Technology—Slave or Master?
THE mother, with a broad smile on her face, is in a warm embrace with her little daughter. She could have been any mother coming home from work, but the caption of this front-page news photo says: “Dr. Anna L. Fisher hugging daughter, Kristin, after returning from space.” She had just returned from an eight-day space flight during which the astronauts rescued two strayed satellites and brought them back to earth in a space shuttle.
On the same page of the newspaper is a report on the latest development in a historic heart-transplant case involving a baby girl. Although the baby died after a 21-day struggle, “her doctor said today that the operation in which she received a baboon’s heart had advanced science and one day would save the lives of many children.”
Technological innovations such as these were the stuff of science fiction as little as 50 years ago. Today, however, to most people they have become no more extraordinary than, perhaps, a friend returning from a trip overseas or someone going to the hospital to have his tonsils removed.
Bewildered, many people have begun to feel that everything is possible with modern science and technology. “Their immense success in producing tangible benefits . . . has caused the whole output of scientists and technologists to be regarded as a sacred cow,” observed science educator John Gibbons. Reflecting such optimism is the statement by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in his 1983 State of the Union address: “As surely as America’s pioneer spirit made us the industrial giant of the 20th century, the same pioneer spirit today is opening up another vast front of opportunity—the frontier of high technology.”
Others, however, take a less enthusiastic view. For example, science professor Mary Eleanor Clark exclaimed in an interview: “In America and other advanced cultures, belief in technology has become a religious faith. We have come to think of ourselves as so technologically clever that we will always be flexible enough to get through any crisis.” Some even hold an almost sinister view of the matter. One writer represented computer scientist Jacques Vallee as feeling that ‘high technology has acquired a momentum of its own, and it is now controlling society as much as society is controlling high technology.’
Is technology really a new frontier of opportunity, the means to solve our problems? Or has technology so affected our thinking and way of life that it is fast becoming not our servant but our master?