[base698]

May want to check out "Technopoly" by Postman as well. It's got some of the same points but goes deeper into technology in general. It opens with a story from Phaedrus by Plato where a king is arguing with a god over the utility of writing. The god says it's amazing and allows all knowledge to be stored, etc. But the king says the god is too enamored with his invention and can't see downsides like knowledge being decoupled from instruction and loss of memory since everything is written down.

Lesson of course is all technologies have up sides and down sides, but we rarely ever discuss the down sides.

[smacktoward]

The problem is that the up sides of new technologies are typically immediately obvious, while the down sides are subtle and can take a very long time to make themselves evident.

Example: let's make watch faces that glow in the dark by painting them on with radium-based paint! (Which was a real thing: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls)

Up side: everyone can now read their watches in the dark! Hooray! An instantly clear improvement.

Down side: radium is, well, radioactive, so the workers painting the watch faces slowly start having their bones rot and their jaws fall off. It takes a decade for the link to be recognized between these symptoms and unsafe procedures for handling radium-based paint. Nobody really knows how many of the workers employed handling such paint eventually died from related illnesses.