Tensions in Technological Determinism

There is a dichotomy of thinking with respect to the role of technology in human evolution. Some hold science and innovation up as ways through which humanity can be emancipated from the natural ground conditions of our organic, biological state in order that we can inhabit a new, synthetic environment tailored to our own goals and visions of what the future SHOULD be.
The contrasting view holds that ignoring our overall relationship with the ecosystem (Earley), from which we originated and derive our living, creates an imbalance that threatens the vitality of the overall system. It is cautioned that any human engineered developments require an ecosystem approach and cannot simply focus their deployment solely in a human-centred context.
Below I have provided links and quotations that reflect these tensions:

What is problematic, in my estimation, is not that technologies influence us, rather, that they have been held up as salvific—that they possess an intrinsic power to transform us. What is neglected in this view is our innate power of choice that has been swayed in favour of forms of technological determinism. Technologically determined notions of the “self” and the “individual” are legacies of thought that serve to distance us from the environment from whence we came. Our inability to reintegrate ourselves with our social and biological environs has had and will continue to have grave consequences for all of creation. These sentiments are echoed in the words of Daniel Chandler, Biases of the Ear and Eye:
“We need to consider the overall ecology of processes of mediation in which our behaviour is not technologically determined but in which we use a medium and can be subtly influenced by our use of it.”
Of particular concern is the accelerant property of culture and technology. Moore’s Law of innovation holds that there is a doubling of capacity every 18 months . This exponential growth far outpaces our capacity for integrating these technologies into our society let alone to reflect on their possible import before their rollout. So much is uncritically released into the public domain, like inflammatory rhetoric, and is unaccountable for the possible serious repercussions of its deployment. Exacerbating this problem is the massive augmentation capacity of technologies that magnify the consequences of our impact such that if a technology is used in an inappropriate manner it can have devastating and irreversible effects. Ironically, if we had the capacity to critically evaluate a particular release of a particular technology it would be obsolete before our deliberations had concluded and so the embrace of progress seems an inevitable response to surviving the complexity of the environments that we have helped to shape. This is a seemingly intractable paradox that begs the old adage: “you can’t live with it…and you can’t live without it.”

I have culled some candid reflections from the internet on the current discourse vis-à-vis adapting to technological change and our relationship to it:
1) “This technology is important, as it brings the capability for counterfeit reality one step closer to the home PC. The architecture can absorb fully the advances of Moores law, and during the next decade will mature to deliver highly accurate renderings of individuals possibly indistinguishable from their real-world prototypes."
"The Counterfeit Reality Ostrich"
by Daryl Plummer
Group Vice President, Gartner Fellow
The Gartner Fellows Weblog, April 28, 2004
http://fellows.blog.gartner.com/weblog/index.php?blogid=8#previous
2) "The future is invisible because our expectations are based on the intuitive linear view, rather than the historical exponential view. When people conceive of the future, they conceive of circumstances made different by the continued progression of the current rate of change. In reality, change is accelerating at an exponential rate. [But] just as Moore's law has demonstrated (a doubling of computer power every 18 months), progress proceeds exponentially. ...Every decade, the time required for progress to necessitate the adoption of a new paradigm is being halved. This means the technological progress experienced in the 21st century will be almost 1,000 times that of the 20th century."
3) "With the discovery of DNA, biology became an information science."
4) "Humans have been transformed into servants of the machines. If you've ever sat through a boring list of voice mail options, you already understand the flaw in making people behave as adjuncts to machines.
As author Michael I. Dertouzos points out you, a noble human being, have been reduced to executive machine-level instructions for a $50 computer. 'Our tolerance of this kind of abuse is reprehensible,' he writes."
5) "Information technology has the incredible potential to serve human needs and help us improve the way we live and work. But to get there we must focus on making our systems profoundly human-centered." From "The Invisible Future" by Peter J. Denning
6) "It was just three years ago, at an industry conference in San Francisco, that a venture capitalist noted that for the very first time, biotech in particular, the field of bioinformatics was beginning to exhibit the kind of technological acceleration until now only found in electronics. And now, when almost no one is looking, here we are: the biotech train is starting to roar down the [exponential] tracks."
7) "...Exponential growth is all-but beyond the capacity of human beings to cope with. For example, it will take generations for us to fully assimilate just what happened in the PC Age from 1984 to 1998. The change Moore's Law produces is so fast, and so sweeping, that it quickly escapes any attempt to control it. Just look at the Internet.
8) Ultimately, the greatest lesson to be learned from the electronics revolution [as applied now to biotech] is that if you hope to have any impact on Moore's Law you'd better do it early, in the firs few generations, before the doubling grains of rice on the chessboard mount up so high that they engulf you. After that, it takes everything you've got just to keep from being buried alive."
From: http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20031027/20031027.htm
The inhuman pace of change coupled with experimentation on the ultimate process of transformation—alteration of the human genome—have frightening and irreparable consequences. This represents a naïve science fetish that, blurred by machine-enhanced rates of progress, has dominated and subverted rational human-centred thought. Themes of inadequacy in relation to machines, isolation, devaluation, disembodiment, transformation, deceit, image, and anxiety pervade the previous quotations. Their sense of urgency, particularly as it pertains to dealing with exponential transformations of the human machine are concerned, is adequately expressed yet unnervingly parochial and nostalgic about the computer trends that predicated trends in biotechnology. There is a tendency to separate them when they are in fact coincident.
It is worth taking a look at the substantial investigation into technological enhancement of human function. A U.S.A.-funded report titled “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance” totals almost 500 pages and considers how technologies and science can augment human capacity:
http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/
Accessed January 8, 2005.
It is notable that in defining their raison d’être this organisation cited productivity and economics as the chief aspects of consideration. The humanities is cited last and seems hastily considered as an afterthought. This seems to reflect the overall disregard that we have for the human condition—that productivity and economic viability maintain a primacy over the human scale of things.