Risks and benefits of using power tools

Some years ago I saw a graph representing the average human energy consumption over the last 40000 years. In the very beginning, most of the energy we used came just from the food we ate, plus a little bit that we got from fire for cooking, illumination and heating, but we still were on an upper limit of approximately 3000 kilocalories per day (the "calories" we usually refer to in dietary terms are actually "kilocalories", one thousand times bigger than the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius). Then we started to use work animals, so the energy in their fodder actually work for our benefit, so we were able to double or triple the amount of work available for our daily consumption: "we" (i.e. our animals) could be milling grain while, at the same time, we were actually weaving some cloth.

The next step was the introduction of generators, machines that could extract energy from natural phenomena and convert them into some kind of work, such as wind- and watermills. This required the construction of non-trivial buildings, but once they were running they could be operated with very limited labor, so they were a very efficient way of obtaining work. The could be unreliable at times, if there was a drought or wind was still, but until the industrial revolution this was the only available source of non-animal force.

Photo: Marco Verch Professional Photographer

With the introduction of the heat engines we did not need to rely on the weather to produce work. As long as there was anything combustible to burn under the boiler it was possible to keep the steam engine running for hours on end: the amount of available energy suddenly exploded. Jobs like spinning and weaving could be done much faster and with only a fraction of the labor that they used to require, so textiles became a lot cheaper. The same applies to most iron wares: once a machine was in charge of pounding the steel at the forge the price of all kinds of metallic objects also sank. It was the beginning of mass production and consumerism. These days the world is consuming in the order of 170000 terawatt-hours of energy per years, which amounts to roughly 57000 kilocalories per person and day, more than 28 times the amount of energy on a modern standard diet.

All this energy is use to power all the agricultural and industrial processes (from sowing crops to manufacturing plastic toys), but also to propel all the means of transportation and to keep all our communications networks running. The world as we know if would not be possible without all this energy. However, this energy comes at a cost: still today about 85% of the energy we use come from non-renewable sources, coal, petroleum and gas produced from plants that lived millions of years ago. Back then, they trapped the energy coming from the younger Sun and stored them in the chemical bonds of the matter, which then went to sleep for millennia. Now, we are releasing that energy back into out atmosphere, leading the world into the climate change that has already start to wreak havoc in some parts of the world. Does this mean that energy is bad? Nothing further from reality. But that does not mean that it is good either.

Energy production and use is nothing but a tool, and as such it does not have any intrinsic ethics. It has no will and therefore no intention, so it cannot be judged in moral terms. In fact, this debate recurs every time a new technology is under development: is the technology good or bad? The most common answer is "it depends on how it is used". Just consider something as basic as a kitchen knife: it unleashes the power to cook thousands of meals, chop onions, carrots, steaks and fish, it can help feed families for decades or even generations. One might be tempted to consider it a good invention. However, it is also true that kitchen knives are the weapon of choice in many cases of domestic violence, where one spouse ends up killing the other and even the children. Does this make kitchen knives a bad invention? Most certainly not. The problem lies in the use we make of technology, and that is an almost universal case.

One of the most salient examples of moral givings in the history of technology is the case of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan project to develop the atomic bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki 76 years ago. He devoted himself to the project with the hope that the weapon (the threat it posed) would render war obsolete, but faced with the devastation that it produced in Japan he could no longer stand the moral dilemma and left the project. Was it morally right to invent the bomb? It is said that the nuclear bombing shortened World War II by two years and saved the lives of one million people, so maybe not everything is bad, is it?

A former boss of mine use to rant wildly against the internet, as if it were the source of all evil and only bad things could come out of it: pornography, piracy, virus, etc. For many years I insisted that it was all a matter of getting educated on how to use the Internet safely and responsibly. As with any other tool, it is neither good, nor bad, and as long as you are properly "trained" (though formal training in Internet use is almost an oxymoron) there are good chances of using it profitably with very limited risks. It is, in an almost literal sense, the same as with a power drill: you can use a mechanical one to make a hole very safely, but it will take you a lot of time; you can also trade some of the safety for speed using a power drill, which is much faster but requires proper training to avoid harming yourself. The danger lies in the negligent (untrained) use of the tool, not in the tool itself.

This reminds me a dream I had when I was about 15 years old. Somehow I managed to steal my father's car and started to drive around town without any trouble until, at a particular crossing that I still remember, something startled me and I invaded the sidewalk running over a pedestrian. Driving two tons of a machine into someone immediately woke me up and reminded me once more how important it was to get trained for any activity you undertake, particularly when there are real risks of hurting yourself or the people around you. As the famous quote for Spider-man states "with great power comes great responsibility". Let us keep that in mind and learn to harness the power of our tools, so that we can avoid harm. Have a nice evening.