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Technology can be thought of as the fruits of the “tree of knowledge”, to
borrow from a model employed by the Church of Reality. As our collective
information about different aspects of reality grows we learn to not only make
more “practical” applications but also gain a more comprehensive
understanding of our consensus reality. This is what sets us apart from our
ancestors in the caves and mud huts, surely more than genetic evolutions,
and recently at a startlingly rapid rate. For example we have gone from
realizing that the earth is round and revolves around the Sun to blasting off
into outer space, landing on the Moon, scoping out the surface of Mars and
other impossible things. Technology, in the sense that I speak of, is the act of
taking one's personal understanding of the world, these days almost always
influenced by communication with other humans, and thinking up a way to use
it to manipulate our world, with the intention of improving it. From the
understanding of the world that moved the first of our ancestors to sharpen
rocks by banging them together to the understanding that moved the men
that created the atomic bomb (not all technology is good for us), as well as
technologies or techniques that are intended to manipulate our very minds
themselves, such as meditation and hypnosis.
I believe that beneficial technology, the natural consequence of
understanding, communication, and thinking, should be readily pursued and
employed. I believe that technologies that are harmful, especially one's that
cause more harm than benefit, should be perfected or replaced (if not
abstained from) and that this transition should not be made at a leisurely
pace, especially when such a technology is widespread, as in the case of
today's problems with the oil based energy technology, when we have
solutions such as new and improved solar panels and crop-based fuels such
as biodiesel, yet the unclean fossil fuels are still used near exclusively, even
though they are limited and bad for the environment and us, as well as more
and more costly and put much money (which means physical power) into
many of the wrong pockets, which is certainly why it is still in use.
