Marriage of Technology & Science

It’s rather interesting to see various ideas concerning the comparison of technology and science. Oddly enough as we discuss technology the mind immediately conjures up images of computers and tiny discrete machines that seem to be a central building block of our modern lives. One can hardly step a breath in any direction without coming into contact with this form of technology in manifestation or another.

Curiously, however, the development of computers owes a great deal to all of the various other sciences that you’ve mentioned. It is only through chemistry, physics, mathematics and various other ‘law’ driven sciences that the technology that drives a computer could be discovered. What would a computer be without an understanding of electricity? The conductivity through various metals? The synthesis of various chemical compositions like the silicon used in the making of integrated chips?

When a person looks at a computer from the outside it’s neigh impossible to see, much less understand, the complexities that are involved beneath the decorative exterior. However, contrary to various other posts so far, computers are indeed bound by a set of rules and laws with the most important of these being mathematics. Computers are not sentient beings and as advanced as they may seem at first they are nothing more than a glorified calculator. It is their ability to accept data, translate it into discrete structures, manipulate it and output new data that makes them so very useful.

‘Computer Science’, as others have called it, is a vast field of theory and research regarding the application of computers that goes well beyond programming and software development. Some of the most experimental parts of this ‘science’ comes from artificial intelligence. Even in this field of computer science there are still rules, ‘laws’ if you will, that govern the application of this technology. In one area of this field called computer learning they are trying to develop computer networks to mimic the neural networks found inside human beings.

As we can see, technology and science go hand-in-hand. Any technology builds on the foundation that previous sciences and technology built before it. Heidegger explains that the essence of technology is revealing. Where hydroelectric plants revealed the streams potential to produce power, artificial intelligence is beginning to reveal a computer’s potential to learn in similar fashion to a human being.

What could be said, then, when technology begins to fashion itself after these ‘natural’ sciences that have been presented before it?