The gifts of technology
Freeman Dyson plantea que la tecnología puede actuar como una fuerza de igualdad cuando se orienta hacia necesidades básicas como la salud, la vivienda y la educación.
The Barcelona publishing house Tusquets publishes a series titled “Metatemas,” which has been directed since the beginning of this decade by physicist Jorge Wagensberg. Through this collection, Spanish-language readers have been able to find several books on science while they were still fresh from their original English editions.
Two books by the author discussed here are currently available locally: Infinite in All Directions (1991) and From Eros to Gaia (1994). Both cover a remarkably broad range of subjects through essays with different titles: twenty in the first book and thirty-five in the second.
The author, Freeman Dyson, has dealt particularly with the ethical dilemmas of the nuclear age, although his intellectual interests are much broader. His books have earned him a reputation as one of the most learned scientist-writers and an ideal popularizer of complex scientific ideas.
Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in his latest work, Imagined Worlds, whose final chapter, dealing with ethics and technology, we will discuss here.
The question Dyson asks directly is this: how can we turn the negative consequences of technology into positive ones? His argument is that, as a general rule, technology works for ill when its effect is to provide toys for the rich, and works for good when its results serve the needs of the poor. Cheapness, in this view, is its essential virtue.
Put another way, technology is good when it acts as a social equalizer. It is not when it deepens the differences between the powerful and the weak, between the rich and the poor.
Until fairly recently, people tended to feel that technology was good. Experience seemed to prove it. Throughout most of the nineteenth century and until the middle of the twentieth, technology provided an abundance of socially leveling goods: electric light, refrigerators, radio, telephones, vaccines, synthetic fibers, antibiotics and television, to name only a few. They improved the lives of rich and poor alike and narrowed the gap between them.
But the past forty years have brought a change: technology no longer serves equality in the same way. Increasingly, it benefits the powerful and the wealthy above all. It moves further and further beyond the reach of the poor. Nuclear energy, for example, becomes a source of power and a monopoly of powerful nations.
Technological effort has been concentrated on products that can be sold profitably, and because the rich can pay more, they receive a disproportionate share of the benefits.
These three technologies are profoundly disruptive. They offer freedom from labor. They offer the possibility of curing disease. They offer wealth and power to those who possess the skills needed to understand and control them. They destroy older industries and professions and make people with obsolete skills increasingly unnecessary. They will probably pass the poor by while rewarding the rich.
What do the poor need? The most disadvantaged half of humanity needs inexpensive housing, inexpensive healthcare and inexpensive education, all of them accessible to everyone and of good quality.
The three new technological waves promise an even greater mismatch than the one that exists today between technology and these three basic needs of poor people. If that mismatch continues to grow, if technology continues to ignore the needs of the poor while increasingly favoring the rich, a point will eventually come when the poor rebel. Their revolt will almost certainly make both rich and poor poorer.
Is there a way to avoid this? Surely there is, if we trust the warning Lewis Mumford once offered as a lesson from history: “Prepare for the unexpected!”
The growing gulf between human needs and technology can only be filled by ethics. In recent decades, we have seen many examples of the power of ethical persuasion.
The global environmental movement has won major victories against industrial and technological arrogance. It has, for example, helped frustrate the U.S. nuclear industry, both in its peaceful deployment as an energy source and in its military deployment through nuclear weapons.
But the environmental movement has concentrated on opposing harmful technology and has paid less attention to the benefits technology might provide if it were placed at the service of goals different from those that have guided it over the past half century: meeting the needs of the disadvantaged at prices they can afford; putting technology at the service of healthcare, housing and education for neglected sectors of society; and promoting greater equality among people.
Dyson writes: “It is my hope that the attention of the Greens will turn in the coming century from the negative to the positive. Ethical victories that put an end to the follies of technology are not enough. We need ethical victories of a different kind, committing the power of technology to the pursuit of social justice.”
We should not expect the free market by itself to produce technology that is friendly to the poor; ethics must also intervene. Environmentalists, educators, scientists and farsighted industrialists must work to ensure that social justice has a real influence on how technology is developed and deployed.
And so, of course, must religion. In the past, religion contributed to many good things, from the construction of cathedrals to the abolition of slavery. In the future, religion will remain a force comparable in power to science and equally committed to the long-term improvement of the human condition.
