Arts & artifacts.

For the past several years, technology has been a major topic of well-received books - most of them resolutely opposed to the idea. Seeing no reason why thoughtful, well-written books should be limited to condemning the artifacts of human ingenuity, REASON asked a number of writers and scholars to recommend three books - preferably including a work of fiction - that provide a more positive, or at least more complex, view of the relationship between human beings and the made world.

Walter Truett Anderson

In recent times we have seen the emergence of a new polarization - anti-technology vs. pro-technology, Luddite vs. techie. The neo-Luddites dream of people leaving technology behind and advancing into a future that looks - well, looks a lot like the past. The techies dream of artificial intelligence - computers so brilliant that they can advance and leave people behind. (See, for example, the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer.) Along with this goes a lot of argument - much of it useless hyperbole - about whether technology is good or bad, destroyer or savior.

What we really need to do, rather than take sides in any such simplistic fistfights, is to understand how inseparable technological change is from human evolution. Technology is us.

Two books that I will mention here address this issue straight on. The third, a work of science fiction, illuminates it in more indirect ways, as fiction should.

Origins of the Modern Mind (1991), by the Canadian psychologist Merlin Donald, argues that the human species has evolved by developing new "systems of representation," and that at each stage - as people invent new ways to communicate and manage information - we become in fact a different species. The first big jump, he says, was the invention of mimesis. Then came speech, then - much later - writing. We are now in the midst of another such transition, and it is literally changing the way we think: "The growth of the external memory system," he says, "has now so far outpaced biological memory that it is no exaggeration to say that we are permanently wedded to our great invention, in a cognitive symbiosis unique in nature." What this means is that we are now evolving into computer-connected beings with a computer culture and a computer civilization.

Bruce Mazlish of MIT makes a similar point in The Fourth Discontinuity (1993), although his framework is more historical than evolutionary. He takes his title from the proposition that the human species has in recent centuries gone through a number of "discontinuities," each of which involved learning new - and disturbing - lessons about the world and our place in it. We learned the Copernican lesson that our planet is not discontinuous from the heavenly bodies, we learned the Darwinian lesson that humans are not discontinuous from the animals, and we learned the Freudian lesson that the conscious mind is not discontinuous from its preconscious origins. Now, he says, "humans are on the threshold of decisively breaking past the discontinuity between themselves and machines," discovering "that tools and machines are inseparable from evolving human nature." Mazlish's book doesn't footnote Donald's, and I don't think that is an academic oversight. Rather, I suspect he merely moved along his own disciplinary path (he is a historian) and came to a quite similar conclusion.

Kim Stanley Robinson isn't trying to make any such point in Blue Mars (1996), but he makes quite a few anyway. This is the third volume in a trilogy (the previous installments were Red Mars and Green Mars) about an expedition to Mars that results in the deliberate transformation of the planetary ecology and the growth of a new human civilization. Robinson's books reflect most of the current scientific thinking about "terraforming," and also show how that issue might lead to a new kind of techno-phobe-technophile argument. The major political groupings in his story are the Greens who are eager to modify the planet, and the Reds (more or less similar to the Greens here on Earth), who prefer to leave it alone. In the books the Reds win many of the arguments, but the Greens proceed to change Mars - while human beings move on to terraform Venus, various asteroids, and the moons of the outer planets. Along the way they go through several technological revolutions and evolve some fancy artificial intelligence, but remain recognizably human. Technological change and human evolution proceed inseparably from one another, much as (according to Donald and Mazlish) they always have.

Stephen Cox

To grasp the significance of technology, it's helpful to look at a society that didn't have much of it to go around. Conquest (1993), Hugh Thomas's magisterial account of the destruction of the Aztec Empire, shows precisely how far a society could advance without wheels, nails, or candles. (The lack of firearms was a comparatively minor problem.) Thomas demonstrates what can and can't be done in such a society, and he dramatically illustrates its vulnerability to any competitor that has marginally less primitive tools.

But material technology is the child of intellectual technology, whose best conquests are peaceful ones. A remarkable example is the sudden triumph of agriculture on the North American plains - an effect of the advanced intellectual technology of free enterprise. Willa Cather's great novel O Pioneers! (1913) richly evokes the experience. Cather's protagonist is a young woman who is distinguished by her skillful use of capitalist methods. Hoping to do more than scratch out a modest living through sheer hard work, she takes the risk of thinking. She invests in real estate and farming methods that other people scorn, and her investments pay off. She transforms both her land and her life.

You can't understand technology without understanding how people think about technology, and, of course, you need to know the bad ideas as well as the good. That's why I want to insert a recommendation of just one influentially bad book, Thorstein Veblen's The Engineers and the Price System (1921). Veblen ably advocates a leading myth of the machine age: the idea that material technology "advances" because of people's collective efforts, only to be manipulated and hindered by capitalists for the sake of their private profits. This idea represents a profound misapprehension of the ways in which material technology is affected by investment, market prices, and property rights. Veblen recommended that capitalists be replaced by a "Soviet of technicians" that could "take care of the material welfare of the underlying population" - a proposal that is either chilling or comic, depending on the way you want to take it, but that is very much in the 20th-century spirit.

One of the finest books written in opposition to that spirit is Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine (1943; republished 1993, with an introduction by me). Paterson offers a complex and compelling theory of history that explains the relationship between a dynamically developing material technology and the concepts of individual rights that are fundamental to capitalism. And she adds a warning to anyone who assumes that the industrial machine on which modern life depends will keep on humming even in a world dominated by social engineering. "For the very reason that the action of inanimate machinery is predetermined," she says, "the men who use it must be free. No other arrangement is feasible." After reading Paterson, one can hardly look at a toaster, much less a computer, without thinking of the Bill of Rights. But that's as it should be. It's not an accident that rights came first and toasters came second.

Penn Jillette

When you're in a Spielberg state of mind, try this: Take a baby from 150,000 years ago and raise him/her in modern Manhattan. What have you got? You've got a 21st-century kid, with in-line skates. Now, take the next kid born now and send him/her back 150,000 years and what have you got? Some grub-scrounging missing link.

Technology is all that matters. Technology is all that makes us human. You want books on technology? Every goddamned book is about technology. Every conversation is technology. Technology is all we got. If you don't like technology, you don't like humans.

If you want the above premise written by authors who aren't smartasses, try Making Silent Stones Speak: Human Evolution and the Dawn of Technology (1993), by Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth. They're a nutty couple that went out, lived in the bush, made stone-aged tools, and used them for wacky stuff like butchering an elephant. Is that science or performance art? It's the best of both. Read it.

You want another book that'll rock your world? Try The Beak of the Finch (1994), by Jonathan Weiner. It's about another cool science-nut couple. The couple is perfect, but the author screws the pooch with biblical references. Jesus and Bible quotes in a science book are pure evil. He also misuses the phrase, "Possession is 9/10ths of the law," and yaps about Zen, global warming, and other hippie Luddite ideas. It's still a great book. This nutty couple goes and lives on one of those rocky, useless, Darwin islands and measures the length of the beaks of the finches (it's a well-named book). Again very close to performance art. They see evolution happening! Technology finding out exactly how we got here.

These books make you love goofy couples. The book I want now is the sex book about these wilderness-science couples. Never mind Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, I want to hear the nasty on the professionals that have nothing to do but discover our world like humans and screw like beasts. Those are the techno-videos I want to study.

The cheeses at REASON asked me to include one work of fiction. Why not include the best work of fiction in the world? The Mezzanine (1986), by Nicholson Baker, will kick your ass. I laughed, I cried. What the hell more you want? After science-sex couples use...