SKZ - Episode 9 - The Nature of Technology

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

Technology increases our potential, but also presents new obstacles that make it harder to reach our potential. I explain how the Tower of Babel story is really about a disruptive new technology leading humans to settle, rather than expand. I link the theme introduced in Genesis 11 to humans' current struggle to best adapt in a world with many emergent technologies, including the internet and bitcoin.

Hey everyone. This is episode nine of the SKZ podcast. I'm your host. My name is Joe. I'm a doctoral student studying clinical psychology. And I'm here with another podcast discussing psychology, philosophy, and the connections between those topics and other things I'm passionate about, such as Bitcoin, video games, fiction, and the like. Today I wanted to talk through this idea I've been having about technology that kind of crystallized this more. I was actually at church and the sermon was kind of about this. So it's going to be ripping off of some of what was talked about at my church today. And it was an interesting angle to talk about the Tower of Babel story, which is in Genesis chapter 11. And the verses that the pastor focused on were very interesting to me. It talked about verses three and four, which I'll read right now. It says, they said to each other, come, let's make bricks and bake them third. They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar. Then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens

so that we may make a name for ourselves. Otherwise, we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth. And it's interesting, that first verse is probably one that a lot of people just skip over. I've probably done in the past looking over this story. But it says, come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They use bricks instead of stone and tar. for mortar. And this is actually just a blatant reference to a new technology that was created. So long, long ago, you know, there was the Stone Age and people use stone to build houses,

build buildings, etc. But actually in ancient Mesopotamia, which is kind of the setting of the story, there was invented the technology of making bricks and that actually kind of standardized the units of, you know, construction and made it a lot easier to build big towers and things like that, right? So this was actually an emergence of new technology that led to people creating the city and building a tower to the heavens, right? And then it says, we want to make a name for ourselves, or otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whore. And if you look just at the beginning of the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis 1, God creates humans and he gives them this mission basically.

He says, be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves along the ground. And sometimes we hear words subdue and rule over and sounds kind of exploitative. But really, it's just talking about being a good steward of the earth, right? And going over the whole earth and being able to create beautiful things using the resources throughout Earth. And I think it's a really interesting idea that basically there was this new technology that was created and it inevitably made changes, right? There is this inevitability with a new technology. It's going to be used.

But the thing is, it could be used for good purposes or it could be used for bad purposes, basically. And what we see in this story literally is people settling for just having this city, not, they said otherwise we'll be scattered over the face of the horror. It's almost like that's a bad thing. Like, oh, we're going to spread humanity throughout the whole planet. That's such a terrible thing. We should all settle for just this city. But actually, God's mission from the beginning is, no, you go create things and spread throughout the whole earth and, you know, continue creating beautiful things.

And the point I want to get across here is I feel like technology is a force that naturally increases human potential, but it also adds new boundaries. to our human potential. So in this Tower of Babel story, these humans were using a new technology and kind of just settling for using it to build one city. But in that, they were not being courageous and brave and kind of expanding the way that God was calling them to in Genesis 1.

And if we think of it from a psychological or evolutionary standpoint, humans were created to feel anxiety. And there's a good reason for this. anxiety is actually very functional. It increases our odds of survival because without anxiety, we would engage in too much risky behavior. For example, if you would just go out and go into a bear's territory and the bear kills you, well, then that person died and the person who was more anxious survived and had more children,

and it was actually very adaptive to help us survive, right? However, humans also evolved to be courageous and brave at times. Without bravery, we would never. have made it very far as a species because we would never have hunted or explored new areas and found new resources and things like that. So there's always this balance of anxiety and bravery. There's times where the anxiety should prevent us from doing something risky, but there's also times where that bravery should encourage us to do something risky in order to seek a reward that can often lead to

our own flourishing and just flourishing of the species as a whole. You're family group, whatever it may be. And again, just reiterating, I think technology is a force that naturally increases our potential, but it also makes it very easy to give in to anxiety and kind of settle for the way things are and not continue to expand the way that, as a Christian, I believe that God called us to in Genesis 1. And I think in Genesis 11 is an example of this Tower of Favil where people used a new technology. and kind of settle for the way things are. They might have been very anxious about exploring the rest of the world, right?

But they just settled for the way things are, let the anxiety win. And clearly, God was not very happy about that. And again, that's one example of bricks being a new technology that led people to settle, right? I think we're in a world where there's so many more new technologies, and I think there's an argument to me made we're kind of in a new technological revolution today with, you know, laptops, cell phones, just the proliferation of internet access, things like that. The internet is a good example of a technology that has increased our potential to learn exponentially. As the internet has become more accessible, we've been able

to learn about, you know, for example, one thing I've learned about is a lot of new housing projects, like watching YouTube videos to learn how to put in a garbage disposal or different and things like that if you want to do some kind of construction project. There's also any language you want to learn, any history of any country or form of art, things like that. There's so many different ways to learn with the internet. And I think that's a really awesome thing. But as you probably have experienced, and I've definitely experienced in my daily life,

the internet creates a lot of temptations, right? One example would be social media. So there's a lot of ways you can learn from, you know, people you follow on Twitter or things like that, but there's a lot of, you know, these platforms specifically as social media are designed to get our attention. So there's a lot of ways in which they can just exploit that to, you know, rile us up. And they're not actually incentivized to give us more true things. They're just incentivized to give us more information. And that can lead to a lot of mental health problems, for example, of, you know, you see someone else's highlight real and you think, oh, wow, these people live such a better life than me.

but in reality you are just seeing like the best parts of their day on social media on Instagram or whatever it is and then you're feeling ashamed about yourself. So it has a lot of mental health impacts and we also can get very addicted. You know, if you look at how much screen time you might spend on your phone, you can get so addicted to just scrolling Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever your social media of choices or maybe all of them. And that can lead to a lot of mental health problems, especially in young, people with something we see throughout the world and especially in the United States,

you know, recently over the past few decades, just so many more mental health problems. I think that's a big reason for it. So for me, for example, I would say that video games are, you know, internet adjacent technology that I think has given me a lot of benefits because I do enjoy a lot of video games. And I think they're very artistic games or puzzle solving games that are very engaging. but on a personal level I often need to check myself just to make sure that I'm not being tempted or leading my you know going down a road of temptation of just playing video games all weekend or during all my free time and you know not recording a podcast like this or not doing something

actually productive with my time or learning something new right it's so easy to get distracted by the internet or other kind of similar technologies and just going back to Tower of Babel Like that's what happened is, oh, okay, there's all this, this new access to building. Let's just build right here, build a super tall tower. Let's not go and use that to explore new places and, you know, get more resources, do new beautiful things, right? Let's just build this one tower. So circling back to just these new technologies coming up, I would say that Bitcoin is another crucial emergent technology. And I hear a lot of Bitcoiners argue that Bitcoin is inevitable.

And this may be true, just like, you know, when Mesopotamians built bricks and it inevitably replaced building with stone, right? It was just a better technology. But just because something's inevitable, that doesn't mean that the outcome or the way the world looks because of this emerging technology is guaranteed to be good. I think we need to put a lot of effort to make sure that the future that will feature Bitcoin. I agree it is inevitable in a sense. We need to ensure that that is a good future and not, you know, the worst outcome related to that. So we can argue that maybe Bitcoin inevitably makes things better, but there's still a range of if it makes it slightly better or if it makes things a lot better. So let's say, for example, that everyone just gives into anxiety.

We all just do the Tower of Vival Route. None of us try to innovate at all, and we're just, okay, it's inevitable, you know. Let's say that lightning continues to have problems with a high fee environment and there aren't any other, you know, successful layer two protocols. This could mean that basically Bitcoin, it does change the world, but it's only used for very, you know, high net worth transactions or, you know, corporations transacting with one another, things like that because the on-chain fees are so high. There's just no other way around it, right? That wouldn't be the greatest outcome. And I'd way rather have people working to help create a Bitcoin future. that's the best potential future.

Or let's say that we kind of lose the political narrative battle and Bitcoin continues to be known as money for criminals that's destroying the environment. We assume that Bitcoin's a Neville and just don't do anything about changing that narrative. I think this would lead to a much worse outcome and especially the process of getting to kind of a Bitcoin future than actually working to explain to people the truth about Bitcoin

and how that's not. necessarily true about it being used by criminals more so than cash is used by criminals and you know how there's actually a lot of positive environmental effects and ways in which we can build out new infrastructure for people who don't have access to electricity and how there's actually a lot less electricity use and it's covered in you know the headlines and things like that so I think making those arguments are having those good conversations and helping people understand what's true is a lot better than just settling for well it's inevitable so

fun staying poor you know that perspective I think recognizing that we have agency and how good the outcome can be is really important and I think on an individual level you know you could believe that and maybe accurately you know believe that if you just have like 0.1 bitcoin and you just hold that forever then your kids are going to be said you know that's going to be generally shown well in the future and that may very well be true right and at this point it's not too hard to just like a couple thousand basically to get to 0.1 Bitcoin. Well, maybe you just settle for that, but is that going to be the best version of your life if you just settle for that

and don't continue to be brave and overcome the temptation to settle, just like people when they built the Tower of Vowel did and just stopped innovating and stopped doing anything with their lives, right? You're not going to be very happy if you're not doing anything with your life, basically, and just settling. So fortunately, you know, I do think Bitcoin is designed to acknowledge a lot of human issues, especially people often talk about human greed, right? And I think you can apply human anxiety as well as people want to take care of themselves

and protect their purchasing power. So I think naturally people will want to adopt Bitcoin as the world become scarier and scarier and they want to address those anxieties. But greed as well, obviously, that's something that's something that's. this talked about a lot is how it's kind of it naturally accounts for human greed and people benefit from people you know for example um mining more bitcoin and then that increases the security um if more people are incentivized to mine just out of greed but acknowledging all that that bitcoin is designed very well in accounting for human maybe flaws you know such as greed or anxiety things like that um

it's still important to remember that even if um some form of bitcoin is inevitable for the future there's a lot of variation in what that future could look like. And we want to be brave and courageous in fighting for the best version of that future. And this fits with that ethos of proof of work, right? Of always, you know, people posting on social media of their exercise routine and saying proof of work, you know, it's that same mentality here. We're just acknowledging, look, even if we say Bitcoin's inevitable and even there's an element of truth in that, we want to continue to work to help create the best future that we can.

and we do have a lot of agency in that, right? Even if a new technology, just like bricks, right? Once bricks were invented, it was inevitable that people were going to use them to build and innovate a lot of new things. And maybe I think Bitcoin is very similar to that, but that doesn't mean that we should just settle and say, okay, well, bricks are built. It's inevitable.

Let's just not really do anything. Let's not, you know, think about the best ways to use bricks. I think similarly, okay, Bitcoin's inevitable. Let's think about the best ways to use Bitcoin. Let's think about. about the best ways to onboard new people to Bitcoin and help them understand it, things like that. So anyways, if you got any value out of this podcast,

feel free to rate, review, share it with a friend. If you're on Fountain and you got some value out of this, feel free to send me any kind of tip. And if you do a boostagram and have a message attached, then I'd be happy to read it the next time I record, especially if you have any thoughts about the show or any comments on it, then I'd love to hear that. So, yeah, hopefully you enjoyed.

and yeah, thanks for listening and have a great rest of your day.