you may Accept A Absolutely Altered Affectionate of Technology

Barbara: Hazel, in talking about new technologies, how would you appraise the next bearing of technologies that would cover such things as the digital for apprenticeship over India, which is bearing on a miniaturized base an astronomic bulk of information, and again the weather-monitoring satellites, and so forth?

Hazel: Well, I don't wish to say a absolute no to all of these things, but I am suggesting that we no best accept the acumen to use all of those sorts of things.

Barbara: We no best have—?

Hazel: Or we've absent it, to use Jean's affectionate of imagery. For example, I apprehend a address on that Indian educational digital system; you apperceive what has happened to that, don't you?

Barbara: No.

Hazel: Well, it's become actually a advertising tool; it's actually annihilation but anticipation control. It's a absolute accompaniment traveling into every village. And the alluring affair is that they accept activate that if you go to some of these little Indian villages, the television sets are on all the time. They dabble with the channels to snow up the screen, and it creates light! They don't accept electric ablaze by which to see in the evenings, so they can again sit about and allocution by the ablaze of the aflame television set! It's wonderful! [laughter] You see, we don't accept the acumen to use all of that stuff. We're still accouchement arena about in Pandora Jewelry. That is not the advance point.

Barbara: Well, we absolutely can't break at this akin of technology, which might, as you say, be destructive. But it's just an aboriginal form. I accept that technology is natural. There is a abstruse aspect to aggregate on the actual plane. And there is an evolving continuum of technologies throughout the evolutionary arete — accoutrement that will aftermath a breakthrough bound — as the abiogenetic cipher technology produced a breakthrough bound from the ample molecules.

Technologies like astronautics, cybernetics, genetics, and so on, will accomplish it accessible for bodies to transcend the beastly action physically—brutalizing work, assertive kinds of disease, planet-boundness. We are at an aboriginal appearance of animal abstruse development, but not of technology itself. That has been traveling on back the agent of the concrete universe. I accept that as we activate to accept synergy and accomplished systems both on Earth and in amplitude our technologies will advance enormously. They will be ephemeralized, as Bucky Fuller says — added biological than mechanical.

Hazel: Yes, of course, I didn't beggarly to accomplish a absolute statement. There are abounding technologies that are already adapted — band recorders are a actual adapted array of technology; they're individual; they acquiesce claimed control. A typewriter is a actual adapted technology, a bed-making machine, ability accoutrement .. .

Jean: But actuality we accept to ask: Adapted to what? If we activate to ascertain the arising angel of what it agency to be human, and the beyond angle of activity and its capacities, again you activate to ascertain those technologies that are appropriate.

Hazel: Well, what I mean, I think, is those technologies that are adapted to our akin of wisdom.

Jean: Yes! But if you can extend that akin of wisdom—

Hazel: Again you can do all of these added things.

Jean: Not necessarily.

Hazel: You may not wish to!

Jean: You may not wish to; you may accept a absolutely altered affectionate of technology.

(Reprinted with permission from The Ability of Yin).

(Note to editor: We accept permission from the three co-authors, Hazel Henderson, Jean Houston and Barbara Marx Hubbard, to run excerpts from their book with the byline The Ability of Yin - they are all referenced in the about the columnist box).