Debating Technology Society and the Environment

¶ … Technology, a very familiar phenomenon of modern world, is continuously enhancing its ways towards comforts and luxuries. New thoughts and ideas are coming with every passing second, and what started as only a blurred vision, now became a necessity for all mankind. These have become a need of today's society making the society very much involved in these technological reforms. Several debates have been made on the topic that although the level of our technology keeps on improving day by day, but do all of these hi-tech gadgets give us the proper advantages? Are we really aware of the two different sides of the same mirror, or are we just so much accustomed to all such things around us that we don't bother to look upon the other side? Amongst these debates, two of the very famous are classical McDermott vs. Mesthene debate of 1960s and contemporary debate of Joy vs. Brown/Duguid in the start of 21st century. In this essay, the compare and contrast between these two debates will be presented along with the work of James Burke in this regard. Before describing the compares and contrasts, a brief look at both debates is provided for better understanding.

Emmanuel G. Mesthene was the director of the Harvard Program on Technology and Society, and the originator of famous classical debate about "Technological change: its impact on man and society." He was considered an optimist in this regard that technology has beneficial effects on the society and is very necessary for the betterment of human beings. His movement was of the view that science is self-correcting and we need more and more technology in order to have solutions of those problems which are created by the previously invented technology. Societies cannot survive without the use of new emerging technologies and they should get involved in the entire process. On the contrary, John McDermott opposed these views of Mesthene as "Technology: the opiate of intellectuals," by saying that we keep on inventing new technologies for our requirements, but ultimately this extreme use of technology will be only in some specific hands which will then control the rest of the society. The debate actually occurred during the American-Vietnam War of 1959 to 1975. McDermott exemplified the U.S.' bombing at Vietnam, by saying that it is U.S. which is the superpower and thus have ultimate technologies to locate certain places in Vietnam where the bombarding took place. Thus much inventions and use of technology which are not equally distributed amongst the entire world is highly dangerous and destructive. On the whole, the debate was considered between an optimist and a pessimist (Mesthene vs. McDermott 2012, McDermott 1969).

Now the debate between Bill Joy and Brown/Duguid is provided. Joy is a famous American technologist at sun Microsystems. In April 2000, he wrote an essay "Why the future doesn't need us," in which he described the same concerns as those of McDermott; that extraordinary advancements in technology may lead to destruction of mankind. He particularly focused the areas of nanotechnology, genetics and robotics and again used the same notion to describe the threat that the technology is limited to superpowers only who can afford high cost gadgets and thus the betterment is not equally distributed. He was worried of the increasing powers of computer by saying that humans will eventually become dependent of such things and ultimately these would rule over us. There are issues like replication and artificial intelligence which can cause a serious harm provided these are accelerated beyond the limits (Joy 2012). This essay of joy was highly criticized by other two scientists, John S. Brown and Paul Duguid in their essay "A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists." They said that as the technology advances its ways, so the techniques by which it is controlled by humans are also devised. It is not like a doom and gloom end of a long tunnel which cannot be seen apparently. Joy has forgot to mention certain social forces that technologies and social systems shape each other and it is not true to say that a time will come when the society will lack behind the technology (Brown and Duguid 79). Nanotechnology and genomics are devised and used by humans and there would be certain constraints and limits for their usage. Everyone is not free to use them, not even superpowers.

Although the above mentioned two debates have a gap of forty years between them, but the concerns and criticism is almost the same. The two debates are highly comparable; only excluding the terms of artificial intelligence, robotics and genetics which were not devised in 1960's. The role of Mesthene in the former is performed by Brown and Duguid in the latter one, who said that social reforms and technological advancements go along, while Bill Joy takes the role of McDermott in the latter, who is opposed to too much advancement in technology as it may become destructive for the mankind.