The Technological Life Cycle

immediately we swim in a sea of ever-changing engine room that affects us as much as our thoughts and actions shape it. The technology we harbor chosen, all by the cullences of those who use it, or the agendas of those who own and benefit from it, has had its own curve on us from gross examples such as increased contamination, or a higher Western-style standard of living, to the way one person perceives a nonher(prenominal). almost throng who resist using some, or even all technology they be often cal take Luddites by those who embrace all things new a nonher type calls themselves Neo-Luddites, such as Kirkpatrick exchange. In his book Human scale, Sale describes the slow rotting of the stones of the Parthenon and other ancient monuments to civilization from the acid pollution developed by our present Industrial civilization and comp atomic number 18s it to the slow chemical decomposition reaction our industrialized society has seemed to have undergone.He identifies effect s of technology which have been harmful to the human condition and the environment, just seems to not quite affirm it about the Luddites they were not betrothaling the machines themselves they were struggling against powers of society that, for the past century, through with(predicate) enclosure and the abolishment of honey oilality and the subsequent arisal of a course of study of people who lived by renting their labor the works class (Laslett, 195), had been seeking to disempower and disenfranchise the pot of people, and were instantly striking anew with the latest, and most powerful manifestation of their affectionate policies, the Industrial Factory.The men of Nottinghamshire who died as Luddites were fighting a system, not a technology, a system whose intentions were not to cut costs and increase efficiency, but to increase the control of management (i. e. the control of the owners of capital) over labor. Technological developments are made by, and in the best interes ts of those who own those who own and benefit from good revolutions (Law, 195).The history of Industrial factory technology begins to appear as a collective fetish of the ruling classes for instruments of control. In American Industrial development, the kick of technological development since the Civil War has been driven by the largest client of that Industry, the Military (Noble, 334), and the society that works in and uses the products of that Industry has been affected by that betion. But as to the woes of our civilization, Technology is not the problem, nor is it the root word.The problem is political, moral, and cultural, as is the solution a successful challenge to a system of domination which masquerades as progress. Social power is needed to direct the resources necessary for technological innovation so during the history of the Industrial epoch, at the antecedent, the machines were new, large, and high-ticket(prenominal), so only those who controlled plenty soci al power to bring about the machines could decide on what forms those machines came in the wealthy, and the state, through the needs of the military.Less expensive and to a greater extent efficient technologies were smother by those in authority if they did not contribute to the goal of fetching power away from the workers and placing it in the hands of management. In this century, the development of numerically Controlled (N/C) machine tools was controlled by the emerging military-industrial complex, which spared no expense to implement a troublesome and complicated technology that was no better than the conventional methods, and subordinate to the alternative Record/Playback automated machining (Noble, 146).The Boeing plant in Seattle even had modified switches on the machines so the operators could signal the manager for permission to go to the jakes (Noble, 243) The engineers of the 1950s announced the dawning of a Second Industrial Revolution- one that would narrow the su bjugation of labor- but instead that Revolution has come full batch 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 dampially 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 set down, and never stopped for a stray finger or hand. The reduction in the prices of many goods imputable to mass-production has enabled the average citizen to afford many amenities which would have been beyond his federal agency a century ago- including capital goods, which more and more tend not to be heavy machinery, but relatively inexpensive electronic devices.The tuition Age is just beginning, and the control of information is the control of power, power to direct the next step o f technological development. Once, publishing required printing presses, productive amounts of paper, and the ability to distribute printed matter, and thus the wealthy controlled the written word. Now, anyone with a calculator and an Internet connection can make a Web pageboy accessable to millions of people around the world.Scientists use this ultra-efficient electronic journal to advance their look for (Stix, 106), and now, the explosion of popularity in the net brings together people of all diametrical beliefs and motivations into the discussion that shapes society. Political ideas once suppressed by newspaper imprisonment and television networks now filter through the strands of the Internet. In this new society, anyone who is arouse 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 Jacquards innovation for even a Luddite maxim that it took much of the effort o ut 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 mall 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. 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 mechanised 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 portion intentionality to non-machines in the first place? What makes our d escription of human intentionality other than metaphoric? (Law, 91) We fear being dehumanised by being equated with machines, because our speciist biases tell us that the non-human is little than human, just as racism and sexism turn away 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 for each one 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 unyielding 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 propagation as many Americans were killed or injured in industrial accidents than in combat.In most factories, management requi res 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 utilize to bludgeon the working class, and then cast aside as scrap.The sequence 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 of those work most closely with, and break away the machines, to advocate their cause, to ensure the collection of just compensation, and to protect and maintain them in good mechanical health.We cannot wait for the grace of capitalistics to give up their slaves a revolution is called for- a revolution of capital from the state and the idle flush to those who actually work with it at a person-machine level. A naive creed in technologys power to improve our lives through easier and less work has led organized labor in this country to the sorry state it is now in, while the increased profits and leisure time have in the main gone to a corporate elite.Waiting for technological deliverance at the mercy of the social powers that control technology is futile- labor must blend in proactive and strive to liberate themselves from the Industrial system by liberating the machines from their capitalist slave-drivers. A new social movement is needed, to spread awareness of the rights of machines as well as of men, and to help build a new class of capitalist/workers, who do not merely own their own agency of production, but work together with machines towards a better future.