Article Technophobia has a body count

[C C]

https://www.freethink.com/opinion/technophobia

EXCERPT: . . . Unfortunately, that’s not the world we got. So, what went wrong?

The answer is that, in way too many cases, the Luddites won. They slammed the brakes on technology and progress out of unfounded fears or personal beliefs, and we all paid the price.

The hidden price of technophobia is incredibly high, too. The real cost of these doomsday policies is in the air we breathe, the families who bury loved ones too soon, the new kinds of jobs that never get created, and the rockets that never blast off.

Activists push big, scary headlines about the bad things they predict a technology will bring: a silent spring, mass unemployment, a new ice age. But they ignore the good things we stand to lose without the technology: the jobs that never get created, the clean air we don’t breathe, the cascade of new inventions that never come to be.

When you throw a wrench in the wheels of progress, an alternative future full of opportunities disappears. Enemies of innovation may think they’re doing the right thing by slowing progress down, but they too often fail to consider how gumming up the works causes us to miss out on good things.

What diseases will we cure with stem cell breakthroughs decades later that we could have because we wasted eight years in the second Bush administration restricting the research? How many damaged lungs did we get because we killed off nuclear and kept right on burning coal to keep up with electricity demand?

Opportunity cost is invisible — but as we’ve seen time and again, it’s one of the biggest bills in history... (MORE - missing details)

[Magical Realist]

“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
― Herbert Marcuse

I'm not a technophobe or luddite per se so much as an advocate of just being aware of all the consequences of what we are getting into with technological progress. Changes will invariably occur over time, affecting who we are as humans and the world we live in. Some good. Others not so good. Can we live with these changes?

Take for example the leading cause of death in the world--heart failure. This is obviously a result of the trend of technology to make things easier and more immediately accessible for us. Less physical effort and more idle time sitting around. Fast food drivethrus and processed junk food. Streaming TV and delivery services and social media. We are getting more obese and out of shape and downright lazy as a species. It's an inevitable price we pay for our labor-saving gadgetry and light-speed connectivity. Now nobody's seriously advocating we go back to our more toilsome pedestrian days. Just bear in mind there are costs for the benefits of technology. Problems we might not even see coming down the line that we have basically brought upon ourselves. And when the time comes to pay the piper, will it all have been worth it?

[Syne]

Nuclear power chief among the technologies that have been fearmongered against... unless it's for the largest global sponsor of terrorism.