Technology is a problem because we cannot do without it, and our use of it clearly makes us both better and worse. Human beings are—among other things—technological or tool-making animals. We use our brains and our freedom to transform nature, and in doing so transform ourselves. We also have a perverse capacity to make ourselves unhappy and take a singular pride in our misery. We are both proud of and wish to free ourselves from the burdens of our technological success. So we find it almost impossible to judge how much and what kind of technology would be best for us. In principle, we should be free to accept or reject various technological developments. Technology, after all, is supposed to be a means for the pursuit of whatever ends we choose. But in truth it might be our destiny to be moved along by impersonal and unlimited technological progress.

From a purely natural view at least, we do not know why human beings alone among the species are technological animals. Only we human beings can freely negate nature to satisfy our desires; only we human beings can create new and harder to satisfy needs through our technological success. One of the best pieces of evidence of our fundamental difference from the chimps and the dolphins is that we can so easily control them if that is what we want to do, but they cannot give orders to us. We do not know why we have the capability and the desire to threaten the very existence of all life on our planet. It is almost impossible to call what we have achieved through technological success—from a natural point of view—progress.

Technological change really is progress from another view. It is the index of our increasing power to control or manipulate nature. The general rule is that societies that encourage or are open to such change overwhelm those that are not. That is why the modern West has exerted its control over the whole world, and why the Europeans almost eliminated the Native Americans in our country. But this control, of course, is quite ambiguous. Technology is characteristically the imposition of human will over nature; we comprehend nature insofar as we control it. But our control and our comprehension are always far from complete.

Another reason we are not free to relinquish control once we have achieved it is that we cannot dispose of technological knowledge once we have acquired it. Surely we regret, on balance, our invention of nuclear weapons. But it would be the height of imprudence for America to destroy its nuclear weapons or even to stop trying to produce better ones. The knowledge of how to build them is everywhere, and otherwise insignificant powers such as North Korea and even transnational terrorists groups are going to find it progressively easier to use that knowledge.

The example of nuclear weapons reminds us that the progress of technology is in many ways not simply good for human life. Technological development often causes massive human displacement, imposing on many an urban misery that can resemble a living death. Indeed, we can say that any rapid technological advance always causes human disorientation, and its initial effect is to cause at least almost as much misery as it alleviates. Such change seems to become on balance beneficial only after it has become routinized, only after it assumes a place in a relatively settled way of life. Technological change would become an increasingly unambiguous evil were it to become too rapid for we habit- and tradition-dependent beings to live with it well.