Technology and the Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel, Alexander Mikhalchyk (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For as long as we have been creating things with our hands we have been making change and being changed by the things we make.

The wheel is technology. Ramps and mallets are technology. Even these examples are limiting because they are just hardware. The written word, wherever it emerged, created profound change. You may be familiar with Socrates’ criticisms of this new software and, to his mind, the questionable impacts of literacy.

It’s important to remember this greater context to keep ourselves from viewing the current technological explosion from inside a very small box. That box is the belief that technology is new, foreign, maybe even unnatural. When we step outside that box we can learn so much more about our impact on technology and perhaps more importantly, technology's impact on us.

A really interesting case in point is the probability (at least) that new technologies create or multiply pluralities of perspective. It’s easy enough to see with the growth of access to the internet, but it has happened to varying degrees as societies absorbed improved means of communication, devised technologies to adapt to new environments, or learned to create more stable structures with better tools and materials.

While it’s safe to say that no technological revolution has been as explosive as the current one with its speed and global proliferation, one point of this post is to suggest that the accompanying chaos comes as no surprise. Ideas and points of view are multiplying and colliding the same way new languages might have in the biblical story.

Another point is to suggest that those of us who grew up with stories like the Tower of Babel may have been mis-indoctrinated. After all, the historic tower commonly confused with (and occasionally credited with inspiring) the biblical one—Etemenanki—was considered a success, and persisted for hundreds of years as a functioning “stairway to heaven”.

So, while pluralities bifurcate at an alarming rate in this new chatbot and IoT-enabled world, maybe there will be no curse, no punishment for the sin of such lofty ambition, no (apologies for the jumbled metaphors) melted wings of wax. We can set aside our worries just long enough to turn this new gizmo in our hands, master it, and work to ensure it keeps its better promises.