Has technology out-paced society?

Has our dependence on computers and other innovations of technology out-stripped our society? This question has been raised before. It started during the rise of the United States to a world power with the invention of the atomic bomb. Nuclear power and weapons are still frightening even today. Now it is our computer technology that seems to race faster than our society can cope with.

Are we in a race to catch up to it? In my opinion, yes. Our traditions built up over centuries of war, peace, industrial and social change are reeling from it. The digital technological age is flying ahead at warp speed. While our civilization struggles to keep up.

We have been through this before with the social upheavals of the 1960s. The protest marches for civil rights, women’s rights, pollution and against U.S. involvement in Vietnam were just some of the things going on back then — even full-blown riots. It was brought to us all via radio and the young medium of television straight into our living rooms. Computers were there too, but they were in the background, and the smallest of them filled entire office floors. The largest were whole buildings.

Today, those machines are everywhere and in everything. From the home PC or Mac to our cars, planes and even traffic lights. The computer and its spin offs are everywhere. Hardly the size of office building floors, they can fit in the palm of your hand and are thousands of times more powerful than their bulky ancestors. Let’s face it, they are all over the place.

We have become over-dependent on them. Take, for instance, a power outage. We get them here quite a bit. Yet, when that happens we can’t get a gallon of gas or a purchase from the store because the stores are all hardwired into a computer system that runs it. Our society has been effectively taken over by the machines we built to run them. Was that really a good idea?

Now even social change is being started and run by them. The social uprisings in the Middle East and even here in the United States are primarily computer- and social-network-driven. The Arab Spring, Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are just three examples of this. This can be a boon or a bane depending on your viewpoint. I see them all as both.

The boon side is that our traffic flows smoother. Our cars run better. Our planes are even now designed by computer and fly better, too. The logistics of trade run to peaks of efficiency. Our movies and media can go places only dreamed of in the past. News and current events happen and, at lightening speed, show up on our TVs, computers and even hand-held devices. Medicine has made giant leaps in healing with computer-aided technology. Our understanding of space has been expanded more in the last 40 years with computers and the men and machines we send out there, where in the past it has taken us centuries. Digital communications can even let someone in Barrow make a call to San Francisco on a cellphone the size of a cigarette pack in the middle of a snowstorm. With the click of a mouse one can look out onto the surface of Mars or the sun itself — live.

The bane list is something like this. Computerized flight systems when they fail can send a plane crashing to the ground or shut down and entire air traffic control system, stranding thousands. Critical government and infrastructure systems have been hacked by everyone from kids in basements looking for a thrill to hostile governments. The castoffs of old, outdated computers have toxic materials that pollute our landfills and environment. Some of our children, subjected to hours of endless computer game violence, have killed people for a thrill seemingly not in the know that dead in real life is dead and there is no reset switch. Sexual predators lurk, fueled by the onset of endless Internet pornography to feed a growing sickness. Identity theft scams millions of people out of home and billions of dollars.

The all important Achille’s heel to our computerized society is that one or more high-altitude nuclear devices set off in our atmosphere can send out an electro-magnetic pulse that put us right back to the year 1900 in an instant. Everything with a computer chip in it or circuit board would be rendered dead and useless. Whole nations and even our whole society could collapse. Science fiction? Sad to say it’s not. That is a drastic thought, but an all-too-real threat.

We don’t seem to talk to each other face-to-face anymore. We talk via cellphone, email or text. I see this every day now, like waiting in line at the bank or store checkout while some person drones on his or her cellphone. I observe young people with thumbs flying on their little devices, seemingly unaware of the world around them at the state fair.

Are we becoming like the machine? Are we losing our humanity? Is this just culture shock? Or are we going through a phase to change into something better? I would like to think the last question to be the answer. I am hopeful for this, yet skeptical at the same time.

Wasilla resident Daniel D. Grota retired from the U.S. Army after more than 21 years of service.