Technology is a form of nature and people are its end users. We can use some technology to convert those resources into a form which is used by people.
How do we know that technology can be used to do this? That is, how do we know that technology can be used to convert those resources into a form that is used by people?
And how do we know that this conversion of nature into something useful can happen? That is, how do we know that this conversion of technology into something useful will occur?
The various types of resources present in nature
In the previous post, we discussed the relationship between nature and technology. Nature is the source of all resources, which can be used by man efficiently using the technology. Technology is one of those factors.
Technology is what allows us to convert our resources into a form that can be used by man efficiently , for example:
• Getting water from the ground or from a stream or river
• Making fire and lighting it
• Tools for making things
• Fuel for transportation or cooking things
• Other technologies, such as electronic communication devices and computers (the internet)
This is where we have to start our consideration of technology: Where does it come from? How does it work? What are its properties? How can we use it? So far, we have looked at nature in terms of how things are created out of it: water, fire and other forms of energy. We will now move onto how man rations them. Technology comes from science, which has been invented thousands of years ago. Its properties are mainly based on science itself – instead of just copying nature exactly like was done previously in pre-scientific era. With this understanding, I would like to show how technology can be used with nature on a number of different levels (There’s more than one level here).
Technology as a means of efficient resource utilization
The term “Technology as a means of efficient resource utilization” was coined by Olof Ahlberg in the 1960s. It has been used interchangeably with “technology as a means of increasing efficiency”, and “technology as a means of improving efficiency”, but they are not the same thing.
The first is an idea that technology can be used to increase the use of industrial resources (like oil), whereas the second is that technology can be used to improve the efficiency of resource utilization (like fertilizer).
In the 1960s, when the term was coined, it referred to technologies which could improve resource use. For example, in addition to oil exploration, search for new sources (oil and gas) could be done more efficiently by using more sophisticated techniques for measuring pressure and temperature in underground caverns. Similarly, in addition to making cars more fuel efficient by giving them better engines and transmission systems, technological advances such as automatic transmission could have had significant effects on fuel consumption.
In contrast, these days we tend to think of technologies like artificial intelligence or robotics as increasing efficiency without necessarily increasing resource use (although AIs can do things like advance our manufacturing processes). Technological advancements that increase efficiency without affecting resources are called “green technologies” or “green growth” technologies.
It is worth noting that this distinction is not always clear-cut: if you find a way to make electric cars run more efficiently with less energy being burned per mile driven than gasoline-powered cars (for example), it may be that your electric car is becoming more efficient than your gas-powered car simply because it runs on electricity rather than gasoline. Similarly, if you find a way to make farming produce crops which grow faster than conventional methods and thus produce more food per unit area planted, then you might be suggesting that there will soon be an increase in food production due to technological improvements in agriculture — even though this might not actually happen for quite some time yet.
The distinction between increases in efficiency and increases in resource usage has been much less clear-cut since humans began using technology for these purposes over 10 000 years ago; yet today there are many common elements shared by both categories of innovations. In particular:
• Scientific advances have had significant impacts on human survival (uprighting fire control made cooking possible) and on how we got into existence (the great discovery of fire at around 12 000 BC allowed humans get off the ground
The benefits of technology-aided resource utilization
To understand the potential of this interaction, let’s start with some common concepts:
• Technology as a mechanism for improving resource utilization
• Nature as a resource utilization mechanism
• Nature and technology as interdependent systems
So, what are some examples of how technology-aided resource utilization can improve the efficiency with which resources are used? In particular:
• The ability to use local resources more efficiently, at lower cost
• The ability to convert or change the use of raw materials into finished goods at low cost (i.e., find substitutes or substitutes)
There are many other applications of technology in resource utilization. But these three are where I think we can start to see the synergy between nature and technology. Here is an example:
The principal reason that cars have such high fuel consumption is that they must drive on roads that have been engineered for efficient use of energy and materials. We could engineer less-efficient roads by reducing the capacity of our vehicles to travel along them. Conversely, adding even more road capacity might increase our vehicles’ fuel consumption, because it would require many more miles per gallon to maintain a given speed on a given road. So there is an inverse relationship between energy conservation and vehicle performance: it increases when conservation improves, but decreases when performance improves. The same is true for natural resources like water and forests: they tend to absorb energy from human activities in order to provide us with food or shelter (and so they also tend to consume more energy than we do). So we need technologies that can use those resources more efficiently than humans do — technologies that consume less energy than humans do.
But what about the third factor – natural resources? The main reason why there is such competition over land for grazing animals like cattle or sheep is that it allows us humans to continue using land for other purposes (like farming). However, there are several ways in which this land could be utilized without requiring any additional human input (e.g., computing power could be used in parallel; solar power supplies could be shared across large areas). We don’t yet know how much additional land we will need to sustain ourselves in 2050 — but if everything else stays constant then almost all future needs will not be met by existing nature – instead they will have been fulfilled by biofuels , synthetic chemicals & plastics , urbanization & industrialization etc.. So maybe it will make sense simply to wait until we’ve built enough
The impact of technology on the natural environment
Technology and nature must coexist: the ability to use one without the other is a blessing, but it also has an effect on how natural resource management works.
While technology can improve productivity (e.g. computerized farming), it can also harm the environment by allowing us to pollute resources that were previously too expensive to synthesize and process.
One example is genetic modification of crops in order to allow farmers to grow more food in less space without using fertilizers, pesticides or other chemicals. Those technologies are extremely valuable, but they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to environmental problems created by increasing agricultural productivity at the expense of biodiversity.
Conclusion
If a technology is good at converting nature into a form that is used by people, then the technology will be useful to people. If a technology is not so good at converting nature into a form that is used by people, but can improve efficiency and productivity of various activities, then the technology will be useful to some people.
For instance, if a technology can convert nature into fuel for cars which can be used as electricity for electrical appliances and so on. Such technologies are very useful for human activities, and we call them “technology”. This kind of technology has been developed by human civilization all around the world from ancient times until now.
For example, an example of such technology is cars which can be converted into electricity using fuel instead of using water as an energy source. Such vehicles are called “internal combustion engines” (ICE) or “petrol cars” because they use petrol or gasoline as an energy source instead of water. In the US alone there were more than 200 million petrol cars manufactured in 1950s and 60s (about 2 million per year). That number has dropped to less than 1 million today in the US, which means that even though we have more petrol-powered cars than before petrol was invented there are quite few gasoline-powered ones left in the world.
The generation of electricity using natural resources is also very much used in modern times in various places around the world including Europe and Asia Pacific where it is called “nuclear power” (and sometimes nuclear weapons or nuclear bombs). In Europe there is a large scale project called “Generation 4” where over 350 nuclear reactors are being built across Europe to supply electricity to Europe from renewable sources like wind and solar (or from other types of generators) instead of burning coal or oil as an energy source.
But these kinds of technologies are not limited to humans; machines too have been developed by mankind for providing electricity; telecommunication systems; guided missiles; robots; and much more. There are some great examples like infrared sensors (which detect heat), lasers , radar system , WiFi systems , etc., etc..
This list could go on forever but I would like to end with one example which I believe shows how powerful this relationship between nature & technology really is: insects . A lot of things are built by insects from their bodies like their eyes, wings, antennae etc.. without any direct help from humans – just like machines were made by man without any