Before you brand me a neo-Luddite, let me explain the dichotomy within which I live. I am an information technology professional and have been making my living in this field for the past 17 years as an analyst, consultant, educator and writer. Certainly, technology has been good for me on a personal economic level. In the bigger picture, however, all of this isn’t really about me (or you for that matter). When I step out from my daily running around inside the narcissistic box of the self, I’m compelled to ask questions about the role of technology in the greater context of society, culture, humanity and, ultimately, its role in the destination of the human race.

These are giant topics permeated by simple questions crying out for answers. But whereas the questions are often simple, the answers are almost always complex. As with many other things, the human condition is not failing to find the right answers, but failing to ask the right questions in the first place.

I think this is quite cleverly illustrated in Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which researchers from a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings, construct a super computer called Deep Thought. The greatest computer of all time and space, Deep Thought is designed to calculate the answers to the universe’s very deepest philosophical questions that even the race of highly intelligent beings are unable to answer such as, Why are we here? How did we get here? From where? What is the meaning of life?

After some debate, the inventors of Deep Thought come up with a question that they believe embodies all those questions and feed it into Deep Thought for processing. The question they pose is this: What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything? Deep Thought begins processing and crunching, and after seven and a half million years provides the answer to the question: “forty-two”.

One of the researchers, Loonquawl, is greatly disappointed and yells at Deep Thought:

“Forty-two! Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?”

Being a computer, Deep Thought doesn’t get angry but coolly responds to Loonquawl’s criticism:

“I checked it very thoroughly and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.

By not asking the right questions, we hurtle blindly toward a future that will be shaped more by our inactions rather than our actions. There is ample statistical data that supports the theory that the ultimate end of the human journey is death. With that in mind, we should focus our attention on the journey rather than the destination of the human experience. That journey begins by asking questions and continues forward as a quest for answers.

There have been and currently are many great thinkers who have written about the role of technology in the human journey; among them Stuart Brand, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy and Neil Postman. I have been a student of these gurus and others for many years now. They have been very influential. You will find some of their thoughts and hypothesis throughout many of my articles. In particular, I have been influenced by Neil Postman whose book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, is an excellent treatise on the subject full of questions and ideas that cause one to look at our technology-driven culture in new ways.

These great thinkers have gifted me many insights that otherwise would have taken me a lifetime to achieve on my own—or perhaps never at all. In particular, one of the great concepts that Postman has gifted me was that of the Faustian Bargain:

Technology does not always solve important problems. We like to think that technological innovation will almost always lead to an enriched and enhanced life, but very often, technological progress does not address itself to important problems but rather trivial ones. And yet we proceed anyway in spite of the fact that in solving the trivial problem we may be creating greater problems than the problem we solved…Technological change is almost always what I call a “Faustian Bargain”—it giveth and it taketh away.