Techno-Anxiety? We've Been Afraid of Disruptions Since the Printing Press | Big Think

Techno-Anxiety? We've Been Afraid of Disruptions Since the Printing Press

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Is the technology of the future more radical than the technology of the past? Alison Gopnik provides some historical perspective.Kids in waiting rooms and on transport are kept placid with smartphones and earphones, pressed into their developing canals. Six-month olds already know they need to swipe to unlock an iPhone. Information darts in and disappears just as quickly on smartboards in classrooms. Our attention spans are shot. Our collective impatience is at its historical peak. Will it stunt early development? Is anyone thinking of the children? Well, It’ll be 20 years before we really know the effect that current technology is having on them, but there is no doubt it will change them. This doesn’t cause a swell of anxiety within developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, because a look through our history as animals reveals that’s exactly how we’ve always operated, and in fact it’s what sets us apart as a species. We use tools, we reshape our physical world, and our inner one. When the printing press and the telegraph were introduced, there were similar dystopian predictions of terrible change – and the world was transformed, certainly, but not for the worse. Our love of stability and familiarity is coming into conflict with the acceleration of technological innovation. Adults worry because it may not be intuitive to them, says Gopnik, but young minds learn differently. There may be trade-offs in the way things have always been but in history, by and large, the benefits outweighed the harms, and they will continue to do so. It’s as human to continually advance as it is to grapple with what is new. Alison Gopnik's most recent book is The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children

Alison Gopnik's most recent book is The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children.

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ALISON GOPNIK:

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children’s learning and development and was the first to argue that children’s minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. She is a columnist (every other week) for The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of over 100 journal articles and several books including “Words, thoughts and theories” (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff), MIT Press, 1997, and the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books The Scientist in the Crib (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl) William Morrow, 1999, and The Philosophical Baby: What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009. She has also written widely about cognitive science and psychology for Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist and Slate, among others. And she has frequently appeared on TV and radio including “The Charlie Rose Show” and “The Colbert Report." She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California with her husband Alvy Ray Smith.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Alison Gopnik: So, one of the questions that we're all asking now is what effect are the new technologies, the Internet, computers, cell phones, screens going to have on the next generation of children? The answer is we won't know for another 20 years until those children grow up. But I think we can make some guesses based on our past human history. One of the things about human beings is that we've been technological beings from the very beginning. In fact, in a way that's the thing that's most distinctive about us, we use tools. We modify and change our environments. We create new ways of being in the world, both physically and socially. And that's what we've always done and we've always changed. We've always had culture, which enabled us to take the inventions of one generation and then modify or change them to suit another generation.

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