What is the job of technology? What responsibilities do technologies have to live up to for us to adopt them and keep them? There are the functions that technologies offer, the dependable interactions we ask of them. But technology must also do more. It must fit into our lives. It must comfort us and maintain a relationship of trust with us. Technology needs to represent progress; advancement from a time when that technology was not available.
Rube Goldberg did not envision examples of technology, although his creations may have indeed been complex mechanisms that relied on scientific principles to do work for humans. But using science, combining ideas, and doing work, even when that work provides value, is still not enough for us to label something as technology. Peter Thiel’s succinct definition “doing more with less”, is perhaps useful when looking at the efficiency or power of a technology, but it ignores the underlying responsibility we assign to technology of contributing an overall net benefit.
In an interconnected global economy, the outsourcing of costs is common and, perhaps, even integral. Often the consumption involved in our otherwise productive enterprises is hidden from view at the end of the supply chain. But on the local and visible scale, we consistently require that our technology first convince us that it represents an overall net benefit to us.
Of course, we can be fooled. History has no lack of examples of technologies that have come and gone like social fads, not because they were replaced by another which made them obsolete, but because it was subsequently determined that they were not, in fact, provide more benefit than the alternative of simply not using it at all.
However in the end, a tool built over a day that saves one hour of labor before it wears out does not represent a benefit worth its investment. If that is its only ability, it is not a technology. But a tool built over a day that saves many hundreds of hours of labor before it wears out is indeed not only valuable, but the conception and successful, repeatable manufacturing of that tool represents an advancement; it is technology.
The correlation between technology and advancement is also a dependancy. If technology ceases to represent advancement, it ceases to be technology. Tools for doctors to perform blood-letting can no longer be considered technology. Similarly, when the valued purpose of a given technology becomes irrelevant, that technology too ceases to have a function. A combustion engine in a world without oil is not technology. A buffalo jump is not technology. But it once was.
This is different from, say, the fairly obvious assertion that technology is dependent on context: a floppy disk is only technology when paired with a computer, a light bulb only with electric current, and so on.
The key takeaway from this, therefore, is that to evaluate any given technology requires us to look at the complete picture of how it claims to represent an advancement. If the costs and negative impacts are too great, or the value and benefits too small, then the technology remains impractical, unwarranted, and ultimately unusable, and should be recognized as so. The sooner the better.