Negative Effects of Technologie

CONTENT

Our basic objective is to examine the scientific developments through history and how they affect human life and society. To meet that objective we will first develop tools to analyze the relationship between science and the increasingly complex decisions we have to make regarding the way we apply science for human welfare.

If we have learned anything at all about the uses of science in the second half of this century, it is that it has had an unmistakable influence on contemporary trends and outcomes. Science has helped to make the world smaller, spatially, and larger, numerically. It has multiplied our choices and scaled up our risks. Based on science we have put humans into space and opened a new arena for warfare. Science has illuminated human beginnings and shaken age-old postulates about human worth and destiny. Science has unlocked material abundance and laid new burdens on irreplaceable resources. It has expanded human potential and dramatized human limits. It has advanced clarity and magnified uncertainty. It has penetrated the deepest reaches of knowledge and held a world hostage on the edge of crisis.

We have no reason to suppose that science will abate its influence upon trends and outcomes and many reasons to expect that it will continue to shape society's choices and dilemmas. What is unprofitable is to try to outguess the rate of advancing knowledge and the forms and effects of its application through technology. But it is a very different matter to recognize and array the emergent national and global issued confronting humans on this planet and to explore with care the contributions that science could make in managing such issues.

Each of us lives with a modern paradox; how can we continue to enjoy the benefits of science and avoid the threat of its misuse or abuse to endanger life and nature? Responses to this paradox have been many, but seldom anything but emotional and impotent in making any useful changes. Among the strongest feeling brought forth by our increasing awareness of the negative side effects of technology has been the feeling of alienation - that we in society have little or no control over the impacts of science and technology on those of us who are supposed to be their beneficiaries.

We owe much to science. In fact modern life would be unthinkable without it. Not just because of the "things" it offers but because of the density of people on the planet and our inability to feed, clothe or shelter ourselves without the power over nature we gain through science. But we are also becoming aware to the "dark side of the force." The peril of nuclear holocaust, while drastically diminished in the last few years, still threatens everyone on Earth. However the destruction of the environment, the difficulty of disposing of the enormous waste produced each day, the abuse of technology for economic manipulation are almost as equally alarming.

What are our choices? Abandon science? Ignore the dangers and continue on, full speed ahead?

Regardless of the burdens of science, society is not likely to turn it off. We have already rejected that prescription proposed by the flower children of the 1960s. We would find survival too difficult, and we would miss too much of the future promises that science and technology offer.

Full speed ahead and ignore the consequences? Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer on a network radio talk-show who might advocate just this approach. He argues that notions of disappearance of rain forests, holes in the ozone layer, and nuclear waste are frauds on the public and designed to keep enterprising people from earning a reasonable profit. There are no problems with technology, he argues, and if there were, we could apply technology to fix them.

But the validity of this attitude is also belied by unpleasant surprises like Three Mile Island, Bhopal, and Chernobyl disasters. Are these the necessary consequences of technological advance? Are they really an insignificant price to pay for the benefits of science and technology? No, there is a third alternative which can help us resolve the paradox. We can continue to enjoy the benefits of technology but we must also identify the unwanted side effects and abuses, deliberate or unexpected. These unwanted results of technology must be controlled and that control will require making tradeoff decisions. Thus we have the third alternative: advance and control.

How we do this, of course, requires considerable analysis and thought. That analysis and thought is the substance of this course. Consider our increasing national reliance on science and technology to maintain national security. By focusing on the tradeoff decisions we will, however, identify some of the most important issues which we must learn to do better with in the future. According to Jonathan Schell, "Scientific progress may yet deliver us from many evils, but there are at least two evils that it cannot deliver us from: its own finding and our own destructive bent. This is a combination that we will have to learn to deal with by some other means.

So in this site we will look at those issues of science associated with human decision-making As Jonathan Schell says in Fate of the Earth, "If, given the world's discouraging record of political achievement, a lasting political solution seems almost beyond human powers, it may give us confidence to remember that what challenges us is simply our extraordinary success in another field of activity -- the scientific. We had only to learn to live politically in the world in which we already live scientifically."