Stanisław Lem: Technology Will Slip out of Hand
Technological advancement comes with a number of unanswered ethical questions.
In 1959, the Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) published the novel Eden, in which space explorers find themselves on a strange planet that, at first glance, appears lifeless and yet is undeniably beautiful. In that environment, they then discover a factory that seems to be engaged in a constant process of regeneration – objects are produced and once completed, are immediately reprocessed and then reproduced, only to be reprocessed once again, in what appears an endless cycle. The factory operates automatically, without anyone managing it, and a key feature of it seems to be that the produced objects lack any discernible purpose. In other words, in a mechanistic sense, the factory functions perfectly, and yet it lacks any use or meaning beyond itself.
Later the explorers discover that the planet is not lifeless after all and come upon a society managed by a unique system of government, in that no government officially exists in it – as it turns out, a society lacking identifiable lawmakers and consequently those to hold accountable robs people of means to oppose them or overthrow their power. The social functioning of Eden is based on meticulous information control, characterised by keeping different social strata in separate information spheres, so as to ensure that society does not deviate from the course charted by its creators and leaders. Furthermore, the explorers discover traces of an attempt to improve the genetic characteristics of the species inhabiting the planet, but the experiment has gone wrong – with the individuals deformed as a result now excluded from society, and the very existence of the experiment systematically hushed up.
Lem did not elaborate much on this particular work of his, and it is therefore difficult to say to what extent were the novel’s plot and setting inspired by the Communist regime under whose grip the author lived whilst writing the story. Suggestions of a totalitarian society are, however, obvious; the flawless and ceaseless production of a single, vague object without any real purpose serves as an excellent metaphor for it – the aim is not the result, but the repetition of a deliberately meaningless act the whole society is subjected to. In other words, the aim is no other than to strip people of meaning – through an activity which they know is devoid of consequences, an activity with no ‘soul’. It is also worth remembering that, as a young Jewish man born in Lviv – then part of Poland – Lem had witnessed the Nazi occupation before even suffering the Soviet regime, and had survived only thanks to forged documents procured by his parents.
The danger of absolute security
Distinguishing between fantasy and science fiction literatures, Lem undoubtedly belongs to the latter. And even there, the focus of his works is not really on science fiction as such, but on the moral and ethical choices of a man in the light of hypothetical futures. Lem claimed that, for him, science and philosophy were inseparable. Today, as technologies surrounding us are developing more rapidly and widely than ever, Lem’s works – though written decades ago – have thus only gained in relevance.
I have never quite understood why, when discussing new technologies, the norm is to automatically treat them as progress. What, for example, is really our personal advancement by using a smartphone or LLM? “I’m looking forward to the day when I can put a tablet in my child’s hands – something that develops her,” a father remarked to me a few years ago whilst queuing at a computer repair shop. I shrugged. No doubt, many of the new technologies have created new opportunities and benefits for us. But the point Stanisław Lem and his fellow thinkers are making is to go beyond the realm of practical problems a particular technological innovation can solve for us, and ask whether and how will the innovation affect our human nature.
For example, in the novel Return from the Stars, Lem tells the story of Hal, an astronaut returning from a long space voyage, who feels out of place in a society that has changed dramatically in his absence (i.e. technology has advanced beyond his recognition). More than anything else, he is deeply confounded by the society’s new and extreme pursuit of absolute safety. Accidents have been eliminated in society, and all aggressive impulses in people have been neutralised thanks to a surgical procedure carried out at birth. In this respect, the book bears resemblance to another well-known science fiction novel, Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, in which the young protagonist flees the City governed by outmost orderliness and security, but deprived of what we would call humanness. Both authors are hence asking, at what point does the absolute elimination of danger itself become an act of violence or a shackle.
From this, one might also turn to classical thinkers and philosophers – Tacitus, for one, states in Book XV of his Annals that ‘the desire for security is the enemy of every great and noble undertaking’, whilst Seneca, in his work entitled On the Shortness of Life, writes that ‘there is no reason to suppose that a man whose hair is grey and whose face is wrinkled has lived a long life – he has merely existed for a long time’. Lem similarly points out that when security and material comfort become the primary values of a society, personal freedom and willingness to take risks will inevitably recede to the background. The seemingly noble aim of eliminating all risks from a person’s life thus ends up stifling both their self-fulfilment and personal contentment, for our zest for life as well as our capacity to dream and imagine are inevitably linked to unpredictability and uncertainty, and thus also to smaller or greater kinds of risk. In Return from the Stars, one of the protagonist’s colleagues, Olaf, concludes: “They have killed the human in people. /…/ To be human, one needs the ability to weigh up everything at once, if necessary. We are capable of this. They [the people of the new age] are not. And that is why they fear us.”
The question of moral responsibility
In his best-known work, Solaris, Lem seems to be reflecting, against the backdrop of the general narrative, on how everything in the world is interconnected – and not necessarily in any esoteric sense of the word, but in the simple realisation that the impact of changes taking place in a society is very rarely confined only to the sphere in which they directly occur. If, once again, considering the handy example of the
