High-tech, low-tech

Browsing through the book reviews for recently-published SF novels, the thing that strikes me is how many involve characters who are human-cyborg mixes.  It seems we still haven't lost the dream of tech enhancing our world, making us puny humans bigger and better than we are.

SF has always been the predictor of future tech, and usually its authors are in love with their inventions.   We're shown how powerful the tech is, but very often in hard SF novels what's missing is any recognition of how the tech alters human culture,

I've always had a problem with scenarios where all-powerful rulers lord it over vast regions of space.  We know from our own experiences of empires on Earth that the bigger the empire gets, the harder it is to control.  Things start to unravel at the edges.  Conquered powers don't stay conquered.  They want their land and their freedom back, and sooner or later they challenge the supremacy of the empire.

The thing I really can't take is the all-powerful ruler who, through their faultless tech and systems, knows everything that's happening in their empire at all times.  No human being's brain can hold that amount of information all at once.  But the other thing that irks me is that their tech never breaks down.  We never hear about the attacks on the remote outposts of the empire that take out its tech and launch cyber attacks on its key systems,

I suspect the future in reality will be a good deal less shiny.  I think there will always be people like my Ren Hunter in the Panthera books who shun the virtiual world for the real one, people who fight for the physical world to retain its wildness and beauty.

There's even the possibility that we could see the rise of a New Pastoral movement.  Some out-of-the-way planets might revert to a near-agrarian existence.  Anne McCaffrey's Pern settlers were fleeing the high-tech world of Earth, taking with them only the tech they needed.  Their airm was to establish a simpler way of life on Pern. McCaffrey hints that bad things had happened on Earth, but doesn't detail them.  But her original settlers were fleeing the high-tech world of Earth for a simpler existence.

The future may become a divide between high-tech and low-tech civilizations not as a matter of lack of access to tech, but as a conscious choice not to use some of it.