I recently read three very interesting sci-fi books (A door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, Ventus and Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder) and while the books are very different, they have a few common themes. I highly recommend all three books – especially Karl Schroeder who has many, many good ideas in my opinion. There will be a few minor spoilers for all the books.

I would like to talk about one of the themes made explicit in “Lady of Mazes” and is left implicit in the other two. Simply put, this is the idea that every technology carries with it a system of values that are automatically accepted while using the technology. For instance, the designation of the car as the status quo way to travel in America has led to cities designed around cars at the cost of pedestrians and bikes and in my opinion, livability. To take a more topical example, the widespread adoption of the internet, social media etc has led to us implicitly devaluing privacy and valuing immediate gratification.

Our ability to live in cities in entirely manufactured ecosystems, supported by an invisible global network is, I believe, in large part responsible for our ecological crisis. We have entirely devalued ecological diversity and sustainability simply because most people do not interact meaningfully with the natural world.

To take another example, as far as I can make out, we never chose capitalism as the governing economic policy explicitly. It seems to have been a consequence of certain technologies combined with a certain Malthusian race (to the bottom?).

Lady of Mazes takes place in a society where humanity has technological control over the solar system but most humans are part of a virtual reality (not quite the right concept) with few constraints on what is possible. We take the perspective of someone who grew up in a society with tech locks – the ability to ban a particular technology – and it’s used to create many ecosystems centered around particular value systems and permissive of only the technologies thought to be compatible with that value system. Most of the book is an exploration of what happens when our protaganist enters the virtual reality world most people live in and the resultant clash of values.

A door into Ocean is about Shora, a biologically advanced civilization that prioritizes sustainability and living as part of an ecosystem. They come into contact with a more traditional society that tries to exploit Shora and the resulting clash of values. Ventus is set on a world saturated by nanotechnology. The planet has been severly geoengineered to make life possible and in the process the AIs responsible for this geoengineering have acquired a kind of sentience. They have their own set of values and humans are often not very high up in this set of values.

I think the idea that technologies carry with them inherent value systems is of great relevance to our world and is only going to be of greater significance in the future. It is currently an entirely invisible phenomenon and this makes it easier for our values to be eroded over time without conscious choice.

The Amish are a very interesting real world example of a culture that realizes this value erosion and have tried to fight very hard against it. At the same time, I simply cannot imagine broader society consciously debating the merits and demerits of some new technological innovation (perhaps with some controlled experiementation) before deciding to accept or reject it. People who consciously reject certain technologies (like a smartphone) are looked upon as a little strange. Perhaps we would all be better off if everyone paid the same attention to the technologies they let themselves use.