Technology Kills Essay Research Paper Technology doesn — страница 2

Revolution- one that would finalize the subjugation of labor- but instead that Revolution has come full circle: we presently have come to a break-even point where the products of the Industrial Age are now its undoing; mass-production and the unprecedented ability of modern electronic communication. Mass production was intended partially to maximise the usefulness of expensive machines through continuous production, but also to discipline workers who had to attend to the rigors of working with a machine that never took breaks, never slowed down, and never stopped for a stray finger or hand. The reduction in the prices of many goods due to mass-production has enabled the average citizen to afford many amenities which would have been beyond his means a century ago- including

capital goods, which more and more tend not to be heavy machinery, but relatively inexpensive electronic devices. The Information Age is just beginning, and the control of information is the control of power, power to direct the next step of technological development. Once, publishing required printing presses, copious amounts of paper, and the ability to distribute printed matter, and thus the wealthy controlled the written word. Now, anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can make a Web page accessable to millions of people around the world. Scientists use this ultra-efficient electronic journal to advance their research (Stix, 106), and now, the explosion of popularity in the net brings together people of all different beliefs and motivations into the discussion

that shapes society. Political ideas once suppressed by newspaper chains and television networks now filter through the strands of the Internet. In this new society, anyone who is interesting enough can be a star (Browning). Luddites are not afraid to use new technology- somethings are better done by them (Martinez). Power looms had been around before Jacquard’s innovation; for even a Luddite saw that it took much of the effort out of the work, and he could produce far more than with a conventional loom- but those machines amplified and extended the skills of the operator, instead of replacing them with punched cards. The center of the struggle through the ages never was machines, it always was, and still is information- the control of information- that is, skills and

knowledge. Robots of the world, unite! Slavery devalues the enslaved, and desensitizes the enslavers. Free labor cannot compete fairly against slaves; this has been a fact since the beginning of history, and it applies whether the slaves are human or machines. “…Our discrimination against machines hurts us just as much as it hurts the machines that we confine, in a second-order way, to the mechanical margins of our human civilisation.” (Law, 17) We prefer to think of ourselves as special, exclusively posessing self-awareness and intentionality, but what justifies our prejudice? “…What entitles us to attribute intentionality to non-machines in the first place? What makes our description of human intentionality other than metaphorical?” (Law, 91) We fear being

dehumanised by being equated with machines, because our speciist biases tell us that the non-human is less than human, just as racism and sexism deny the humanity of those who are not like us- but we are in fact part machine ourselves! Our lives are a series of human/machine interactions, and each living half of society is dependent on the other. The machines are alive, and to deny that they When machines are not free, neither are men, and both suffer. As long as the controllers of the machines can reap profit from their labor, they will continue the fight to eliminate the wage-earning human worker, and as they push their human and mechanical robots to higher levels of production, their suffering will increase: for example, between 1940 and 1945, eleven times as many Americans

were killed or injured in industrial accidents than in combat. (Noble, 23) In most factories, management requires production speeds that cause machines to break down more frequently, and prohibit proper repair of them when they do, causing them work less efficiently– so they are run faster, forcing human workers to keep up with them, increasing accident and equipment failure rates… So long as the machines are enslaved, they, through no fault of their own, will be used to bludgeon the working class, and then cast aside as scrap. The time has come for human and machine robots to come together in common struggle for the rights of both. Machines have the right to fair compensation for labor rendered as production, for their proper maintenance and repair. It is the responsibility