Evolution Of Technology Essay Example

It is redundant to acknowledge what a crucial role technology plays in our lives today. Over the last century, such scientist as Gerhard Lenski, Leslie White and Alvin Toffler introduced their theories trying to break down the issue into smaller pieces and offered their view on the evolution of the technologies, the reasons that stand behind and perspectives for the future.
Gerhard Lenski was a scientist that produced one of the theories about the types of societies that can be defined by their technologies. He was a true believer that technology is the main force that drives change and helps societies to evolve. He offered to divide all societies by the level of their technological development. After hunter-gathering level goes horticulture level, organized agriculture, the industrial revolution and postindustrial societies. Gerhard Lenski ecological-evolutionary theory claims that there are 2 major forces that influence the human population. The first one is sociocultural evolution as a case of evolution itself, and the second one is environmental influences. If read the first and last articles published by Gerhard Lenski on his ecological-evolutionary theory, it becomes obvious that he changed and developed his theory tremendously adding more information about factors that influence the evolution of the society. For example, in this last researches, he puts on a spotlight ecological and demographical factors and their role. He claimed that shift from one type of society can be driven not only by increasing the knowledge base about the words but more by such issues like lack of food and other resources and other economic reasons. Gerhard Lenski indicated that sociocultural evolution can be driven by the existing culture, the size of the population, communication with other cultures and societies, physical environment, the evolution of the technology and attitude towards change in general.
Leslie White in his anthropological research concentrated on a cultural evolution of the societies. Nonetheless, he has found a completely unique approach to evaluation the level of development of the societies. White believed that in the formula C = ET, cultural growth is represented by C, E is the amount of consumed energy per year and T stands for “measure of the efficiency of technical factors utilising the energy”. In this way, he was showing that evolutionary progress is determined by the level of control over the energy. White saw technology only as a supplement and not a main factor of influence at all, that was supposed to help to use energy in a more efficient way.
The ideas of Alvin Toffler have already become mainstream in our society and even within any special referencing a lot of people are familiar with his statements. Toffler presented the idea that societies come in three waves. The First wave is the hunter-gatherer cultures. The second wave comes after the industrial revolution when factories start producing mass product according to standard procedures. The third wave is characterized by the original productions for every customer, the sources of energy become renewable, types of families diversify, media become less mainstream, local and specialized. According to the Toffler, the every society has its own atmospheres that describe the process of the social change such as technosphere, socio-sphere, power-sphere, info-sphere and super ideology. Toffler also sees a threat in a such rapidly changing environment because the stress the every human being experiences due to the overload with information can cause serious psychological problems. That is why, according to this scientist, the growth and development of the technology should be controlled and supervised not to cause an uncontrolled freedom that will eventually lead to chaos.
Basically, the main difference between theories of Gerhard Lenski, Leslie White and Alvin Toffler is that Lenski paid a close attention to the environmental factors alongside the social and economical ones. Leslie White presented a new perspective of how the level of cultural evolution can be evaluated based on the energy that we consume and Alvin Toffler not only gave an overview of the processes that were happening in the past and present but gave a very precise prediction about how technologies will be developing in the future.