Is humanity’s technological progress accidental or destined?

I believe that technological progress has been, and will continue to be, driven by a fortuitous interplay of the passage of time and the birth of great minds, although there is an element of fate in the universality of humanity.

 

In South Korea, a passenger car drives smoothly and quickly toward its desired destination as the cool ocean breeze blows across the island of Jeju. The car’s car stereo system connects to my iPhone and plays music that matches the beautiful scenery to keep me entertained on the 30-minute journey. The music is not stored anywhere in the car, but streamed in from an unknown server. This is what I experienced on a trip to Jeju Island with my friends in June of this year. We don’t realize how great these experiences are unless we’re conscious of them. It’s just that these technologies have seeped into our lives so quickly that we don’t realize it. Cars and smartphones are some of the most cutting-edge products of modern technology. As time goes by, cars get faster and more fuel-efficient. Leading companies in the US and Germany are even working on cars that drive themselves. Smartphones have only been around for a short time, but they have evolved over the past five years or so, more than doubling in size and weight, as well as in DPI, battery capacity, and number of CPU cores. While these technological developments have made our lives easier, the rapid pace of development also raises concerns that humans may one day be dominated by technology. Is this technological development we are seeing now an innovation or a fate? When the world is dominated by technology, will it be our destiny or something we could have prevented?
Humans have always admired great scientists and inventors. Great scientists include physicists like Newton and Einstein, and great inventors include people like James Watt, Edison, and Steve Jobs. We admire them because their theories have allowed us to understand nature, and their inventions have allowed us to live in this convenient age. Some might argue that without Newton or Einstein, someone else would have come along and established theories of physics, or that without Edison or Tesla, someone in a later generation would have democratized electricity. Some more ambitious people might think that without them, they would have taken their place. This kind of thinking is probably closer to the idea that technological progress is destiny.
Those who believe that technological progress is destiny probably try to emphasize the universal aspects of humanity. In fact, modern technologies developed by a handful of innovative people or companies seem to ironically demonstrate the universality of humanity. The automobile represents our desire to move faster, and the smartphone represents our universal need to get and share information from anywhere. Heating and cooling technologies such as air conditioners and boilers fulfill the universal human need to maintain a comfortable temperature. In addition, the technologies that are commonly used around us are naturally connected to universal human needs. From this point of view, the technological advancements that we have achieved seem to be our destiny. In other words, modern technology is actually the result of our survival instincts, our need for convenience, and our intellectual pursuits.
But this argument makes us uncomfortable. The technologies invented in the first industrial revolution helped humanity to establish a market economy and an equal society, and the bloody wars that led to today’s advanced technological civilization. The research and sacrifices of many people have been made along the way, but to call it fate seems to make us feel vulnerable and reduces humans to passive beings. In order to shake off this feeling, we need to question whether humanity’s technological achievements are really the result of a great force of fate.
The butterfly effect is a term that refers to how subtle differences in the beginning can eventually lead to big changes. The idea is that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in Seoul can become a storm in Beijing. I borrowed this phrase to suggest that the modern technological age is not inevitable. Is there only one starting point and one destination for the long journey that humanity has traveled and will continue to travel? If we think of humanity as a person, and civilization as the life of a person, we can see that people make many choices in their lives and are influenced by many circumstances. The choices that are made, or the circumstances that are given to us, will lead us down one of the many paths of life. I myself have lived less than half of the average life expectancy, but if I had made a few different choices and changed the environment in which I grew up, I would have lived a very different life. If I had chosen to study literature as a student, I might be writing poetry instead of essays today. It is very likely that humanity has undergone a similar development due to the births of many of the aforementioned individuals and their environments.
Let’s look at a few examples to support this argument. Steve Jobs was able to invent the iPhone because a great mathematician named Alan Turing was born first, who established the basic theories of computers, followed by computer scientists like Dennis Rich, who developed the C language. If the order of their births had been reversed, we might still be texting with friends on feature phones. Famous services like Facebook and Google owe their existence to web technology. Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the web, first proposed the concept of hypertext in 1989 as a way for scientists to share information while working as a scientist at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). Hypertext evolved into the modern web and has had a profound impact on the evolution of information and communication infrastructure and technology. If Tim Berners-Lee had focused on his research rather than sharing information, we might not have seen the internet giants like Facebook and Google. Electric cars don’t need any mechanicals to drive the engine, so the front and back of the car are trunks. If for some reason electric cars had been developed before gasoline cars, cars as we know them today would look very different.
The development of technology has been, and will continue to be, shaped by a fortuitous interplay of the passage of time and the birth of great minds, albeit with an element of human universality. In the very distant future, future humans may look back on modern human life and dismiss the automobile and the internet as primitive inventions, like combed earthenware and toothpicks. They will address universal human needs with technologies beyond our wildest dreams. But it’s impossible for us to predict exactly what their future technologies will be. They will evolve through serendipitous interactions, just as we have.