Technological escalation: Encyclopedia II - Technological escalation - Effects

Technological escalation - Effects

Technological escalation has occurred in many wars, and been key to victory in some of their battles — the longbows at the Battle of Agincourt, radar in the Battle of Britain, and, to some extent, nuclear weapons at the end of World War 2 — but has not been a factor in many other instances, such as Germany's World War 2 innovations of the V-1 flying bomb, V-2 rocket, Me-262 jet fighter, and Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket plane. Clearly other factors overshadowed these technological improvements. More recently, in the Vietnam War, the United States utilized a far higher level of technology and production than the Viet Cong, and the technology specific to fighting in Southeast Asia did improve during the war progressed — but other factors overshadowed this technological superiority, and the United States ended up losing.

In the present day, the effects of technological escalation on the largest scales are not disputed: constant threat of terrorism and asymmetric warfare due to, for instance, nuclear proliferation spreading to militant groups and individuals, and a great degree of tension and confrontation between an increasing number of industrial states that have the capacity to wipe out each other's populations — thus, an increasing percentage of the skills and energy and resources of each such power is devoted to anticipating and preventing the conflict arising from the weapons that they, due to whatever motives, feel compelled to produce.

It was exactly these dynamics that led in part to the outbreak of World War I, as Germany sought to compete with the British introduction of the Dreadnought class battleship, and in World War II, when the aircraft carrier became the dominant weapon, and Japan sought to wipe out the US Pacific fleet in one blow at Pearl Harbor. In each case, a contributing factor to the start of war was fear of being dictated to by those with the superior technology, including production capacities.

However, these effects are often taken as inevitable or manageable, and much more explicit attention is paid to the commercial effects of technological escalation, which is most usually known by the euphemism innovation. Energy economics is largely motivated by the fact that capitalism ignores energy as a motive factor, and encourages spending more on problem-solving regardless of payoff — possibly because problem-solving is more fun than simply doing what is known to work.

Examples of commercial technological escalation are often indistinguishable from examples of pro-technology propaganda, of which the 1980s AI boom and much larger and global 1990s dotcom boom are the best known examples. In each case, the applicability of expert systems and e-commerce respectively had yet to be proven, but the same factors as above led to the invented "need" to have the "latest and greatest" technology to brag about in one's advertising, and to have at least some of one's portfolio in the "sexy", "high-tech", "growth" stocks — which of course turned out largely to be incapable of sustaining any profitability.

The effects of technological escalation are also trivially visible in the computer gaming world — where access to higher Internet bandwidth and faster computers tend to determine success in the popular first person shooter and even, increasingly, the real time strategy computer games. This of course leads to a larger and larger percentage of one's income being "invested" in computer hardware for these purposes, perhaps in pursuit of some prize or recognition for success at a game. It is also suspected to lead to a recently-noted increase in the scholastic performance of girls, who are generally less interested in these games, over boys, who are in some cases unable to resist them.

Constant gaming may also be having profound psychological effects, due not only to computer addiction but several known effects on brain waves of extended video game play, which are suspected to have the effect of reducing the ability to feel empathy, in the same way that cocaine and its derivatives can reduce the ability to feel pleasure.

If true, then technological escalation and an increasing amount of one's time spent in an engagement with technological artifacts may be literally replacing sexual courtship as a process in male psychology — materialism reinforced by the inability to imagine any other way to compete to show off for a potential mate. Who is, due to yet another technological escalation, more and more likely to simply be an image on a screen, claiming to be quite personally interested and involved, but paid by a dating service or Internet chat site to keep the naive male involved and interested.

Some branches of feminism take these phenomena as evidence of an inevitable and well-deserved end to patriarchy and male dominance.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Effects", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki