Technology

Technics can be a tool extending human body parts and senses or a combined physical system (man-tool, man-machine, man-natural process)created by a culture and utilizing human powers and external natural powers, structures, and systems for human cultural purposes. It is not important whether these systems and powers are predominantly animate or inanimate, natural or artificial, located inside or outside of humans. Technics may be human work with bare hands or with a tool, a factory production line, soil cultivation with a tractor or with animal power, corn [Page 2166]growing, bread baking, or wine fermentation. There is one phenomenon differentiating technics from nature: the relevant structures and powers must establish a purposeful process that doesn't work primarily for nature but for humans.

Source: Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The term “technics” is usually understood objectively, with the emphasis placed upon the artificial element of the total technical system. It usually represents the “technical phenotype,” that is, the means of the technical operation: a tool, a machine, or an automatic system. The term “technology,” on the other hand, is understood as a process, as the functioning and operation of the technical systems.

Technics is a part of the human, antinatural culture and is rationally understandable only within this culture. Yet we must distinguish between two historical levels of technical development and between two basic development lines of technics: biotic and abiotic.

Hunting and gathering was the first stage of biotic technics development; its second stage, the Neolithic Revolution, was the first great technical revolution. The Neolithic period witnessed the arrival of almost all cultural plants and domestic animals. Basic procedures of food “manufacturing” and processing were also discovered during this time. Even the third stage of biotic technics development—the modern biotechnologies, cloning, and genetic manipulation—will hardly be able to surpass the Neolithic Revolution. Neolithic biotic technics, as a cultural channeling of a possibly multifunctional live system, was in harmony with the similarly anti-natural abiotic technics: it utilized the activities and characteristics of live systems but it didn't interfere with their genetic information; it didn't distort the natural biospheric information.

The abiotic technics production line, which is usually connected with the idea of technics itself, can be schematically described by the following terms: tool–machine–automation.This line developed in harmony with biotic technics up to the Industrial Revolution, that is, in harmony with the human skills and procedures utilizing the processes transforming live organisms.

This difference between the two lines of technical development presents not only the hidden antinatural character of all technics but also the environmental advantages of the currently neglected biotic technics. Naturally, abiotic technics is more aggressive environmentally. Even though its energetic and functional bases were originally based in humans (humans activated and controlled tools), the original human functions in the instrumental anthropotechnical system (especially those energetic and kinetic ones) were transferred to the technical system from the beginning of mechanization. And this technical system doesn't retrieve its energy from renewable resources but from nonrenewable fossil biomass.

The energetically much more thrifty biotic technics is mostly represented by live systems even today: microorganisms, cultural plants, domestic animals. Biotic technics remains, therefore, connected to the weakly integrating renewable energy of the Sun, even though it is forced to operate on behalf of man and culture.

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