Читать книгу Is Technology Making Us Sick? - Matthew Taylor - Страница 10

ANeolithic arrowheads from Saharan Africa, c. 4,000 BC. These tiny pieces of stone, 3 cm (1⅕ in.) long, are among the first markers of us as a technological species.

We are, uniquely, the ape that makes complex tools and uses them to solve its problems. We call those tools technology.

Everything from language to clothing, flint spearheads, coracles, fishing hooks, sails, wattle and daub, food salting, gunpowder, candles, paper, glass lenses, printing, the spinning jenny, steam locomotives, telegraphs, antibiotics, microchips, hypertext transfer protocol, DNA sequencing machines, lithium-ion batteries and 5G mobile phone masts are technology, and every bit of it came into use in order to ease some particular sticking point that we encountered. We value our tools very highly. The fact that they can come at a cost to our own well-being matters to us less, and does not dim our enthusiasm for them.

Technology has always made us sick.

Hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago first experienced diphtheria, syphilis, influenza, salmonella, tuberculosis and leprosy when they domesticated animals. The invention of agriculture, the first defining moment in the evolution of our civilization, reduced average prehistoric life expectancies from the mid-twenties to mid-teens. Neolithic people were anaemic; osteoporotic; deficient in zinc, calcium, vitamins D, B12 and A; and smaller in stature than their ancestors. Their teeth grew crooked and crowded, and fell out earlier due to the new, softer, more sugary diet. However, they did not return to the old, healthier ways because they had fire, pots, fabric, stone tools and permanent shelters for themselves and their stored food surpluses. They may not even have identified their new way of life as the cause of their sickness. It was an unintended, unexpected and unexplained side effect.

Agriculture, cultivating plants and raising livestock, began in parts of what is now the Middle East and independently, a few thousand years later, in the valleys of the Wei and Yellow rivers, now in China.

BRock art from Tassili n’Ajjer, also Saharan Africa, from c. 7,000 BC shows early animal husbandry.

CContemporary images from the same region showing the use of carts and animals in agriculture.

We have never changed the pattern.

The ancients were fully aware of the poisoning that was caused by using lead for pipes and wine vessels – Nicander of Colophon wrote about it in the 2nd century BC – but the new material, pliable and with a low melting point, was too useful to give up. It was not until the late 20th century (1970 in Europe and 1986 in the USA) that lead was banned by building codes, ending two millennia of kidney failure, birth defects, diarrhoea and early deaths. It is still used in China.

Nicander of Colophon was a greek poet and physician who wrote about poison in his 630-line poem entitled Alexipharmaca.

In the 19th century, cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid, typhus and smallpox swept through the towns and cities that emerged around the new machine-powered factories. Workers lived closer together, sharing water sources and breathing space in the specialized buildings – put up to house the technology, with only the needs of the technology in mind – and infection spread more easily.

A19th-century illustrations of a man with pulmonary tuberculosis, a man with typhoid and a man with cholera vomiting black fluid.

BChild workers were the norm in the 19th and early 20th century, as seen here, working hard in a basket factory in Evansville, Indiana.

CBoys packing brooms in the same factory. As late as 1900 most children in the USA left school at age 12 or 13 to take up working life.

Cars saved people from a mountain of horse manure but instead urban lungs filled with lead, micro-particulates and carbon monoxide, sending asthma rates skywards and changing the climate.

Horse manure was a big problem in cities. In New York in 1900 there were 100,000 horses that together produced around 1.36 million kilograms (1,500 tons) of manure every day, which had to be swept up and disposed of.

In addition to physical sickness caused by arranging our lives around machines, the direct use of machinery has always caused injury. Even when it has been clear to everyone that harm is being done to the people who make and operate machines, our love affair with shiny new things has been too strong to put them aside.

Industrial workers in the 19th century, especially children, were at risk of mutilation every day as they came into contact with powerful machinery with little or no guards against accidents. Loss of limbs, fingers and hair were especially common, and reports of workers being swept into the relentlessly grinding cogs and crushed were far from rare. The inspectorate set up in 1833 in England as part of the Factory Act helped little as it had only four inspectors for more than 3,000 mills and factories, increasing to 35 in 1868. Coverage of deaths and maimings in the popular press put pressure on Parliament, and legislation was passed throughout the century, culminating in mandatory financial compensation in 1897. Demand for the goods produced grew rapidly throughout this time.

The Factory Act (1833) mandated shorter hours for children and introduced compulsory schooling and basic safety standards.

APen nib packets. Metal nibs boomed in popularity in the 1820s when manufacturers in Birmingham, UK, started mass-producing good quality, low priced, hard-wearing steel models.

Scrivener’s palsy afflicted writers and clerks in the 19th century just as repetitive strain injury paralyses the data entry workers of today. Their hands spasmed and they lost the ability to grip their pens. Some blamed the new steel nibs the clerks were using, whereas British anatomist Charles Bell (1774–1842) suggested the condition was due to ‘the imperfect exercise of the will’. Samuel Solly recognized the affliction’s physical roots in the nervous system and named the condition in 1860, warning doctors not to mistake it for a psychological malady. The steel nibs remained, and no one suggested doing any less scrivening.

Scrivener’s palsy is now known as writer’s cramp, and it is treated with botox injections in the hand. Retraining the muscles, including using different writing instruments, physical therapy or just swapping hands, has been shown to have a longer term therapeutic effect.

Samuel Solly (1805–71) was a British surgeon who urged his peers to examine the spinal cords of sufferers of writer’s cramp post-mortem to find a cure for the cause. In 1865, he told an audience at St Thomas’s Hospital that a disease of the spinal cord was ‘the primary malady’. The search for a cure continues.

A new technological revolution – mobile communications in all its forms – has radically changed life in less than two decades.

As with previous paradigm shifts, there are physical and mental elements, but now the machines are coming between us as social beings in entirely new ways. Algorithms designed to keep us engaged filter the world we see through our newsfeeds. Social circles have widened beyond our proximate community more than at any other point in history.

Algorithms are sets of rules or instructions, particularly those that are followed by a computer. In social media, they are used to find related content or to connect users with similar people in order to deepen their engagement with the network.

While rates of mental health problems have been stable for adults in the past few years, emotional disorders among children and young people have increased more than 40% since 2004, to their highest point since records began.

The question of whether there is a direct causal link between technology and our minds’ healthy functioning is an urgent one that needs to be addressed.

BIngenious inventors attempted to ease scrivener’s palsy with pen-holding apparatus such as these from George Tiemann and Co. None addressed the core problem of repeated minute muscle strain.

AThe Facebook ‘like’ thumbs-up has become a symbol of social networking since its introduction in 2009, shown here at the entrance of the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters. Each ‘like’ feeds data back to the user’s newsfeed, increasing their likelihood of returning to the ‘liked’ content.

This book will primarily deal with modern technology. Our current wave of innovation tends to be highly personal, interactive and digital. It is designed to be habit-forming and integrated into every moment of the day. Rather than physically useful objects such as aeroplanes and street lights, our mobile devices and services focus on communication and interpersonal relationships with groups, trends, ideas and individuals. They might not give you phossy jaw or risk breaking your bones, but their ubiquity has introduced new fears over technology’s impact on our health. Is this fear justified, or is the picture more complex?

Phossy jaw refers to the brain damage and jaw disfigurement found in people who worked with white phosphorus, mostly match makers, between 1839 and 1906, when the use of phosphorus in match production was banned.

Technological progress has always brought health and well-being coupled with disease and confusion, as engineers and designers work to address initial problems. Neolithic farmers experienced more physical problems than their Mesolithic forebears, but once the Copper Age arrived life expectancies had improved on the Stone Age, and doubled by the Iron Age. Choleric factory towns grew into safe, clean, comfortable housing once waste disposal, pest control and sanitation problems had been solved. Throughout the 19th century, rural farmworkers’ diets were static, consisting mainly of bread with a little tea and sugar (even allowing for self-provisioning from gardens), while the new class of urban factory workers and miners saw living standards improve and diets broaden as their incomes rose. Malnutrition fell. Mass-produced, cheaper medical instruments could be used in the service of a greater number of people.

Mental health has benefited from advancements, too.

We cannot see rates of depression or anxiety from archaeology, as we can rickets or tooth decay, but we can see what is happening now. It is undoubtedly the case that many people are suffering from the effects of what US writers Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi call ‘future shock’ in their 1970 book of the same name – anxiety produced by too much changing too fast – but it is also true that links between people at great distances have never been easier to maintain, and new communities are being found with little or no need to take geography into account.

Alvin Toffler (1928–2016) collaborated with his wife, Heidi (1929–2019), to write a series of books on the future. Titles include Future Shock (1970), The Third Wave (1980) and Powershift (1990).

BVideo chat applications such as Skype, used here, and other digital communication methods have made it possible for long-distance communication to be a daily and casual activity.

CEngineers assemble a tomograph, a device for photographing cross-sections of objects including human bodies, which has greatly advanced diagnostic success without using risky invasive procedures.

In the 20th century, for the first time, technology was developed that was deliberately designed to affect the way we think and perceive the world, and we now use it continually. When it works, it boosts our mental well-being, even our intelligence, but it has entirely new ways of harming us, too.

In 1945, a man called Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) had been head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development for four years, throughout the US involvement in World War II. He was in charge of the scientific war effort and was one of the most broadly knowledgeable technologists of his time. He published an article titled ‘As We May Think’ in the Atlantic in July 1945 on a subject he had been thinking about for more than ten years. It was an aide for researchers, a kind of sophisticated desk he called the memex.

‘As We May Think’ sketched out a highly prescient collaborative vision for science, focused on understanding rather than destruction, and able to act as a healing process after the horrors of war. It was reprinted after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan later that year.

The memex user was to scan their notes and important documents into the desk, linking them together by attaching keywords rather than using a central index. As the researcher referred back to their records, they would be able to follow those keywords to recall more data, being led through their work on a trail of linked information in an imitation of the way memories trigger deeper memories in the human mind. In short, the desk became a shareable extension of the researcher’s own memory. This concept of a web of linked data and documents was to become the foundation of information sciences throughout the second half of the century, leading directly to the development of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990.

Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955) published his proposal for the World Wide Web in 1990 while working at CERN, the particle accelerator in Switzerland. He launched the first website, http://info.cern.ch, in 1991.

ABush’s memex drawing. Despite its influential status, no one built a working memex until 2014, when engineer Trevor F. Smith made one as a fun project with his daughter, Sparks Webb.

BThad Starner and his wearable computer at MIT in 1997, and below with the Media Lab’s Perceptual Computing Group. He is an engineer of wearable computers that augment human capabilities, such as Google Glass.

The web, together with many other applications that link computers and knowledge together, is intended to be an augmentation of human intelligence, what Apple CEO Steve Jobs (1955–2011) called a ‘bicycle for the mind’. It is in our phones, our social networks, the websites we visit and the apps we use habitually all day, every day.

Computers and mobile phones have been a lifeline to isolated people everywhere.

AStar Wars fans, a well established online community, congregate in Portmagee, South-West Ireland. Islands off the coast featured in The Last Jedi and people travel to be with others who share their interest in the films.

From the lonely teen finding a peer group on Snapchat to the new parent scrolling through Facebook as they endure yet another night feed, they can be a great defence against loneliness and thereby reduce the stress of a cut-off situation.

The Internet has been the most common place for same-sex couples to meet since 2001, and the same is very likely to be the case for heterosexuals within years. Married couples who met online report a small but significantly higher level of happiness than their compatriots who met in the pub or at work and, while marital problems are associated with depression, anxiety and substance abuse, a happy pairing can expect to live appreciably longer and healthier lives.

But do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? Is our increased dependence on mobile communications, content algorithms and social media doing us more harm than good?

One person finds affirmation in the form of a supportive audience for their Doctor Strange fan fiction; another finds it in the welcoming but destructive arms of the far right, drawn in by a subversive code of memes and in-jokes. One is boosted by a self-help group that addresses their particular psychopathology and background; another finds themselves egged on by the compounding forces of thinspiration videos, self-harm tutorials and misanthropist isolation cults, fed to them by automated suggested content lists and anonymous trolls, intent on taking revenge on a world they have rejected by making it as unpleasant as possible.

Thinspiration has been a banned tag on Instagram since 2012, as it promotes extreme thinness and unhealthy behaviours. However the content continues to find its way online, as users locate alternative tags before the network blocks them too.

In affluent countries, living standards and healthy life expectancies are at all-time highs. Suicide rates have been low and stable for decades, averaging just over 10 deaths per 100,000 since the year 2000, compared to more than 20 in the second half of the 19th century. As technology crowds further and further into our personal lives, some of us find it impossible to thrive. Technology is harming us in certain specific ways that are likely to intensify if we continue on our current trajectory.

The questions are: what are those ways, how serious is the harm and, most importantly, what can we do about it?

BOKCupid is just one of more than 7,500 dating sites. Others include UniformDating, Mullet Passions and Gluten Free Singles. eHarmony alone is responsible for 4% of weddings in the USA.