Technology with Intention: Understanding Wisdom Technologies

Technologies are simply building blocks, however the intentions of the people who create them can lead to unintentional as well as intentional biases towards supporting certain approaches and strategies. It is technology without intention that makes technology appear for so many to be more of a problem than a solution. However technologies are simply tools for human evolution or more pessimistically devolution. How we use technologies relates to the how we think about ourselves and the world around us. If we develop a way to use technology with wisdom then we can truly develop technologies that offer practical solutions to social problems and needs, while offering new opportunities for humanity to evolve and experience life not only on this planet but within the larger universe of which we are a part.

As we enter into the information age, increasingly technology has taken a cut and paste feel. We are more able to take information and reconfigure it for our needs. These trends in technological development are very important to understand, because of their potential to disrupt existing predictable economic patterns. Disruptive technologies are those which disrupt the business status quo. What has been missing has been a way to concretize and interweave these innovations into a vast network; a social tapestry that could form a cohesive whole in terms of powering an economic alternative to the prevailing socioeconomic system to create a thriving bottom up economy.

C.K. Prahalad, one of the world’s leading strategists, has a new book called The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits.

Human scale "wisdom" technologies have the potential to precipitate a shift away from larger and larger economies of scale—away from ever larger levels of national and now centralization and concentration of power. We now have the technologies, the building blocks to determine our own reality, rather than relying on those in established power structures to rule in what they claim to be our best interests. What is missing is the inspiration and the strategy from which to effectively implement these technologies at the grass roots.

Ultimately though it is up to us to organize effectively to meet the challenges of the world today. The financial analyst Robert Loest says that your worldview is like the hull of a ship in a vast sea of information. If we do not develop a process of organizing the information that flows in every greater quantities into our lives, we become overwhelmed. So an important aspect of any effective movement towards social change must involve a filtering process by which we selectively cut and paste information into a informational mosaic that suits our aspirations in life.