persons. Without the current technological levels the life on earth of 8 million people wouldn't be possible!

But despite of this evident fact, in order to address the posed issue, we have to examine the complex relationship between human thinking development and technological changes. 

Human thinking abilities are developed or changed from two sources. The primarily and most evident source is the strong need of individuals to solve their current problems. We could call this mechanism "the way life adapts to nature".  During the first years of human existence the basic problem was to survive and, therefore, individuals began to develop a set of intellectual abilities to solve this elementary problem. In other words, they changed their way of seeing nature in order to adapt themselves to the current environmental conditions and survive. This change in the way of thinking conducted to technological developments. At that time the technological efforts were probably concentrated on developing better weapons to hunt, improving the ways individuals protect themselves against nature and creating good systems of communication (language). Currently, these problems practically don’t exist because they have been solved by our predecessors. We can say that they provided us with the necessary technological tools to eliminate these problems from our daily lives. Today we have different solutions to a big number of problems.  

The dynamics of this evolution mechanism has two main consequences. In the first place, by solving older problems, it promotes the development of new thinking abilities that allow us to face problems that haven't been considered. Today we don’t need to "waste" time in solving a simple calculation because we can use a calculator to obtain a very precise result in less than a second. Of course we can always try to solve the calculation manually, but the existence of a calculator constitutes a very strong incentive to use it to solve other problems. In the ancient years obviously poverty existed, but it wasn’t a real problem because the real issue was to survive. Today, thanks to technological advancements, surviving isn’t a problem and we can concentrate our efforts in solving poverty across the world. The second effect of evolution and progress is the apparition of new and more complex problems which demand other thinking abilities. Consider for example the problem of energy. Today we need to develop new forms of energy that allow efficient power supply to multiple industries. In both cases human thinking abilities are significantly improved because we face a set of more complex problems; those existing but had not been considered and those arisen from changes in environment. Therefore we can observe a positive feedback between thinking abilities and technology; the first appears from environmental conditions and the second, which is a consequence of the first, changes the environment. 

There is a second source for intellectual development which is simply and natural curiosity. Intellectual activity not always comes from a desperate need to solve crucial environmental problems. Many people dedicate their entire lives to study things whose applications we simply ignore. Frequently, but mistakenly, we consider such things as unuseful. Take for example the development of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. When Einstein wrote this brilliant theory his fundamental motivation wasn’t to improve the life quality of the society or to solve a specific and urgent need but to understand the secret structure of universe and appreciate his beauty. Einstein gave simple answers to complicated questions that, years later, conducted to technological changes (today Einstein’s equations are used in communications through satellites).  Besides technological improvements originated from Einstein’s theory, the most interesting thing is that the answers provided from Einstein opened new questions which promote curiosity of others. These new, more complex and challenging questions demand improved thinking abilities. In this case we can also see a positive feedback: curiosity develops thinking abilities and the second promotes curiosity on more complicated problems.

According to the exposed arguments we can conclude that technology will always improve human thinking abilities. But is that was the answer, why does it apparently exist a non-negligible extent of doubt on this issue? In my opinion the reason is related to human behavior regarding technology. At the beginning of this brief essay we stated that technology affects all kind of humans activities, particularly, individual and collective behavior. Technology evolves more rapidly than human behavior and, for this reason, we need time to get used to technology and learn how to use it. Therefore, it’s quite logical that, in the short term, we make a bad use of available technology. We can use our smartphones to communicate in a very effective way with people located very far from us but we can also use them while we are talking with our fathers and children. In the first case we are making a proper use of technology but in the second case our social (and also thinking) abilities are clearly deteriorating. We can strengthen this argument by taking a more extreme example. We may use nuclear energy to supply a whole country with power or to build a spacecraft to travel across the universe. At the same time we may build a bomb, press a little button and destroy human life. In this last example human thinking abilities will clearly deteriorate with technology improvements because there will be no more civilization!

This short reflection on technology and human thinking suggests that technological changes will always promote the improvement of our intellectual skills but our short term behavior may deteriorate while we are learning how to use technology.  Pitifully this topic is much more complex because technology and human abilities are related to more complicated and diverse factors that should be taken into account in a more rigorous study. Now we are only touching the surface on this issue.