Beginning with the experience of traveling to Jeju Island, this essay examines whether modern technology is destiny or chance, exploring the complex relationship between human scientific advancement, the influence of personalities, and the impact of choice and environment on technological progress.
In South Korea, a passenger car drives smoothly and quickly toward its destination in the cool ocean breeze of Jeju Island. The car’s car stereo system is connected to an iPhone, playing music that matches the beautiful scenery to make the 30-minute journey less tedious. The music isn’t stored anywhere in the car, but streamed in from a server somewhere. This is what I experienced on a trip to Jeju Island with my friends in June this year. It’s hard to realize how amazing these experiences are when we’re not 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 two of the most cutting-edge products of modern technology. As time goes by, cars get faster and more fuel-efficient. Leading companies in the United States and Germany are even working on cars that drive themselves. Smartphones have only been around for a few years, 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 advances have made our lives easier, the rapid pace of development has also led to concerns that humans will one day be dominated by technology. Is this technological development we’re seeing now an innovation or a fate? When the world is dominated by technology one day, 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. But without these scientists and inventors, would we be where we are today? Some might think 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. These people are probably more inclined to believe that technological progress is destiny.
Those who believe that technological progress is destiny probably emphasize the universal aspects of humanity. In fact, many modern technologies developed by a handful of innovative people or companies seem to ironically demonstrate our universality. The automobile represents our need to move faster, and smartphones represent our universal desire to get and share information from anywhere. Heating and cooling technologies like air conditioners and boilers fulfill the universal human need to maintain a comfortable body temperature. Furthermore, the technologies we use around us are naturally connected to our universal needs. From this point of view, the technological advancements that we’ve achieved seem to be our destiny. In other words, modern technology is actually the result of our survival instinct and desire for convenience, combined with our intellectual pursuits.
But this argument makes us uncomfortable. The technologies invented in the First Industrial Revolution helped humanity establish a market economy and an egalitarian society, and the bloody wars that brought us to the advanced technological civilization we have today. The research and sacrifices of many people have been made along the way, but to call it fate makes us feel vulnerable and reduces us 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 refers to the idea that subtle differences in the beginning can eventually lead to major 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 single person and civilization as the life of that person, we can see that we make many choices in our lives and are influenced by many circumstances. The choices they make, or the circumstances they are given, can lead them down one of many paths. I myself have lived less than half of the average life expectancy, but if I had made a few different choices and changed the circumstances of my upbringing, I would have lived a very different life. If I had chosen a liberal arts major in school, I might be writing poetry instead of essays right now. It is very likely that humanity has undergone the same 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 formulated 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 our 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 has 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 experienced the internet giants like Facebook and Google. Electric cars don’t need an engine to drive them, 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 be 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 that are beyond our wildest dreams. But it’s impossible for us to accurately predict their future technologies. They will evolve their technologies through serendipitous interactions, just as we have.
