Technological Metastasization

CELL PHONES CAUSE CANCER! Or not. Or maybe.

10 Year Cell Phone/Cancer study is inconclusive.

The interesting thing about this is not whether or not cell phones are putting the daemon-seed in your dome-piece, the interesting thing is that it takes TEN YEARS to get an inconclusive study.

What if there was some amazing new piece of technology that just happened to be latently deadly? What if the new retina-control i-EYE-Pads cause measurable blindness over, say, fifteen years of use? That's fifteen years of an amazingly influential piece of technology burrowing into our culture, economy, and our-very-structure-of-language, before we realize we are all going to be blind in another five? Technology moves at such a fast pace, we could kill ourselves off with a hype new gizmo before we can even diagnose ourselves.

And where the hell do you find a control group for this sort of study, anyway? Where do you find a measurable slice of humanity that doesn't use cell phones or isn't around cell phone use for a significant amount of years? Not the third world. The higher Andes? Monks in Tibet? People who have lifestyles and nutrition and genetics totally different from us? Is such a study even possible?

Or is technology so enmeshed into our lives, that it is not even separable from our body systems? Is this like, wondering if having blonde hair makes you live longer, but more like wondering if walking upright makes you live longer? If consciousness drives you crazy? How can we tell if this evolutionary mutation is a good one, or a bad one? Or is there no way to tell?

Can we not predict our health, if we don't even know what product Apple is going to release within a year? What happens to our deductive modeling of our future based on empirical evidence? What happens to science, as progress? Is science just a symbol of our own mutation? Is science a new virus, introducing some unimaginable majority of our current DNA, and therefore, distorting our destiny-as-species based on such anti-progress economics like infection and global pandemics, rather than the scientific method ?

Hari Seldon, where are you?