Can Technology Save the Economy?

As a fan of technological innovation, I am surprised and distressed that some people seem to believe that technology is the ultimate answer to everything, including the world's failing economies. Unless and until a technology is developed that can repair human character flaws, that hope and expectation can only be regarded, based on all available information, as bizarre.

Technology has historically been seen as evidence of humankind's advancing knowledge, sophistication and ability to create and cope. Today, as perhaps the most immediate and ubiquitous threats to the well being of much of the world as we know it is in the area of economics, it seems apropos to wonder if somewhere in the ever-expanding scope of what we call 'technology', a solution might be found.

Questions about the relationship of technology to progress have been addressed many times before. Emerging technologies often arrive (or are imagined to be just over the horizon) catapulted by an expectation that the heightened sophistication of the new technology will, somehow, improve things for humankind. Well, maybe yes and maybe no.

Some countries have actually placed a great deal of both investment and faith in the idea that advancing technology will actually save them from the economic malaise that threatens the entirety of organized human society as we know it. Scotland is a recent and rather dramatic example of this "I-wish-it-were-so" phenomenon.

Concurrently, there are extremists on both sides of any issue. The Luddites and those who are identified with the Progressive Luddites insist that technological advancement is rarely if ever to be equated with progress.

Technology can make many kinds of work easier. Imagine what moving heavy things around was like prior to the technological innovation of the winch, lever or block and tackle. Yes, these common objects that we may often regard as 'old fashion' were once new and innovative technology!

Somehow, when the task of technology is to make work easier and more efficient (assembly lines, adding machines, computers, etc.) or to make recreation and discovery more accessible (cars, trains, air and spacecraft, etc.) the answer seemed pretty straight forward. Yes, technology made something better.

On the other hand, even with the most brilliant minds of the world addressing the problem of the crumbling modern world economy, technology seems at a loss to be of substantive or direct help. The reason is not mysterious. Fixing the economy does not require the development of a new kind of device, but the subtraction of what appears to be a perennial and indelible human attribute, greed.

The advancements that took us from scratching marks on walls and counting pebbles to the abacus have no parallel when it comes to inventing something that will eliminate or substantively reduce avarice. There is not a technological solution to everything and, I suggest, that the economy is among those things.

Of course, new technologies can make some people rich and can create jobs which contribute to the betterment of struggling economies around the world, but they will not and cannot 'fix' the essential problem. To think otherwise would require one to be a believer in technology as a religion - as a systemic and reliable configuration of beliefs and faith. Hope may spring eternal, but technology cannot and will never repair the world's economy.

While the gargantuans of contemporary technology will persist in arguing to the contrary, they do so from the position of the successful trying to persuade everyone else that their success is everyone's success. Charlie Wilson, the CEO of General Motors back in 1955, hit this nail on the head with his oft quoted line, ?What is good for General Motors is good for America." Right. Same went, in different words, for Standard Oil. Between the two of them, they rampaged functional and 'green' electric transportation systems making us all reliant on their products.

While the changes are often described more kindly, as in the loss of electric transportation in Los Angeles Their stockholders certainly benefited, but it would be quite a stretch to argue that the world is in better shape as a consequence of their self-serving technological innovations and promotions.

Can technology save the economy? Probably not. Thoughtfully and altruistically applied might it help? Of course. History reminds us, however, that more often than not when the motives of altruists clash with the drive of the greedy, the altruists tend to lose, and so do the rest of us.