My grandparents gave me a subscription to Scientific American when I was twelve or thirteen, and I've kept it ever since. I save the issues and I have a bookshelf full of them. SA has now come out with its 175th anniversary issue, which reviews the history of the magazine, and of science and technology during the past 175 years. (The title of this post, HiST, is the common name for the Smithsonian museum of the history of science and technology.)
I would break down HiST as four intertwining strands: scientific knowledge, technological capability, the socio-cultural context, and the economic context. Science, and particularly technology, also drive changes in those contexts, they are mutually determined. I would locate politics at the intersection of the socio-cultural and economic, but you could also conceive of it as a fifth strand.
Prior to the 20th Century, science and technology were not particularly closely related. Technology was mostly empirical, created by practical people who solved problems by imagination and trial and error. The Wright Brothers built their airplane before there was any scientific theory of aerodynamic lift, and in fact while scientists were saying that flight by heavier-than-air craft was impossible.
Even though Benjamin Franklin proved that lightning is equivalent to static electricity, the only technology that came out of that was the lightning rod. However, that situation has radically changed. It required the theory of electro-magnetism and electric current for electricity to become technologically important, but then it became the most transformative technology since agriculture.
Socio-cultural biases have infected science -- SA reviews its own substantial past promotion of pseudo-scientific racism, eugenics and sexism -- but after substantially (though not completely by any means!) purging those biases the scientific enterprise became far more productive. Technophilia, alas, is a bias that persists. The early enthusiasm for nuclear power and space flight is embarrassing. We were going to have electricity that was too cheap to meter, nuclear powered aircraft, trucks and boats. We were going to be taking vacations on the moon. Sadly, no.
On the other hand IBM mogul Thomas Watson famously predicted that the world wide market for computers would never be more than five. The Internet was invented by the Defense Department as a means for secure communication in the event of World War III. The fundamental transformation of society it generated was not foreseen, and as people did start to foresee a transformation they completely misconceived what it would be. Knowledge would be democratized, scientific understanding would become universal, propaganda would be exposed and discredited, social hierarchy would be leveled, and we'd enter a utopian age of mutual understanding and rationality. Again, sadly, no.
Then there are the more obvious unanticipated consequences, from particulate pollution to global climate change to the depredations and inequalities that occur when new, expensive and scarce technologies become essential to the way of life. People who lack broadband access, reliable electricity, or access to the demanding and expensive education and training needed to make use of complicated technology and earn a good income are a new global underclass.
We have a deeply embedded and too seldom examined cultural proclivity to see history, at least in the past 200 years or so, as progressive. The march of science and the ever-growing power of technology are thought obviously to represent a net benefit to humanity. But this assumption must be interrogated skeptically and must no longer be axiomatic in our thinking. We can make a better world, or a worse one. Right now, this moment, is a hinge of history. We need to think deeply, act as deliberately and wisely as we can, and above all act for the good and humane. Whether the technologies made possible by modern science are for better or for worse, the only way forward is to believe in the science and make humanity the master of technology, not its slave.
4 comments:
I met Ari Melber, the MS-NBC host, here in Ann Arbor one day, outside at a table at Zingerman's Deli. I talked to him for a while, and I wish to hell I'd given him the website for this blog. I've written "him" (his staff no doubt fields the emails) at ari@msnbc.com at least five times. I can't even get an answer.
I want more people to be exposed to this blog, and ultimately to its host if possible. That's because there is SO much information and disinformation out there that I want real information that is scientifically- and ethically-based to be disseminated.
Without real information, the kind of change Cervantes is talking about bringing to our world--at a time when it rests on a fulcrum point--won't happen. Ya can't fix a problem ya don't know ya got.
Perhaps other readers of this blog can email Mr. Melber as well. He was a really nice guy, eating lunch with his U of M roommates, with whom he keeps in touch.
But he doesn't read his emails.
Well, y'know, he probably gets 50,000 emails every day. And he's a smart, well-informed guy, he probably doesn't need my advice either. But I will put in a plug for his show.
Yep, and television was going to allow the best teachers to remotely reach millions of students. How'd that work out? 'Bout the same as every other prediction.
You can't control the unfolding of technology and how it will be used.
Predicting the future has always been a dicey business.
I have to agree with that. "Educational TV" turned out to be pretty much a scam. And modern incarnations -- Discovery Channel, History Channel -- are completely full of shit. Ancient aliens and the Loch Ness monster, dramatized costume dramas, shark paranoia . . . The corruption of commercialism is partly to blame, but also just the one-way nature of the medium and the need to pitch it to the lowest common denominator.
If you want to learn history and science, do it the old fashioned way. Read.
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