Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.
Interpretation
Technology brings both challenges and solutions, and its uncertain impact continues to create global issues.
Jared Diamond's quote reflects the dual nature of technology: while it has the potential to solve complex problems, it can also create new challenges that society must navigate. The quote emphasizes the notion that as technology evolves and grows more powerful, it simultaneously introduces risks and issues that can escalate into global problems, requiring us to remain vigilant and proactive in managing its implications for the future.
In practice
This quote can be used in a technology conference to spark discussion about the dual nature of innovation.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
As we move into an era in which personal devices are seen as proxies for public needs, we run the risk that already-existing inequities will be further entrenched. Thus, with every big data set, we need to ask which people are excluded. Which places are less visible? What happens if you live in the shadow of big data sets?
Regardless of what the naysayers believe about human interaction and social media, the data show us that the abundance of technology is actually increasing the abundance of happiness all over the world.
People are mobile. They move around, and anytime they want to communicate, if you tie them to the wall or the wires, you're restricting them, you're infringing on their freedom.
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
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