Information Technology

So what are the ways in which technology, and especially information technology, can move in an intelligent direction? Information technology has the potential to contribute to the increase in consciousness. Yet it can just as effortlessly endow dubious submissions of technology which farther our extinction as a species.

I now want to examine, from the point of view of an intelligent species as defined above, what our responsibilities as managers of technology are. Information expertise (IT), like modern expertise, is available for use in numerous ways. We need to consider whether it is a neutral tool or not(Kelly, 1999).

Modern technology is not neutral; it use initiates a sequence of changes that takes it to consequences beyond human calculation. The very young age of information technology, we probably cannot yet have much idea of what innate direction it may contain within it. In fact, the productivity paradox shows us that we don't yet have a clear idea of when IT is benefiting us. Information expertise may have an important function in this process. The part of the procedure that offers some expect is the growth of consciousness itself. Modern technology has already produced a globalized human species rapidly coming to share common economic and social goals.

likely to go out of control and thus out of reality.

Yet as human beings with the ability to affect the survival of all life on the planet one way or another by our activities, we do not have a strategic plan which includes the conditions for our own survival. The ultimate question of how we should be using what intelligence we have is so far unanswered. Although I don't share the "manifest destiny" technologist's belief in the invincibility of the human species or its technology, I finally do hope that the human species has something like the normal 2-million year life span of most species. Passing the torch to other species does not seem to be possible. Our knowledge is in a very profound sense human knowledge, tied to human society and the conditions of human beings. Kant glimpsed this very clearly. The only thing that prevents human knowledge from dying with its possessor is other human beings who are prepared to carry on the human enterprise. It's not even that other species are not intelligent enough.

Even those intelligent enough are simply not part of the biological chain that underpins all our ...