Does technology influence human progress?

Zsolt Hermann
1 min readJun 16, 2022

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Question from the Internet:

“How will the world make progress without relying on modern technologies?”

Technology is basically a tool in our hands. What effect technology has or does not have on our progress depends on us, and how we do or do not use technology.

And even if we gave up all our technology, our progress would still depend on how we behave, and what goals, aspirations and values we follow.

Our problem is usually that we look at things superficially and try changing, blaming, and restricting the consequences and the symptoms instead of finding and treating the root cause.

And the root cause of all of humanity’s problems, the root cause of us misusing technology is our inherently self-serving, self-justifying, subjective and individualistic nature that drives us towards ruthless and exclusive competition and excessive overconsumption.

Without changing ourselves, without changing how we relate to each other and Nature, why we do what we do it is irrelevant whether we use or abandon our technologies.

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Zsolt Hermann

I am a Hungarian-born Orthopedic surgeon presently living in New Zealand, with a profound interest in how mutually integrated living systems work.