The social effects of technology

• Technology is much older than science: once, science was derived from new technology, today, it is more likely that technology will be derived from new science.
• Alan Kay's point that the only way to predict the future is to invent it remains valid. History has too many examples of impossibles that became possible.
• Every technology that has ever been developed has been attacked by people who see it, usually irrationally, as threatening their way of life in some way.
• Every technology, having been developed, has had social effects and consequences that could never have been anticipated when it was first introduced.
• Most new technologies have been dismissed as useless and dangerous nonsense by at least one elderly and experienced scientist who knows all about the subject.
• Many pieces of useless and dangerous nonsense have been correctly attacked and dismissed for what they are by at least one elderly and experienced scientist.
• That which scientists dismiss as impossible is only so under a set of assumptions and knowledge that are always open to revision, question and change.
• A new technology typically goes through a twenty-year development phase before becoming generally adopted and maturing over the next thirty years.
• At the end of the fifty years of development and maturation that all technologies seem to need, the social effects of the new technology start to become apparent.
• Technology is neither good nor bad. In the long run, every technology improves the lives of humans, but it can exact an incredible toll upon some human beings.
• These days, there is never enough appropriate technology, using small solutions to tackle and crack small problems at a local level with simple equipment.

Back to the top

This file is http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/scifun/splatstech.htm, first created on July 24, 2004. Last recorded revision (well I get lazy and forget sometimes!) was on January 25, 2006.