Humanizing the Technosphere

For this meeting we have been asked to think about how to “shift the framing of innovation and its funding beyond perspectives that leave technology, per se, at the center. . . . how to resituate technological development itself within visions for a more humane future.” For half a century now the Gaia hypothesis has been far out in front of our current attention to long-term climate models for what we now regularly call the Earth system. Gaia’s own evolutionary phases or changes of state map climate change over geobiological time. However, unlike Gaia, we modern humans in the midst of anthropogenic global warming don’t have that kind of time. However, what we do have before us on a human time-scale is an anthropogenic technosphere that—claims to the contrary notwithstanding—we do have some small hope of steering in relation to the viability of the unsteerable Gaian system that forms its ultimate environment. Here is one place where current Gaia discourse has some critical purchase: as