The discussions around ethics and technology is prevalent and timely as we see the AI race moving faster than we can comprehend, let alone the social, ethical and moral considerations that are still being debated. I wonder the world’s debates and congressional hearings are moving as fast as the emerging technology.

Surely, this is not the first time humanity has to deal with this.

I could not help myself but think of dystopian movies and TV shows like; The Minority Report, See, The Postman & Waterworld (to name a few that come to mind). The writers basically depicted a futuristic view of what and how things could go wrong. a common theme is around the chaos and destruction by human kind on to itself as a result of lack of consideration of moral and ethical implications of the use of emerging technologies.

Technology, as we know it know looks like the latest AI bot or LLM or Agent in the news…..But allow me to take you on a journey back in time and reflect on the first unveiling of technologies, from Farming, Fire, the Wheel, metallurgy and weaponry. Technology after all is always and at some point an emerging technology and I like to think of it as a new tool, or service that allows humanity to perform the usual task but in a different way. Technologies that stick are the ones that really added value to the human race or at least perceived value…. The perception of value is what interests me.

Technology after all is always and at some point an emerging technology and I like to think of it as a new tool, or service that allows humanity to perform the usual task but in a different way.

Even “writing” was a form of technology that was not always looked upon favourably. This is evident in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. Plato recounts a myth where the Egyptian god Thoth (Theuth) invents writing and shows it to King Thamus. Thamus rejects it, saying writing will weaken memory and wisdom: “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters… You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth… they will appear omniscient and will generally know nothing.”.

“……writing will weaken memory and wisdom: “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters… You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth… they will appear omniscient and will generally know nothing.”.

Plato

Earliest Ethical Reflections on Technology – A Chronological Timeline

c. 45,000 BCE – Prehistoric Compassion (Shanidar Cave, Iraq): Archaeological evidence suggests Neanderthals practiced purposeful burials. In Shanidar Cave, one Neanderthal (Shanidar IV) was found with clumps of pollen around the grave, leading archaeologist Ralph Solecki to propose a “flower burial” – the idea that mourners placed flowers with the dead cam.ac.uk. Another Shanidar skeleton showed long-term care of a disabled individual cam.ac.uk. These findings imply early ethical sensibilities: care for the vulnerable and ritual respect for the deceased, long before written records.

c. 17,000–15,000 BCE – Cave Art and Ritual (Lascaux, France): Deep in the Paleolithic, humans created sophisticated cave paintings like those at Lascaux. Scholars theorize this wasn’t mere decoration; the prevailing view is that Lascaux’s images were part of spiritual or ethical rituals. Hunters possibly performed ceremonies in these painted caves to honor animals or ensure a successful, respectful hunt (“hunting magic”). The remote location and careful execution of the art suggest a sacred sanctum used for initiation or cooperative teaching. In essence, early humans appear to have reflected on their relationship to nature and prey – an ethical consideration – through art.

Replica of a Lascaux cave painting (c.17,000 BCE). Many researchers believe such Paleolithic art had ritual or educational purposes, indicating early spiritual/ethical engagement with hunting and nature.

c. 10,000–8000 BCE – Dawn of Agriculture (Fertile Crescent & Mythic Eden): The Agricultural Revolutionprofoundly altered human life with farming, settlements, and new social structures. Later traditions remembered this transition with ambivalence. For example, the Garden of Eden story (recorded in Genesis, likely based on earlier oral tradition) symbolizes humanity’s “fall” from an easy natural life to one of toil. After Adam and Eve gain forbidden knowledge, God condemns Adam to a life of farming: “cursed is the ground… in toil you shall eat of it… by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread”. This etiological myth frames agriculture as a double-edged innovation – necessary for civilization but seen as a punishment or loss of innocence. Ancient Mesopotamian folklore similarly contains contradictory origin stories about how farming began, indicating an early awareness that adopting agriculture was a momentous, not entirely positive, change. Humans reflected on the social upheavals (inequality, hard labor, property disputes) that farming brought, often casting these in moral or divine terms.

c. 4000–3000 BCE – The Potter’s Wheel and Creation (Egypt & Mesopotamia): Early technologies were often woven into creation myths, suggesting they carried ethical or sacred meaning. In ancient Egypt, artists of the Eleventh Dynasty (c.2130–1991 BCE) depicted the god Khnum forming human beings on a potter’s wheel. This is striking – a tool (the potter’s wheel, perfected in Egypt by 3000 BCE) is shown as the instrument of divine creation. It implies that craftsmanship and technology were seen as positive, godlike powers, used ethically by deities to shape life. Similarly, Mesopotamian myths credit gods with gifting civilization’s arts to humans. Sumerian legend tells how Enki and Inanna brought the Me (divine decrees of skills like writing, farming, weaving) to humanity – essentially, technology as a sacred trust. The ethical undertone is that using these innovations justly was part of the divinely ordained order.

c. 2200–1700 BCE – Earliest Laws on Tech Misuse (Mesopotamia): With civilization came written law addressing technology’s impact on society. The Code of Hammurabi (Babylon, c.1750 BCE) is one of the earliest legal codes and includes specific provisions to curb the misuse of technology. For instance, agriculture depended on irrigation canals and dikes; Law §53–54 stipulates that if someone neglects their dike and causes a flood that destroys a neighbor’s crops, they must compensate for the loss. In other words, there was an early legal/ethical principle of responsibility for technological negligence (in this case, maintaining infrastructure). Another law (§55) similarly fines a person who leaves an irrigation canal open and floods a neighbor’s field.

c. 1750 BCE – Accountability in Medicine (Babylonia): The same Hammurabi code contains one of the first known discussions of medical ethics. It holds surgeons to account for their use of advanced tools: Law §218 says if a doctor uses a bronze lancet to operate and the patient dies or loses an eye, the surgeon’s hand shall be cut off ehammurabi.org. This harsh punishment reflects an early ethic: with the new “technology” of invasive surgery comes personal accountability. In short, Babylonian society recognized that specialized knowledge (like surgery or engineering) conferred power that needed ethical regulation – foreshadowing the principle “do no harm.”

c. 1500 BCE (legendary time, text c.300 BCE) – Forbidden Knowledge in the Book of Enoch: An ancient Hebrew apocryphal text, the Book of Enoch, offers a mythic critique of certain technologies. It describes events before the Flood when fallen angels (the Watchers) taught humans various arts. One angel, Azazel, “taught men to make swords, knives, shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them…,” after which “there arose much godlessness… and [humans] became corrupt in all their ways”. This story implies a deep-seated ethical concern: the introduction of metallurgy and weapons is linked with moral decay and violence. Early Jewish tradition thus portrayed advanced technology (especially weaponry) as knowledge that perhaps humans were not ready for, aligning it with the origin of sin and chaos. It’s a cautionary tale that too-rapid progress, or acquiring powerful tech from dubious sources, can lead to societal ruin – an idea that echoes down to later myths of “forbidden knowledge.”

c. 1100–700 BCE – Myths of Hubris and Punishment (Near East & Greece): Several early myths warn against human overreach through technology. In Mesopotamian tradition, the Tower of Babel story (Genesis 11, probably composed ~6th century BCE) castigates human arrogance in building a gigantic tower. The people of Babel innovate by baking bricks and using bitumen mortar – cutting-edge construction for the time – to build a city and tower “with its top in the sky.” God confounds their language and scatters them, suggesting a divine check on human ambition. Some later commentators (e.g. medieval Rabbi Abarbanel) even interpreted the detail about brick-making as symbolic: technology breeds new problems, and while not forbidden, it leads humanity away from an ideal simpler state jewishideas.org.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus and Pandora form a paired lesson. The Titan Prometheus defies the gods to steal fireand give it to mankind – fire being a metaphor for all technology and knowledge. In Hesiod’s account (~700 BCE) and Aeschylus’ play Prometheus Bound (~460 BCE), this gift enables progress (cooking, metalwork, engineering, etc.), but it comes at a price. Zeus punishes Prometheus severely for empowering humans. Moreover, Zeus sends Pandora – the first woman – with a jar (or “box”) of evils that she unwittingly releases into the world, a counterweight to Prometheus’ gift of fire. The ethical message is twofold: on one hand, technology (fire) was a heroic boon that allowed civilization, even seen as a compassionate act by Prometheus (“I gave humans hope… and taught them the secrets of fire” he says). On the other hand, the gods’ retaliation and Pandora’s tale warn that new powers can unleash unintended consequences (suffering, toil, illness) if humans lack divine favor or wisdom. This mythic theme – that every great innovation carries risk – is one of the earliest expressions of technological ethics. Greek storytellers were essentially asking: Do our advances make us better, or will they backfire? The mixed fate of Prometheus and Pandora embodies that uncertainty.

c. 800–500 BCE – Iron Age Warfare and Moral Decline (Eastern Mediterranean): By the first millennium BCE, iron tools and weapons had spread, and people reflected on how metallurgy altered society. Hesiod’s Works and Days(circa 700 BCE) describes the prior Bronze Age race of men who made everything from bronze – their weapons, houses, tools – and “loved the lamentable works of Ares (war)”. He says this bronze race ultimately destroyed itself in wars and descended to Hades, leaving no name. Although framed in mythic terms, Hesiod’s account reveals a Greek view that an era defined by a *new metal technology (bronze) was marked by violence and moral decline. In the Five Ages of Man, the Bronze Age is inferior to the idyllic Gold and Silver ages that came before – a clear ethical judgment on the corrupting influence of advanced weaponry. This pessimism may well echo real memories of how bronze (and later iron) armor and swords enabled large-scale warfare. It’s an early philosophy of history: technological might (here, metallurgy) without corresponding virtue leads to self-destruction.

5th century BCE – Chinese Debate on War Tech (Mozi, China): Across the world, ancient Chinese thinkers were also grappling with the ethics of technology, especially in war. Mozi (Mo-tzu), a Chinese philosopher around the 5th century BCE, founded a school of thought that explicitly opposed offensive warfare. In the Mozi texts, he denounces the use of advanced weapons and military campaigns as morally unjust and wasteful. While Mozi was skilled in defensive military technology (Mohists were reputed for designing fortifications and anti-siege devices), he argued that offensive military innovation was ethically wrong, as it brought widespread harm. This might be one of the earliest philosophical condemnations of a specific technology on ethical grounds. Mozi’s stance highlights that by this time, people recognized how technologies (in this case, weapons and strategies of war) could be evaluated not just for efficacy but for their alignment with moral good or harm to society.

5th–4th century BCE – Technology and Justice (Greece): Greek philosophy explicitly addressed the need for ethics to keep pace with technical progress. In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras (c. 4th century BCE), there’s a myth that after Prometheus gave humans fire and crafts, humans still lacked the ability to live together safely. Zeus then sent the god Hermes to distribute Justice and Moral Sense to all people, “so that there should be order in cities”. To Protagoras, this story explained that technical skills (fire, farming, building, etc.) were not enough – ethical and political wisdomhad to be universal, or humanity would perish. This is an early articulation of a key principle: for society to benefit from technology, virtues like justice and respect must be widely shared “technology” in their own right. Everyone must partake in ethical reasoning just as they partake in using tools.

c. 370 BCE – The Critique of Writing (Plato’s Phaedrus, Greece): One of the most striking early evaluations of a new technology is Plato’s critique of writing. Writing began in Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE, but by Plato’s time it was becoming integral to Greek life, and not everyone thought this was good. In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato recounts a myth where the Egyptian god Thoth (Theuth) invents writing and shows it to King Thamus. Thamus rejects it, saying writing will weaken memory and wisdom: “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters… You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth… they will appear omniscient and will generally know nothing.”. Through this story, Plato voices an ethical concern that resonates even today: does new information technology harm our cognition and judgment? To him, books might give a false appearance of knowledge without true understanding. This early skepticism shows humans reflecting on a communication technology’s impact on the mind and social discourse. (Notably, Socrates in the dialogue advocates the superiority of living, dialectical knowledge – implying that technology should serve, not replace, genuine human wisdom.)

c. 4th–3rd century BCE – Daoist Rejection of Complexity (China): In ancient China, the Daoist classic Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing) presented an ideal of simple living, implicitly criticizing overreliance on technology. Chapter 80of this text imagines a small contented community that “makes use of the knotted rope (old mnemonic cords) rather than writing”. It goes on to describe people who are satisfied with simple food, clothes, and home, and who do not travel afar in boats or carriages. This is essentially a plea to “return” to a low-tech society. By favoring knotted cords over writing, the text suggests advanced innovations (like writing, record-keeping, transport) breed unnecessary complexity and discontent. The ethical vision of Daoism here is that technological simplicity better preserves harmony, humility, and closeness to the Dao (the way of nature). While not condemning any single tool, Laozi advocates deliberately not using many new inventions to avoid the moral pitfalls (ambition, greed, strife) that come with them.

3rd century BCE – Reflections of an Emperor (Ashoka, India): (While slightly later than “early civilisation,” it’s worth noting) the Indian Mauryan emperor Ashoka (r. 268–232 BCE) for his unique ethical stance on warfare after using war technology to conquer. Following the bloody Kalinga War, Ashoka issued Edicts in stone proclaiming his remorse and renunciation of violence cheggindia.com. He embraced Buddhist non-violence (ahimsa) and urged moral conquest through virtue instead of weapons. Ashoka’s edicts aren’t about a specific invention, but they represent an early ruler’s public ethical response to the “technology” of imperial warfare. In a sense, he tried to govern by ethics as a “technique” to replace the sword. This stands as an early historical example of attempting to mitigate the human suffering caused by military technologies through a change in values and policy.

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In summary, from prehistory through the early first millennium BCE, humans consistently framed new tools and innovations in ethical terms. Archaeological sites show compassionate or ritual behavior around technologies like fire, hunting, and burial. Mythologies worldwide – from the fire theft myths (Prometheus in Greece, Maui in Polynesia, etc.) to the Garden of Eden, from the Tower of Babel to Pandora’s box – reveal a deep concern with how newfound powers might disrupt the natural or divine order. Early laws and philosophical texts likewise grappled with maintaining justice, responsibility, and balance in the face of technological change. Whether it was controlling floods from irrigation, punishing medical malpractice, questioning the value of writing, or reining in the use of weapons, our ancestors left a rich record of ethical reflection. These examples show that the question “should we do this, and what might happen if we do?” has accompanied each major leap in technology since the very beginning of human history.

I wonder if these dystopian movies are on to something we do not want to face. I will continue enjoying them, but will be looking at them with a different lens of curiosity. Lessons can be learnt from the past and the philosophy of ages and even the myth’s we all love and know.

Timeless Ethical Advice for Emerging Technologies

Wisdom from the Ancients

1. Every innovation comes with a consequence—seek balance, not just progress.
   From fire to the wheel, from writing to warfare, early cultures recognised that tools empower but also endanger. Ethical foresight must match technical foresight.
2. The more powerful the tool, the greater the responsibility of its use.
   Babylonian laws, early surgery, and myths like Prometheus all teach that harm from misuse grows with the power of the innovation. Responsibility must be designed into every stage—from invention to implementation.
3. Don’t confuse knowledge with wisdom.
   Plato warned that writing could produce the appearance of knowledge without understanding. Today, AI and big data demand that we prioritise critical thinking, not just information accumulation.
4. Technology should serve humanity—not replace our humanity.
   Ancient stories about forbidden knowledge, like the Book of Enoch or Pandora’s box, remind us that technological advances must support human dignity, justice, and well-being—not undermine them.
5. Anticipate unintended consequences—and include diverse voices to foresee them.
   Ethical insight in early civilisations often came from myth, law, or collective memory. Future innovation needs broad consultation—not just engineers, but philosophers, historians, elders, and ethicists.
6. Embed justice and compassion into every system.
   Whether irrigating crops, designing cities, or creating code, ensure that the most vulnerable are protected and that equity is part of the architecture—not an afterthought.
7. Choose humility over hubris.
   The Tower of Babel and Iron Age epics warned against arrogance in the face of new power. Modern technologists must approach innovation with reverence for its potential, not a rush toward domination.
8. Sometimes the wisest choice is restraint.
   Daoist and Buddhist traditions suggest that not using a technology can be the ethical path. Just because we candoesn’t mean we should.

Sources:

• Cambridge University – Shanidar Cave “flower burial” and Neanderthal compassion cam.ac.ukcam.ac.uk
• Lascaux Cave paintings – spiritual/ritual interpretations
• Reddit (AskHistorians) – Garden of Eden as agriculture origin myth; punishments for Adam (toil in farming); Mesopotamian agriculture etiologies
• Lapham’s Quarterly – Egyptian god Khnum using the potter’s wheel to create humans
• Code of Hammurabi translations – Irrigation negligence laws; surgeon’s malpractice law (§218) ehammurabi.org
• 1 Enoch (R.H. Charles trans.) – Azazel teaching weapon-making, leading to human corruption
• Plato, Protagoras – Zeus sending Hermes with justice to humans (techne vs. ethics)
• Hesiod, Works and Days – Bronze Age men obsessed with war and destroyed by it
• Mozi (Stanford Encyclopedia / IEP) – Mozi’s condemnation of offensive warfare
• Plato, Phaedrus – critique of writing weakening memory – “semblance of truth”
• Tao Te Ching, Chapter 80 – ideal of knotted cords instead of writing; simple life without modern tech
• (Ashoka’s Edicts – Rock Edict 13 summaries of Kalinga War remorse cheggindia.com)
• Prometheus Bound (as cited in Lapham’s Quarterly) – Prometheus: “I taught them the secrets of fire…” and discussion of crafts.