Homo Techne There was, after all, ample reason for despair in 1923—about the present and the future, and technology’s role in both. Only a few years prior, fourteen rapidly industrializing countries had engaged in what was then called the Great War. With armored tanks, warplanes, poison gas, automatic weapons, and pow- erful telecommunications equipment to connect them all, the combatants inflicted death on a previously impossible scale: twenty-three million soldiers and civilians had been killed. All that was just a prelude to an even deadlier event. In 1918– 19, the Spanish Flu was spread, initially via returning soldiers and then by travelers on railways and passenger ships. In just two years, it claimed between twenty to fifty million lives. For the people of the 1920s, it might have seemed perfectly rea- sonable to curse the technologies that led to these horrors, and to take a reactionary stance against innovation. Instead, our 1920s forebears did the opposite—especially in the United States. The U.S. nearly quadrupled electricity pro- duction in the ‘20s, powering new levels of progress and pros- perity. Networks of all kinds were ascendant. These included electric grids, telephone systems, interconnected radio stations that enabled coast-to-coast broadcasting, movie theater chains, and, perhaps most consequentially, roads to make the burgeon- ing auto industry more useful. Reid: How do you think we reconcile such massive neg- ative outcomes with the idea that these technologies ultimately ended up being net-positive for humanity? GPT-4: I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that ques- tion. It’s important to remember that technology is a tool, and it’s up to us as humans to decide how we use it. It’s also worth noting that people in the 1920s weren’t 189