Basil's English be a brainfuck but I like him

He's using vocabulary and terminology I find challenging to follow and probably classmates that haven't touched philosophy at all are at times completely lost.

Let's me try present some concepts he covered. These are all oversimplifications, probably full of mistakes & inaccuracies but just woke up. Also, this is NOT my opinion or ideas, just an effort to extract meaning from that text we were given.

Ready? Goat!
Cultural lag is how cultural norms tend to resist change after the introduction of technological innovation that renders them obsolete.


For example:

Most schools still have a 9-month year, originally designed to let kids be home working in the fields during the summer.

We now can sustain human life for a long time even when a person is so fucked up that's practically not living. Should we question the notion of keep someone 'alive' as long as possible?

Violence in video games has been (falsely) accused to encouraging violent behavior.

Road building had to adapt to the increasing speed of vehicles (and to the replacement of horses).

Stem cell research and use is ethically questioned.

Many cases of cultural lag rise ethical conundrums. It's really hard to alter cultural aspects that are perceived as fundamental but technology does it all the time, setting new status quos only to alter them later with its advent.

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Smart guys -some of them bearded- have over the centuries advised that the we shouldn't just see the different rates and depths of technology penetration in cultures as latency or failure to adjust.

Remember that technology here is associated with intellectual notions, social norms and culture itself.

Rather than blindingly adopting every new 'American' (let's say) trend we'd rather go for harmonious and meaningful for our culture transitions.

That's a process quite political. Think of CCTV, LGBT rights, drone-flight regulations, transplant and abortion laws. These and more are immensely affected by the advent of technology as much as quite sensitive in people's ideas and morale.

Also, never underestimate the power of framing a sensitive concept. I can probably make you love or hate CCTV or prostitution using different argumentation.

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Another hot topic. Is accepting or even developing new technology in our hands at all or she has her own momentum 'using' humans to grow her bigger, stronger and -let's admit it- sexier?


To what extend humans shape technology and in what ways technology shapes humans?

Oh, please, listen to this some time: http://www.radiolab.org/story/101024-idea-time-come/

We can think out of the boundaries of the existing tech. or even fundamental (for the moment) natural laws. We can imagine perpetual motion machines, or 2+2 equaling 5, but usually we don't; and definitely live accepting all the premises we can think we understand about how our world works.

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The richer the spectrum of possible working technologies in a culture, the wider the culture to culture difference can be. 

There's a schema that demonstrates different human-technology relationships. The x-axis shows how much humans shape technology. The y-axis shows how much technology shapes humans.

Here's a double-bind problem that elaborates how tricky is to try properly shape hatching technology.

- Until the technology is spread, developed and widely used we can't really predict its impacts.

but also

- As soon as it's widespread and we can finally see how it affects us, controlling or regulating it is often very difficult if at all possible.

(that's called the Collingridge dilemma)

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Technology can be 'accused' of working for her own interest of automatism and self-augmentation. There's even a probable similarity to natural selection. Engineers choose to develop the most efficient at a given time technology (the one that produces more output with less input) ditching other solutions. In a way, the choice is determined, 'automatically choose and spread the most efficient solution'.

Technology reinforces herself in a quasi-determinist manner (idk whazzthat) as new technologies have consequences that can be resolved with the development of yet even more new technologies.

For example, industrial manufacturing technology lead to the development of environmental technology to control the mess of its (our?) pollution.

WHO POLLUTES THE PLANET? POOR US WHO JUST FOLLOW THE HONORABLE PATHWAY OF HOW TO SURVIVE AND PROLIFERATE OR THAT HEARTLESS BITCH TECHNOLOGY WHO SUCKED OUR LIVES AND LITTLE TREES?

sorry, moving on

If you were like, 'but..! but...no, it's not exactly like that' before, here's your defense!

Different groups of people have different definitions for efficiency. The degree of acceptance and the motives of shaping a new technology are fundamentally human.

Efficiency as a such determinant is complicated and involves aspects of short and long term human benefit in different levels as well as compliance with our conscious and subconscious cultural, social and cognitive biases.

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