Children of Invention Revisited Morton Winston

I N T R O D U C T I O NChildren of Invention RevisitedMorton WinstonIF NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER of invention, who is the father, and who, or what,are invention’s children? Necessity, of course, is a matter of degree: We actually onlyneed air, water, and food to survive. Shelter, clothing, and a few material possessions arealso nice, as are companionship, affection, security, and several other psychologicalgoods that we crave as social animals. But we humans learned how to satisfy these basicbiological needs millions of years ago. Why then did we embark on the long journey thattransformed us from cavemen into cosmonauts? What was it that made possible theascent from the Stone Age to our present global technological civilization?Clearly, the leading answer to these questions is superior intelligence. But in whatspecific respects is human intelligence superior to that found in other species? Is it ourcapacity to learn from observation and experience and to transmit what we learn toothers? Is it our ability to create and use language? Or might it be these two generalcognitive capacities for culture and language, together with our unique ability todiscover new solutions to old problems, better ways of making and doing things? Inshort, is it our unique capacity as a species to form science and technology? Coupledwith our needs and desires, which provide the motives that propel us to discover andinvent, our scientific and technological creativity has guided the development of civilization through the development of theories, tools, inventions, and technologies thathave transformed the ways that we live and work.1For most of us, a world without technology is inconceivable. The inventions thatit has given us are all around us. In fact, most of us spend most of our lives incompletely artificial environments, wrapped in a technological cocoon that providesus with much more than merely food and protection from the elements. We are sowrapped up in our technological culture, in fact, that it takes an effort to distanceourselves from it in order to understand how technology has transformed humanexistence from its natural state. Such a historical perspective also helps us see howcontemporary technologies, such as genetic engineering and the Internet, are nowchanging us in even more dramatic ways, creating new opportunities for humans toflourish, new ways of life, and also, in some cases, new social and ethical problems.These social and ethical issues arising from technological innovation are the ‘‘childrenof invention” that this book is about. To understand these issues, however, it is firstnecessary to get a clear view of their source—technology.– 1 –THE SCOPE OF TECHNOLOGYThe word technology is itself of fairly recent coinage; Johann Beckman of Gottingenfirst used it in 1789. Its root, techne, is the ancient Greek word for “art,” “craft,” or“skill,” which itself is derived from an earlier Indo-European root, teks, which means“to weave” or “to fabricate” (teks is also the root of the word textile). Recent archeological evidence suggests that the weaving of cloth predates the birth of agricultureand the dawn of civilization, going back to about 35,000 BCE, making it one of thefirst technologies. As the etymology suggests, a techne is a method, craft, or skill usedin making things, not the things themselves, which are called artifacts. For instance, awoven object made from animal hairs that have been twisted together into longstrands, dyed with vegetable colors, and interlaced by a weaver is an artifact. Let’ssay that this object functions primarily as a blanket; a person wraps her- or himself in itto stay warm. A typical use, or function, of an artifact is called its purpose or end, andthe knowledge of how to gather the fibers, twist them, dye them, and weave them arethe individual techniques that comprise this particular technology. Thus, the coremeaning of the word technology refers to the ensembles of techniques by which humans make artifacts that serve certain useful ends. However, this original meaning istoo restrictive for the contemporary context in which we think about the relationshipbetween technology and modern society.As Rosalind Williams (Selection 1.1.4) notes, in recent years there has been anunfortunate tendency to narrow the definition of technology to contemporaryinformation-communications technologies (ICTs) such as personal computers, theInternet, and the digital gadgets advertised in Wired. This way of thinking abouttechnology is clearly too restrictive; it ignores other areas of contemporary technological innovation, such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, as well as the technologiesof earlier periods, such as the automobile, the steam engine, or the water wheel. Whenone ordinarily thinks of technology, what most likely comes to mind are technologicalartifacts—the objects, machines, structures, and devices that are the useful end products of technological design. Then, perhaps, one thinks of the less familiar but potentially more impressive machines and industrial processes tucked away in thefactories that manufacture the various gadgets and widgets that we use. Finally, onemight visualize the scientists, engineers, and technicians in white laboratory coats,hard at work in the laboratories of the Research and Development Division, designingthe next generation of technological devices and processes.Although it is true that each context through which artifacts come into being—design, manufacturing, and end use—is a technological context, it is still too narrow aview to identify technology with only the material culture of designed or manufactured physical objects. We take an even broader view: Technology consists of not onlyuseful artifacts and the tools and processes needed to produce them but also the entiresocial organization of people and materials that permits the acquisition of the knowledge and skills needed to design, manufacture, distribute, use, repair, and eventuallydispose of these artifacts. Technology is not a collection of things but is a systematicand rational way of doing things; it is, in general, the organization of knowledge, people,and things to accomplish specific practical goals. 2Technology includes not only the obvious candidates—the mechanical, structural,and electronic know-how that directs the purposeful organization of materials—butalso the less obvious invisible technologies that control the purposeful organization of2 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and Technologypeople and their labor. The mechanical clocks described by David Landes (Selection1.1.1), for instance, enabled people to coordinate their activities and thus made possible a more productive use of human labor. But clocks and calendars are useful as waysof measuring units of time—the minutes, days, weeks, months, and the like—thatcomprise the invisible technology of time. The monetary system, the banks, and thestock and commodity markets are technologies for the distribution of economic valuethat was once associated with gold coins, then with pieces of paper, currency notes, orstock certificates, and is nowadays represented by encrypted bits of digital data. Theideologies of free-market capitalism and centralized planned economies are competingeconomic theories about how best to organize social production. Even governmentalsystems, ranging from varieties of representative democracy to theocracy and dictatorship, are competing political technologies for managing concerted societal action andresolving political conflicts. People ask, “Is there a better way to run the government?”no less frequently than “Is there a better way to design a mousetrap?” Both questionsare requests to find a better technology—that is, to acquire knowledge that enablesone to solve a practical problem.Contemporary writers often speak of technology as consisting of systems; forinstance, Ruth Schwartz Cowan (Selection 1.1.2) describes the telegraph and telephone, the railroad, the petroleum, and the electrical systems that came about inthe later half of the nineteenth century. Large-scale technological systems are linkedwith one another, often in relationships of mutual interdependence; for instance, telegraph wires were strung along railroad rights of way, and railroads came to depend onthe telegraph for scheduling and signaling. Similarly, contemporary ICT systems, suchas the Internet, depend on a great many other technological systems for their creationand use but then are used by them, creating a matrix of complex interdependencies.One might think of the entire technosphere—that is, the sum total of all human-createdartifacts together with the enabling knowledge that created it and sustains it—as constituting one giant technological system. However, this definition of the scope oftechnology is too broad to be of much practical use. Instead, we will think of technologies as consisting of several distinguishable but interacting aspects: (1) skills, techniques, human activity-forms, or sociotechnical practices; (2) resources, tools, andmaterials; (3) technological products, or artifacts; (4) ends, intentions, or functions;(5) background knowledge; and (6) the social contexts in which the technology isdesigned, developed, used, and disposed of. These six aspects are present in everytechnology.The first aspect of technology is the human activity-form—that is, the particularskills, techniques, methods, practices, or ways of doing things. We know that animalsother than humans can make and use tools; for instance, chimpanzees strip branchesoff tree limbs to make sticks that can be used for gathering insects. For the purposes ofour characterization of the technological system, we restrict activity-forms or techniques to those employed by human beings. Some human activity-forms employ naturalobjects rather than tools to achieve ends; for instance, if one throws a spear in order totry to kill an animal for food, one is employing a particular technique. But throwingspears is a primitive and not very useful hunting technique; our technologies for providing our food have improved considerably. Today, there are complex ensembles oftechniques for doing just about everything from planting and harvesting crops tofiguring out the orbit of a moon of Jupiter, from designing a house to conducting aleveraged hostile takeover, from cooking lasagna to programming a computer to sortMORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 3sales data. Such complex techniques represent what is called procedural knowledge, ormore commonly “know-how,” and is contrasted with propositional knowledge, or“know-that.” Both of these types of knowledge are necessary aspects of technologicalsystems, but techniques are its essence. Procedural knowledge forms the basis of technology because it provides the patterns for the sociotechnical practices or humanactivity-forms that we use to create artifacts of all kinds and to build and maintainour complex technological systems.One of the main consequences of technology is to increase our capacity to dothings. Technologies, techniques, and tools extend, enhance, and sometimes evenreplace our natural powers such as sight, hearing, muscle, and even memory andthought. By using tools, we can accomplish things that we could not otherwise achieveand to do things that we could not otherwise do, thus increasing our repertoire ofhuman activity-forms. Tools are artifacts at our disposal that can be used to makeother artifacts, but tools, even the dawn stones used by our distant ancestors, arethemselves artifacts that have been transformed from their natural states in someway by means of human action.Earth itself is of course not an artifact but has for many centuries been viewed as aresource well into which we can dip at will in order to satisfy our needs and desires.Technology requires resources of various kinds as inputs to technological processes,and by employing specific techniques or human activity-forms, we act on and transform these resources from their original or natural states. Once a built environment hasbeen created, however, everything in it can serve as a resource to further technologicaldevelopment. The term infrastructure describes elements of the built environmentthat are available to be used to create or apply new technologies. We live on anincreasingly anthropogenic planet, one in which the evidence of the built environmentcan be seen from outer space in the form of clusters of light emanating from our majorcities. In fact, if we include the unintended effects on Earth’s atmosphere and climatecaused by anthropogenic global warming, there are very few things on Earth that areunaffected by human activity.By acting on either natural or artificial resources, through techniques, we alterthem in various ways and thus create artifacts, which form the third aspect of technologies. A clay pot is an example of a material artifact, which, although transformed byhuman activity, is not all that far removed from its natural state. A plastic cup, acontact lens, and a computer chip, on the other hand, are examples of artifacts thatare far removed from the original states of the natural resources needed to createthem. Artifacts can serve as resources in other technological processes. This is one ofthe important interaction effects within the technological system: Each new technology increases the stock of available tools and resources that can be employed by othertechnologies to produce new artifacts, forming what Deborah Johnson and ThomasPowers (Selection 1.3.4) call the artifactual platform.The fourth aspect concerns the ends or functions of an artifact or technique. Mostartifacts have typical or intended uses, but artifacts can in fact be embedded in multiplecontexts of use or can serve multiple ends, a property that Richard Sclove (Selection1.2.1) calls polypotency. However, most artifacts have an intended use, or focal function; a toaster, for instance, is designed to lightly burn slices of bread, but it is alsopolypotent and can be used as hand warmer or as a murder weapon. There is a doubleambiguity in the relations between artifacts and practices and between ends and practices; the same artifacts can be used to achieve different ends, and different practices4 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and Technologyand their associated artifacts can be used to accomplish the same ends. For instance, Icould have written this sentence with a quill pen, a pencil, a ballpoint pen, a typewriter, or a personal computer (PC) running text-editing software (although I usedthe last). And I could have used my PC to play an adventure game or calculate myincome tax instead of writing this sentence. Because artifacts are designed and createdto serve certain functions, it is possible to talk about the ends of these objects—that is,their intended purposes or focal functions even though the objects themselves mayoften also be used in ways that were not intended. The term valence is sometimes usedto refer to the typical or conventional uses of artifacts, which may or may not matchtheir intended purposes.3The fifth aspect of technological systems is knowledge-that, or factual knowledgeabout what the universe consists of and how it operates. To employ our technologies,we need background knowledge of various kinds: what resources to use and where tofind them, what techniques to employ to fabricate various artifacts, the ends andpurposes that are typically served by various techniques and objects, and how all theseelements fit together in a systematic way. Both knowledge-how and knowledge-thathave always been an important aspect of technologies. However, since the scientificrevolution of the seventeenth century, scientific knowledge—that is, both factual andtheoretical knowledge about the universe and the way it works—has come to play anincreasingly important role in technological development.The sixth aspect of technology is the social context or organization in which technologies are developed, distributed, and employed. A division of labor in which different individuals perform different tasks or occupy different roles to accomplishcommon or coordinated ends characterizes technological societies. The schemesthat we use for organizing human labor represent a kind of technology that can beapplied to the most important resource of all—ourselves. Complex schemes for organizing human activities that have become more or less institutionalized can be calledsocial artifacts. Examples of social artifacts include the stock market, battalions ordivisions in an army, baseball teams, hospitals, schools, and corporations. In eachcase, human resources are organized in a particular way according to a plan or technique involving a division of labor in which different persons occupy different roles,and their labor is coordinated to accomplish specific sorts of goals. It is important tounderstand that technology encompasses not only material artifacts but also social andorganizational forms and even the cognitive techniques that produce the material andsocial infrastructure of human civilization. These invisible technologies frequently consist of formal, mathematical, or analytical techniques—for instance, the scientificmethod, statistical analysis, or procedures for creating a balance sheet—and manyother specific, high-order thinking skills, which are the content of higher education.Becoming a scientifically or technologically educated person consists mainly in theacquisition of a fairly extensive repertoire of such cognitive techniques.The social and psychological aspects of technological systems are the least obviousbut also the most important. Technology is a human social construction. This is truein an obvious and straightforward sense when we speak of large technological structures—such as bridges, buildings, or dams, which obviously came into existence onlyby the coordination of the activities of numerous individuals—but it is equally true inthe case of the lonely amateur inventor toiling in the attic. Inventions today are rarelythe result of such solitary creativity, but even when they are, the resources and techniques employed and the knowledge by which they are put to use by the inventor areMORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 5themselves the products of prior social processes. Even the inventor’s own knowledgeand abilities have been shaped by her education and by the repertoire of cognitivetechniques that she has acquired through education. So, there is really very little, onlythe raw materials and the laws of nature, that has not in some way resulted from aprocess of social production. Even when an inventor succeeds in inventing somethingnew, it is still unlikely to be brought into production and placed on the market unlessit has some social value or is of use to other people. So, all technologies must be seenas embedded in social contexts of development, deployment, and use.To summarize this discussion, we can define technological systems as the complexof techniques, knowledge, and resources that are employed by human beings in the creation of material and social artifacts that typically serve certain functions perceived asuseful or desirable in relation to human interests in various social contexts.TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTIONSThe use of technologies to satisfy our needs is a fundamental feature of human nature.All human societies we know of, both those presently existing and those that existedhundreds of thousands of years before the dawn of civilization, were technological tosome degree. For almost all of our species’ evolution, we lived in small, nomadic bandswhose main means of livelihood were hunting, gathering, and scavenging. But wewere also toolmakers and tool-users during this long period of human evolution,and tools were the principal means by which we satisfied our physiological needs forfood, warmth, and shelter. Our hominid ancestors first began chipping stones to makesimple hand tools about 2.5 million years ago. Fire was used as early as 1.5 millionyears ago. If Homo sapiens (literally, “man the wise”) is now the dominant species onthe planet, it is in large part because he is also Homo faber (“man the maker”).Early human societies were organized as hunter-gatherer groups, gathering edibleplants in season and supplementing their diet with the meat or marrow of huntedanimals. Quite likely, these bands of hunter-gatherers were nomadic, following animalmigrations and seasonal food-plant distributions. As with present-day huntergatherers, ancient nomadic societies were severely limited to only those objects thatthey could take with them; thus, they tended to develop simple portable technologiesfor hunting, gathering, cooking, transportation, and defense. Perhaps surprisingly, lifedoes not seem to have been especially hard for hunter-gatherers. The secrets of theirsuccess seem to have been populations that did not exceed the food supply, simple andlimited material needs, and the ability to move to another area when the local foodsupply ran out. Nomadic hunter-gatherer societies have persisted into the twentiethcentury in such diverse environments as the African desert, the tropical rain forest, andthe Arctic tundra. Remoteness might be the key to avoiding conversion to moretechnologically intensive ways of life. For the rest of us, our lives now deeply dependon far-flung and complex technological systems.About 10,000 years ago, the first great technological revolution occurred in several fertile river valleys of Asia Minor and North Africa. During the agricultural revolution, humans learned how to domesticate animals and to plant, grow, and harvestcrops to sustain their existence. This enabled humans to give up the nomadic lifestyleand to build permanent cities. Civilization, which means the building of cities, originates at this time, as do morality, law, religion, record keeping, mathematics, astronomy, class structures, patriarchy, and other social institutions that have since come to6 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and Technologycharacterize the human condition. With the adoption of settled agriculture in thefertile river valleys, the history of humankind begins. Permanent houses could be built,tools and objects could be accumulated from year to year, and so humanity began thelong climb toward the collections of miscellany and junk that now clutter people’sclosets, attics, and garages.Settled agriculture had many advantages and a few disadvantages. The quantity offood that could be produced per acre was much higher, so population densities couldalso be much greater. With permanent dwellings, creature comforts could be madethat did not have to be portable. With larger numbers of people living together,specialization of activities could take place, and specialists were more likely to findbetter ways to do things. Larger concentrations of people could better share andperpetuate knowledge and band together to cooperate on projects that smaller groupscould not attempt. Thus, we see that even at this early stage of technological development, the organization of people, information, and accumulated resources wereessential aspects of emerging technological societies.In regions with insufficient rainfall to sustain many crops, it was necessary todesign, construct, and maintain either irrigation canals or aqueducts. There is evidenceof canal irrigation in both Mesopotamia and Egypt as early as the sixth millenniumBCE, and in areas where the topography posed challenges various devices were developed to raise water above its natural level. Some of these devices, such as the noriaused with flowing water, were sophisticated; others, such as the chain-pump used withstill water, were simple, being powered either by animals or humans. Devices of thelatter type are still being used today in some parts of the world. Even with the NileRiver’s normally adequate supply of water for irrigation in Egypt, it was usually necessary to employ technology to direct and control its distribution, making agriculture amore complex undertaking than originally might be thought.The disadvantages of settled agriculture sprang from the fact that society had “putall its eggs in one basket” and had committed itself to living in one place. A settledsociety is prey to flood, drought, and insects. Persistent weeds must be removed fromfields before they displace crops. Houses and farm implements must be maintained.Crop seeds must be gathered and sown. The final product, food, must be harvested,stored, and distributed. In short, the settled farmer has more but must work harder tomaintain his or her improved standard of living. Irrigated agriculture is even moretechnologically intensive and requires more complex social organization. Large irrigation projects demand larger groups to support them and must be maintained throughout the year, not just during the growing season. Irrigated farms produce more foodper acre, more reliably than dry farms that rely on uncertain rainfall, but they alsorequire more work per person fed. At the extreme are rice paddies in the river deltas ofsoutheast China where three crops are grown each year. They are the most productivefarmlands but also the most labor intensive. Today, most agricultural production inindustrialized countries occurs on large farms where energy-intensive farm machinerysubstitutes for human labor and chemical fertilizers maintain soil fertility.The second great technological revolution took place many centuries later, duringthe eighteenth century in Europe about 250 years ago. The Industrial Revolutionreplaced the muscle power of animals with coal-fired steam energy and then later,about 100 years ago, with gasoline-driven internal combustion engines. The firststeam engines, patented in 1698, were designed to pump water from coal mines inEngland, but before long they were improved and used to power looms and otherMORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 7machines in factories. The machine age caused profound changes in economic andsocial relations. The number of people needed to produce food declined as the number of people engaged in factory work increased. People migrated from rural areas tocities in search of higher-paying factory jobs, and new inventions such as the cottongin, the locomotive, and the telegraph laid the groundwork for the emergence of thecomplex technological society that we live in today.The methods that a society uses to produce goods have a profound effect on whatlife is like in that society, for both producers and consumers of goods. Prior to theindustrial age, production was organized by crafts. Individual artisans both designedand produced each individual product, usually guided by traditional techniques thatwere occasionally modified by creative innovations. The relative value of the productwas largely determined by the artisan’s skill. As a result, artisans were relatively autonomous, and production units often consisted of a single artisan and several apprenticesin cottage industries.When the invention of the steam engine made power available on a scale neverpreviously possible, it became feasible to concentrate larger numbers of workers in oneplace, and to have each worker perform only a small part of the production process.This resulted in a much more specialized division of labor, and the factory system wasborn. The factory system required far greater concentrations of power, labor, and rawmaterials than either agriculture or cottage industries. It also required the development of infrastructure for transportation of raw materials to the factory site and finished products from the site. Railroads and canals were thus as essential a part of theIndustrial Revolution as the factories themselves. The industrial system also required alarge labor force near the factory, so society’s living patterns were reorganized toinclude factory towns where workers lived and the means to supply them with foodand other necessities. Factories were often located near sources of power or raw materials, resulting in net population shifts away from agricultural lands.In the early twentieth century, technological experts working under the banner of“scientific management,” developed by F. W. Taylor in 1911, studied the productionprocess and learned what each worker knew about making the product. They thenordained the perfect way to produce a given product using standardized parts, thedivision of labor, and mass-production techniques, what each worker would do, andat what pace he or she would do it. Each worker needed fewer skills and could bepaid less per item. Cheaper workers making larger numbers of products using specialized machinery resulted in less expensive goods. Lower prices resulted in increasedstandard of living for consumers. Factory work may have become onerous, but a salarycould buy more than it could previously. In recent decades, much of the world’sproduction has moved to low-wage countries such as China and India where workersare paid far less for their work than workers in developed countries would be paid forcomparable labor; workers in these countries usually do not have the right to formunions and bargain collectively with their employers. But jobs with low wages andlimited rights, many claim, are often better than no jobs at all or trying to scrape out asubsistence living on small farms.In the search for increased productivity, working conditions in early factories wereoften harsh and dangerous. In response to the many abuses that existed, employeesoften battled tyrannical bosses for the right to form unions and bargain collectively,many times suffering injuries or even death for their actions. The sacrifices made bysuch organizing drives secured improved working conditions and raised the standard8 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and Technologyof living of millions of workers and their families. A similar process of humanizingconditions of factory workers is now taking place in the developing countries wheremost current production is located. Despite the dominance of the factory system,crafts did not vanish entirely. They survived in niches where no one could think ofan economical way of applying mass-production techniques or as a way to producedistinctive, high-quality goods. In some cases, they survived because traditional cultural values prevailed over the lure of newer technologies. As David Edgerton (Selection 1.1.3) notes, in many countries sewing machines continued to be used in homesto make clothes for the family, and in India, Mohandas Gandhi revived the spinningwheel as an alternative to mass-produced thread. But the dominant trend throughoutthe latter half of twentieth century was toward mass-produced, globally distributedconsumer goods produced by workers in low-wage countries.The technologies of power production were driving forces of the industrial system, and each new source of power required industrialized society to provide anaccompanying infrastructure to make the system work. Water power, an ancient technology, was limited in availability and location prior to the building of aqueducts andrequired relatively little additional infrastructure beyond that already available in anagricultural and craft society. Coal could be more widely distributed, but coalpowered factories were large because efficient steam engines were large. Railroadsand canals began to crisscross the countryside from mine to factory to market. Monetary supply and financial services had to expand to serve a system with increasingseparation between producer and consumer. Electricity is a more flexible source ofpower, capable of efficiently driving both large and small machines. As Ruth SchwartzCowan (Selection 1.1.2) observes, electricity permitted greater decentralization ofindustry supported by a network of power grids that eventually reached nearly everyhouse and factory in the country. Oil and gasoline revolutionized transportation anddistribution of goods. Internal combustion engines fueled by gasoline and diesel oilmade it possible to have smaller vehicles, and smaller vehicles continued the trendtoward decentralization. However, gas- and oil-powered vehicles required more andbetter roads. The U.S. interstate highway system, built in the 1960s–1980s (andsimilar systems in other industrialized countries) are society’s most recent contributions to an industrial technology system based on oil, a system that may now bereaching its final phrase, perhaps to be replaced during the twenty-first century by a“greener” energy system that uses renewable forms of energy.Many people believe that since the mid-1970s we have been going through athird great technological transformation—from the machine age to the informationage (also called the “third wave” and the “knowledge revolution”). Computers, communications satellites, fiber-optic cable, and other developments—which make possible global, high-capacity, high-speed communications technologies such as theInternet—are already profoundly changing the way that we live, work, and play.Revolutionary developments in computing and communications technology havetransformed the workplace, faster than some would like but slower than its visionarieshad hoped for. The earliest successes of computers in industry were in payroll, inventory, and similar routine and repetitive kinds of record keeping. The automated processes were well understood, straightforward, and implemented exactly as they hadbeen done before the advent of computers. In some cases, they didn’t even save timeor work, but they were the wave of the future.MORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 9The next stage gave decision makers more and better information to enhanceefficiency, competitiveness, and other factors reflected in the bottom line. Computersmade it possible to gather and organize data on an unprecedented scale. Also successful were the attempts to use computers to improve scheduling and reduce inventory inthe production process. Goods stored in inventory cost money to store and contributenothing to profit until they are used or sold. Predicting exactly how much of whichraw materials and parts are needed at which steps of the manufacturing process andscheduling their arrival in the factory at precisely the right place at precisely the righttime was the just-in-time manufacturing technique developed in Japan that led to realgains in productivity that drove the global economy in the 1990s.As computers and computer programmers got better, computers became capableof doing jobs that were formerly thought to require human intelligence. Typically,computers proved capable of doing far more than most people would have predictedin advance and far less than their most vocal proponents claimed was possible. Although the conceptually most impressive achievements were in areas like expert systems for medical diagnosis, the biggest successes of computer technology were in thesimpler applications now so common that we take them for granted: automatic pilot,antilocking brakes, electronic fuel injection, and most important, in more flexible,general-purpose tools and machines for making other products.With flexible, modifiable, reprogrammable tools, it was no longer necessary tohave long production runs to amortize the setup time of the machinery. Computercontrolled machinery could switch quickly from one task to another, and customizedproduction runs became in some cases economically viable. Supply could now moreaccurately follow demand, and both idle machinery and unproductive inventory werevirtually eliminated in those industries adopting the new technology.The synergies created by computers, user-friendly software applications, satellitemediated communications, the Internet, containerization, and rapid and relativelyinexpensive air freight made possible the kind of geographically distributed productionsystems that are characteristic of the contemporary era of globalization. One can noworder a computer to one’s precise specifications on the Internet, have it custom builtin a Chinese factory, and delivered by an air freight carrier to your door in a matter ofdays. In fact, without computers and rapid worldwide communications, our presentday global marketplace would not be possible. Some authors, such as Thomas Friedman (Selection 2.1.1) believe that around the year 2000 we entered a new phase ofthis information-revolution form of globalization, what he calls “Globalization 3.0.”This new phase springs from a Web-based global platform that enables multiple formsof knowledge sharing and collaboration irrespective of distance; this in turn creates a“flatter” world in which the economic playing field is getting more level betweenpeople in the developed and the developing countries. Cass Sunstein (Selection2.2.1) explores how Web-enabled collaboration using wikis, open-source software,and blogs is changing the way in which knowledge is assembled, transformed, anddisseminated in the information age. But ICT is not only changing commerce andindustry but also transforming the power of government and big corporations tocollect and assemble data on individuals, as described by Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt (Selection 2.2.3). It is also altering the way in which soldiers operate on thebattlefield, as described by Max Boot (Selection 2.2.2). Futurists such as RodneyBrooks (Selection 2.3.1) and Ray Kurzweil (Selection 2.3.4) predict that by the middle of the twenty-first century synergies created by the convergence of ICTs, artificial10 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and Technologyintelligence, robotics, biotechnology, and nanotechnology will create another technoscientific revolution, what Kurzweil calls a “singularity,” in which the intellectualcapabilities of our machines will exceed that of human intelligence. While some, likeKurzweil, welcome such developments, others, such as Bill Joy (Selection 2.3.3), fearthat we may not be able to control the technological genies once they are out of thebottle. Still other authors, such as William Clocksin (Selection 2.3.2), doubt thatartificially intelligent machines will ever be able to master the complexities of humannarrative communication. Whichever of these future projections turn out to be correct, it is certain that we will have to grapple with the social impacts and ethicalchallenges of twenty-first-century technologies.SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETYIn the modern world, technology and science often go together, with science supporting technology and technology supporting science. Although they now share a greatdeal in common, their goals have been historically different. In the ancient world,science, then known as natural philosophy, was viewed as an elevated activity involvingpure contemplation and the value-free pursuit of knowledge, whereas technology wasassociated with more practical concerns and with the arts. It was not until the beginning of the modern period in the seventeenth century that there was a decisive shift tothe view that scientific knowledge was valuable because it was useful to us in gainingmastery over nature. This shift was largely due to the writings of several influentialphilosophers such as Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon. Bacon’s works, particularlyNovum Organon (1620) and New Atlantis (1624), are notable for their contempt oftraditional speculative philosophy and their emphasis on the importance of empiricalmethods of investigation through which the secrets of nature could be revealed bymeans of judicious experiments. In 1637 Descartes wrote the Discourse on Method inwhich he proclaimed thatIt is possible to attain knowledge which is very useful in life; and that, instead ofspeculative philosophy which is taught in the Schools, we may find a practical philosophy by means of which, knowing the force and the action of fire, water, air, stars, theheavens, and all other bodies that environ us, as distinctly as we know the differentcrafts of our artisans, we can in the same way employ them in all those uses to whichthey are adapted, and thus render ourselves masters and possessors of nature.4This change in the dominant view of the nature and bases of human knowledge set thestage for the modern belief in progress, which was expressed by Bacon as the beliefthat “the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of his lot are one and thesame thing.”5Despite the marriage of science and technology in the modern period, somesignificant differences remain between the two enterprises. Technologists primarilyseek to answer the question “How?” (“How can we keep warm in the winter?” or“How can we see distant objects that are invisible to the naked eye?”) Engineers seekto design and produce useful material objects and systems that will function under allexpected circumstances for the planned lifetime of the product. Science, on the otherhand, may be considered as a form of systematic empirical inquiry, which seeks todescribe the underlying laws governing the behavior of natural objects. Scientists primarily try to answer the questions “What?” and “Why?” (“What kind of thing is this?”MORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 11and “Why does it behave the way it does?”). In the early stages of science when littlewas known, the immediate goal of the science was to describe and classify the phenomena of the natural world. As more things became known, the sciences beganasking, “How do these things change over time and interact with each other?” Scientists sought laws and principles that would enable them to predict and explain whythings in nature behave as they do. This search produced the scientific revolution inthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in the work of Sir Issac Newton. But Newton’s universe has been superceded by Einstein’s, and his by quantummechanics and string theory. Despite the abstract nature of contemporary physicaltheory, natural science continues to provide the intellectual basis for technology.Technology needs science to predict how its objects and systems will function sothat it can tell if they will work, and science supplies the predictive laws that apply tothese objects and systems. However, although the laws of science are often simple tostate, applying them to the complex objects of technology is often anything but simple. Sometimes the engineer must experiment with the complex objects that are thebuilding blocks of a technology to find out what will happen. At the same time,technology makes direct and obvious contributions to the progress of science. Thelaboratory equipment that the scientist uses is the product of technology. The biologist would discover little without a microscope and the particle physicist even lesswithout an accelerator. In recent years, the lines between the role of the scientistand that of the engineer or technologist have become increasingly blurred. Much ofthe current research agenda is dictated by the possible practical applications of newscientific knowledge, and most research is carried out by multidisciplinary teams. Thismerging of science and technology has led some writers, such as Bruno Latour, tospeak of contemporary research as technoscience, a term used to draw attention to theinterdisciplinary character of most contemporary research as well as the social andhistorical contexts in which innovation takes place.6The conventional linear understanding of the relationship between science andtechnology holds that science discovers natural laws, technology applies scientificknowledge to practical problems, and the market selects which technologies are destined for widespread diffusion and use by society. However, this simplistic model hasbeen replaced in recent years by a more sophisticated understanding known as thesocial construction of technology (SCOT) model. According to SCOT, science andtechnology have a symbiotic relationship, each one helping the other, while socialvalues shape the precise forms that technological artifacts take. As Judy Wajcman(Selection 1.2.3) points out, the new sociology of technology supports the view that“technological artifacts are socially shaped, not just in their usage, but especially withrespect to their design and technical content.”Social values play a crucial role in shaping technologies and in determining whichof several technological options gain widespread acceptance in society. The use context of technology ultimately determines the meaning and deployment of technological innovations. Consider the Amish religious sect of central Pennsylvania and Ohiowho shun the use of many modern conveniences such as the radio, televisions, videorecorders, and telephones in the home because they fear that their use would destroythe rhythm of family life and cause separation to develop among members of thecommunity. However, the Amish make compromises with modern technology, allowing flashlights, hearing aids, and electric welders for what they collectively decide to belegitimate reasons.7 But if society’s values and attitudes toward technology play a12 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and Technologycentral role in determining the course that technological change takes, what attitudesshould we have toward technology? What kinds of moral values should guide thefuture development of technology in the twenty-first century?TECHNO-OPTIMISM VERSUS TECHNO-PESSIMISMOur attitudes toward technology are complex and often ambivalent. We cannot butacknowledge and credit science and technology with delivering many wonders thathave improved and extended our lives, and many people believe that improved technologies hold the solution to our problems in the twenty-first century. But manypeople are also disturbed by what they view as technology being out of control andsee technology as a threat to our traditional ways of life, to our environment, and evento our survival as a species. These contrasting attitudes toward technology are oftenreferred to as techno-optimism and techno-pessimism.Techno-optimists tend to emphasize technology’s benefits; they believe that science and technology are not the cause of society’s current ills; they do not believe thattechnology needs to be controlled or regulated; and they have faith in “technologicalfixes” that will solve outstanding social problems. Techno-pessimists, by contrast, tendto emphasize the risks and costs of technological changes; believe that many social illsare attributable to technology; and think that technology needs to be controlled or isincapable of being controlled. They do not have faith in “technological fixes” to solvesocial problems, instead emphasizing moral or political solutions.8While there are some extreme Luddites (those who are opposed to technologicalchanges) and antitechnologists, the dominant view of contemporary society still seemsto be a cautious form of techno-optimism. The modern idea of scientific and technological progress continues to hold sway not only for people in the developed countriesbut also increasingly for those in the less developed nations of the world who tend tosee development largely in terms of access to more sophisticated forms of technology.However, although technological development can raise the standard of living, rapidtechnological and social change also brings with it social dislocation, identity confusion, and a sense of disappointment and social alienation. Part of the problem is thattechnology has been allowed to assume a greater and greater role in human affairswithout anyone in particular being responsible for this change. Some writers see this asa problem, and others see free technological innovation as the source of prosperity andhuman progress.Among the ideas that critics of technology question is the concept of progress.Throughout most of history, most societies believed strongly in tradition, and changeswere presumed to be unwelcome and probably harmful. Kings sat comfortably (oruncomfortably) on their thrones, and when they were replaced through succession orconquest by other kings, quality of life changed little for the general populace. As lateas 1800, life was relatively little different than what it had been in prehistoric times—most people lived in extreme poverty. Then came the steam engine, the railroad, andthe automobile.Productivity exploded in the factory and on the farm as new crop varieties andchemical fertilizers enabled fewer farmers to produce more food than ever before. Asgains in productivity outstripped population growth, the industrial societies of England, Germany, and the United States grew wealthier faster than any societies inhistory. Telephones and railroads shrank time and space, and the factory systemMORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 13mass-produced goods that offered unimagined comfort and convenience to the bulkof society. Improvements in agriculture, medical advances, and improvements in public health and hygiene increased life span. In the industrialized world, progress wasmore than an idea; it was an everyday fact of life, and the cornerstone of progress wasseen to be scientific discovery and technological innovation.In the industrialized world, however, over a century of unchallenged belief inprogress was disturbed by several rude surprises. World Wars I and II demonstratedthat human cruelty and brutality were still with us, only magnified by weapons capableof producing mass death. Although science and technology could put a man on themoon, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 reminded the world that we were only abutton’s push away from a global nuclear war that could destroy humankind. Thatsame year, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in which she warned that pesticidessuch as DDT were accumulating in ever-larger amounts in species that progressed upthe food chain until eagles and peregrine falcons could no longer reproduce. DDT wasmaking their eggshells too thin to keep from cracking. It did not take a genius torealize that humans are also high on the food chain, and DDT was eventually banned.But more bad news was to follow. Mountain lakes in the northeastern United Statesand Europe were found to be too acidic to support fish, and the problem was tracedback to acid rain, automobile emissions, and the exhaust of coal-burning electricpower plants. Asbestos, our modern weapon against the age-old danger of fire, turnedout to cause the lung disease mesothelioma in asbestos workers and in people livingand working in asbestos-lined buildings. Radioactive by-products of nuclear powerplants piled up, and no one could think of a foolproof way to keep them isolatedand sealed for the thousands of years that they would be a hazard. In 1986 theChernobyl nuclear disaster spread radioactive contamination as far away as Sweden,and the world became even more worried about the dangers of nuclear power.Once the myth of technology as unmitigated blessing was destroyed, some peoplebegan looking for hazards posed by technology with as much fervor as had previouslyaccompanied the search for benefits. They were not disappointed; there were heavymetals in the rivers and fish, farmland soil erosion and salinization, lead paint in pipes,houses built on industrial waste dumps, health problems of people processing radioactive materials, smog, ozone holes, radon, and global climate warming. Technologyhelped in the search for its own defects by supplying satellite photographs and instruments that could detect trace chemicals in parts per billion.Many potential threats to human well-being have been identified, and others nodoubt soon will be. Some may be false alarms that are best ignored; some may be earlywarnings for which action will someday have to be taken; and some may be urgent lastcalls for which the optimum time to respond has already passed. If technology isresponsible for many of our present problems, it will likely be technology that willenable us to overcome them, sometimes in the narrow sense of finding a technologicalfix but more often in the wider sense that the processes of democratic decision makingand economic restructuring are social technologies that we use to address and resolvesocial problems. As Sheila Jasanoff (Selection 1.2.4) urges, the issue is “no longerwhether the public should have a say in technical decisions, but how to promotemore meaningful interaction among policy-makers, scientific experts, corporate producers, and the informed public.” Taking part in these decisions in a democraticsociety, however, depends on informed “technological citizens” who have attained adegree of scientific and technological literacy.14 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and TechnologyTechnological citizenship is a modern moral virtue. Being a good technologicalcitizen implies an understanding of mutual rights and responsibilities between oneselfand other citizens and between citizens and the government. Among our rights ascitizens are the right to receive knowledge and information about technologies andhow they might affect our lives, the right to express views and opinions about thedevelopment and use of technologies, and the right to participate in decisions concerning the development and deployment of technologies that are potentially harmfulto us. To exercise any of these rights, however, citizens must first accept the responsibility to educate and inform themselves about the nature of the technologies that arechanging their lives and to understand the ethical and public policy dimensions of thedecisions in which they claim the right to participate.As Langdon Winner (Selection 1.2.2) emphasizes, technologies are not valueneutral. In each case, there are human ends and values that stand behind and directthe technological processes. Technology itself is perceived by most people as of positive value because they understand that through technology we can increase ourpowers and capabilities and are therefore better able to satisfy our needs and desires.But most people also realize that technological innovations are seldom all for thegood, and almost inevitably trade-offs need to be considered. A new drug may helpcure a disease but may also produce undesirable side effects in some patients and mayin the long run promote the spread of new and more drug-resistant forms of thedisease. Car ownership may enable one to move about freely and comfortably, butit also entails loan payments, insurance payments, repairs, gasoline, smog, car accidents, global warming, and other downside effects.Predicting how inventions and technological innovations will be used and howthey will ultimately affect society is often very difficult. The history of technology is fullof stories of inventors and innovators who had no idea of how their inventions andinnovations would ultimately be used or the far-reaching effects that they would haveon society. Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press and movable metaltype, was a devout Catholic who would have been horrified to know that his inventionenabled the Bible to be widely printed and so helped stimulate the Protestant Reformation. Thomas Edison apparently believed that the phonograph would be mainlyused for recording people’s last wills and testaments and would undoubtedly beamazed by today’s tapes, CDs, and MP3 players, all of which are descended fromhis invention for recording sound. And who, until recently, would have thoughtthat chlorofluorocarbons, which have been used for decades as refrigerants, wouldbe eating away the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere? Given enough experiencesof this kind, one gets the idea that every new technology has not only known andexpected benefits and costs but also unknown and unforeseen benefits and costs. Newtechnologies sometime even produce consequences exactly the opposite of what theywere intended to produce, what the author Edward Tenner calls “revenge effects.”9Powerful new technologies alter the social context in which they arise; they change thestructure of our interests and values; they change the ways in which we think andwork, and they may even change the nature of the communities in which we live.Another feature of technological change is the way in which it produces winnersand losers in society. If technology is a source of power over nature, it is also a means bywhich some people gain advantage over others. Every technological revolution haswitnessed the competition among technologies and the eventual replacement of onetechnology or technological system by another. Think of what happened to blacksmithsMORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 15when the automobile came along, or what happened to watchmakers when the quartzelectric digital watch came along, or what is today happening to bank tellers with theintroduction of ATMs. In such processes of technological change, groups and individuals whose interests and livelihoods are connected to the older technology are usuallythe losers, and those whose interests are connected to the “next wave” of technologicalinnovation are the winners. However, because the directions and effects of technological change are often unpredictable, it’s difficult to tell in all cases whether any particularindividual or group will come out as a winner or a loser.Similar social phenomena are occurring today in the midst of the information andbiotechnology revolutions and the economic phenomenon known as globalization. Byand large, the wealthier and better-educated people in society remain largely favorablydisposed toward new technologies such as computers, the Internet, gene splicing, androbots and toward the globalization of production and distribution that these technologies have made possible. Many others, however, see these developments as threatening their jobs and livelihoods, their religious beliefs, and their traditional ways of life.New technological elites are being created in each of these fields while other peopleare becoming newly unemployed. Such social effects of technological change bringinto sharp relief the need to consider the ethical and moral dimensions of technology.TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICSIn considering the ethical issues arising from technology, it is important to distinguishclearly between the specific products of technological development, artifacts (for example, clocks, internal combustion engines, digital computers, respirators, and nuclearbombs), and the typical uses to which people put them, or what might be termed theirassociated sociotechnological practices. The fact that a particular device or technology isavailable for human use does not by itself imply that we ought to adopt and use thattechnology, nor does it tell us how the technology should or should not be used.A gun, for instance, can be used in many ways: as a paperweight, for recreational targetpractice, for hunting, for personal protection, or for the commission of a crime.Although a gun has many uses, its valence lies in the social practices of use typicallyassociated with it, which may or may not match its intended purpose. We can and domake moral judgments concerning the various sociotechnological practices associatedwith different products of technology. We accept some uses as morally legitimate, findothers to be morally questionable or problematic, and take steps to restrict or outlawcertain other uses to which these devices may be put. In some cases, such as chemical orbiological weapons whose only purpose is to produce mass death and destruction, weattempt to outlaw them entirely rather than to regulate their use. The war in Iraq thatbegan with the U.S. invasion in March 2003 was premised on the notion that suchweapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq and that, if not found and destroyedor allowed to fall into the wrong hands, could produce catastrophic results.When we consider these sorts of questions about how the products of technologyought to be used, we are really asking questions about how people ought to behave oract. Questions about whether to use products of technology or how such productsshould be used are ethical questions; that is, they are questions concerning what weought to do rather than about what we can do. Ethical questions related to technologyare basically no different from other ethical questions that we ask about humanconduct: In each case, we must attempt to determine which action or policy, from a16 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and Technologyrange of alternative possible actions or policies that we might follow, is the one that wemorally or ethically ought to choose. Viewed from the standpoint of technology,broadly defined, morality, ethics, and their cousin, law, are social techniques for regulating human behavior in society. They arose in human history at about the same timewhen most humans gave up the nomadic lifestyle and began building the permanentsettlements that we call cities. Cities require the maintenance of high levels of socialcooperation based on reliable expectations that others will act as they are required todo. For instance, a simple commercial transaction in which one person buys somethingfrom someone else at a mutually agreed-on price presupposes that the buyer and sellercooperate in settling on a price and, once a price has been agreed on, in actuallyexchanging the goods and money that the deal requires. Such economic exchangesare regulated by social custom and, in modern societies, by a complex system of lawspermitting the drawing up of contracts that legally bind individuals to the performanceof the agreement terms. Other laws, such as those that prohibit theft of private property or forbid others from assault, rape, and murder, are part of a social contract thatwe make with one another that allows us to live together in mass societies with areasonable degree of freedom and security.Many people are skeptical about whether there is single, universal correct moralviewpoint. However, almost everyone believes that there is a difference between rightand wrong and that most people understand that difference and can use that understanding to guide their behavior. Ethical decision making, like most other things in themodern age, is something that can be rationalized and practiced in accordance with atechnique. The technique of ethical decision making consists in a conscious attempt toget a clear view of the issues, options, and arguments that present themselves in anysituation that calls for ethical judgment or decision. The technique is basically this:1. Identify all stakeholders—that is, all individuals whose interests might be affected bya decision.2. Identify all possible courses of action that one might follow.3. Review all arguments for each option, developing pros and cons in terms of theirpotential risks and rewards for all stakeholders.4. Then, after having carefully worked through such deliberations, make a rationalchoice about which of the available options has the strongest set of moral reasonsbehind it.10Moral reasons are those that involve ethical principles governing such notions asfairness, justice, equality, duty, obligation, responsibility, and various kinds of rights.In most ethical decisions, such reasons contend with other, nonmoral reasons foractions based on prudence or self-interest, efficiency, and economy. From the moralpoint of view, ethical reasons ought always override nonmoral reasons for action whenthe two kinds of reasons conflict, although people do not always do what they oughtto. Ethical decisions concerning the use of technologies involving judgments of valueand obligation, responsibility and liability, and assessments of risk and benefit can ariseat various levels: the personal level of individual behavior, the level of institutional ororganizational policy, and the social level of public policy. As individuals, we are theconsumers and users of the products of technology in our everyday lives; as workers orstudents, we belong to and participate in institutions or organizations whose policiesand practices can affect our health and well-being; and as citizens, we all must beconcerned about the ethical issues that we face because of modern technology.MORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 17Ethical concerns arising from technology can be divided into four kinds. The firstand most basic address questions about whether and how traditional ethical values andnorms apply in new technological contexts. Technological innovations enlarge thescope of possible human action by allowing us to do some things that we could notdo before (for example, liver transplants) and to do things we could do before indifferent ways (for example, reheat food in microwave ovens). Each new technologythus raises the implicit ethical questions: “Should we employ this new technique/technology?” and if so, “How should we employ this new technique/technology?”In many cases, such questions are answered easily. However, in many other cases,decisions about whether, how, and when to use particular technologies can raise difficult and troubling ethical issues about how our traditional ethical values and rulesapply in new technological contexts.To illustrate this kind of issue, consider how our traditional notion of privacy isbeing altered by modern computer and communications technologies that make itmuch easier to collect and analyze information about individuals. In this arena, peopleare asking how the traditional value that we place on privacy can be protected in thedigital age. Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt (Selection 2.2.3) raise the alarm concerningthe increasing use of electronic-surveillance technologies by the government and giantcorporations, and James Stacey Taylor (Selection 2.2.4) argues that on balance the useof these types of technologies will make us more rather than less secure, assuming thattheir use is properly regulated and controlled. But as even Taylor admits, how thecalculation of risks and benefits turns out will depend to a great extent on the socialand political contexts in which these technologies are employed and by whom.Traditional approaches to ethics are basically two kinds: utilitarian (consequentialist) and deontological (Kantian). Consequentialist reasoning in ethics involves evaluating the rightness or wrongness of actions or policies in terms of the goodness orbadness of the consequences that they produce. Ian Barbour (Selection 1.3.1) pointsout that it is often impossible to apply utilitarian, or consequentialist, reasoning toethical problems involving technologies because it is difficult to quantify and comparethe expected benefits, harms, and risks that they may produce when placed in use. Onemain theme of this book is that when we evaluate which new technologies to develop,which to deploy, and how to deploy them, we need to consider carefully both thebenefits and costs and the opportunities and risks that the technologies entail—to theextent that we are capable of making such judgments. Often doing this sort of costbenefit analysis is very difficult or extremely inaccurate because (1) manifold aspectsneed to be considered, (2) costs and benefits often have no common measurementscale (if they can be measured at all), and (3) we are uncertain in predicting future orlong-term consequences of introducing a new technology into society. A second problem with the consequentialist approach is that it does not take into account the way inwhich benefits and harms are distributed and thus may give rise to allocations of socialcosts and benefits that are unjust. Despite these problems, consequentialist reasoningremains the dominant approach in the moral evaluation of technology.Deontological theories in ethics emphasize not only justice but also rights andduties, which in some cases will lead to ethical judgments that would require us tofollow a moral rule, honor a right, or discharge a moral duty even if doing so doesnot produce the greatest good. The theory of John Rawls may provide a way of combining the best elements of each approach by suggesting a way in which we can balancefreedom and equality that allows each person the maximal liberty to pursue his or her18 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and Technologyown self-interest, compatible with an equal liberty on the part of others, while alsorequiring that deviations from equality be arranged so that they benefit the least advantaged.11 Under this sort of view, for instance, everyone would have an equal liberty tobenefit from new pharmaceutical treatments for disease, but the poorest and sickestamong us would be entitled to social support to ensure that they can access theselifesaving technologies. Generally speaking, deonotological considerations set limits onthe possible uses of technologies and counsel us to employ our technologies only withinthe limits of what is ethically permissible. So, for instance, although supercomputersoperated by the National Security Agency make it technologically possible for the government to monitor the billions of e-mail messages that fly around the planet each day,ethical considerations concerning civil liberties such as freedom of speech and privacyshould determine what forms of electronic surveillance should be allowed.A second kind of ethical problem arises concerning some sociotechnological practices that, although innocuous in themselves, when employed by individuals, raiseserious concerns when their effects are aggregated across millions of users. There is,for instance, nothing intrinsically wrong with throwing empty bottles and cans into thetrash to be carted off to the nearest landfill. But when millions of American householdsengage in this practice on a regular basis, we find that we are wasting recyclableresources and running rapidly out of space for new landfills. Similar sorts of aggregation problems arise with respect to air and water pollution, overfishing, suburban development, and many other cases in which the aggregate and cumulative effects ofindividual sociotechnological choices threaten the long-term well-being of all.The current debate over global climate change due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere exemplifies this kind of ethical issue. The 2007report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) documents thefact that “the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrousoxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and nowfar exceed pre-industrial values.”12 The changes are mainly due to the burning of fossilfuels and agriculture and are thus anthropogenic—that is, caused by human activity.We are already seeing the effects of this global warming in phenomena such as theshrinking of glaciers, the defrosting of the tundra, and the reduction in Arctic ice inthe summer. The IPCC predicts that unless we do something to stabilize the atmosphere, Earth may reach a “tipping point” later in this century that will dramaticallyalter Earth’s climate and produce a significant rise in the ocean levels that will inundatemany coastal areas and cause other significant environmental damage. In his populardocumentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, former vice president Al Gore states hisview that global climate change “is not a political issue; it is a moral issue, one thataffects the survival of human civilization.”13 (Gore and the IPCC were awarded the2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work on the issue of global climate change.)Garrett Hardin (Selection 2.5.1) analyzed similar moral problems in his famousessay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” using as his example herdsmen overgrazingcommon lands. In such cases, each herdsman treats the common pasture as an inexhaustible resource and seeks to maximize his own self-interest. But if every herdsmandoes this, the result is that the pastureland soon becomes overgrazed so that nobodycan use it. Earth’s atmosphere has been treated in this way by humankind throughoutmost all of our history, but especially since the beginning of the industrial age. We arerapidly reaching the limits of how much carbon the atmosphere can absorb withoutaltering its geochemistry. Hardin argues that voluntary measures to limit this kind ofMORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 19overuse will not succeed and that the only solution available to us is greater responsibility. This responsibility is based not on individual acts of conscience but on “definitesocial arrangements” under which we mutually agree to coerce ourselves into reducingthe emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.As Stephen Gardiner (Selection 2.5.2) points out, we use the term responsibility inboth a backward-looking, or retrospective, and a forward-looking, or prospective,sense. In the retrospective sense, we think of responsibility primarily as liability forcausing past harms, particularly in order to allocate blame and determine who shouldmake amends. If we adopt this view of responsibility for global climate change, thenclearly the older industrialized nations—such as England, Germany, and the UnitedStates—are responsible for the greater proportion of the greenhouse gases that haveaccumulated in the atmosphere and thus should bear the primary responsibility forcleaning up the mess. A second reason for allocating responsibility primarily to theolder industrialized nations is that they are richer than other nations and can moreeasily bear the burden. On the other hand, from the prospective point of view, we stillneed to determine how to control future emissions of greenhouse gases, and in thiscase, various proposals have been made about how to allocate this responsibility for thepresent and future. One proposal that Gardiner discusses suggests that we determinethe current acceptable level of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions necessary tosafeguard the health of the planet and then allocate shares of that amount to eachcountry based on its population. Under this scenario, however, the older industrializedcountries would still bear the greatest burden of reduction. The United States withroughly 5 percent of the world’s population is responsible for emitting roughly 25percent of the greenhouse gases, while India and China, although they are both rapidly industrializing, still are below their per capita allocations. Under most all of thesescenarios, it is becomingly increasingly clear that continued delay in addressing thisglobal problem is not an acceptable option.A third class of ethical problems associated with technology concerns questions ofdistributive justice and social equality. New technologies generally benefit or advantage certain groups or members of society over others—namely, those who have mastery over or access to the technology first. In many cases, we think that because suchadvantages are earned through hard work or special knowledge they are thereforedeserved. However, in other cases, we may feel that such restricted access to sometechnologies gives certain individuals or groups unfair advantages over others, andwe seek to extend access to everyone in the society. Public libraries, for instance,were built to ensure that everyone could obtain access to books and learning.Today, we are putting computers and Internet connections into public schools forthe same reason. Questions of social justice and equality of opportunity thus can beoccasioned by technological innovation. Freeman Dyson (Selection 1.3.3) discussesseveral historical examples of this phenomenon and goes on to propose some technologies of the future that may increase social justice.Questions of social justice are also at the heart of the debate over the current waveof globalization. Some authors, such as Thomas Friedman (Selection 2.1.1) and Jagdish Bagwati (Selection 2.1.2), believe that globalization, as it has developed over thepast several decades since the advent of the information age, is a net benefit to everyone on the planet and has the potential to alleviate poverty and create prosperityworldwide. Others, such as Joseph Stiglitz (Selection 2.1.3) and the InternationalForum on Globalization (IFG) (Selection 2.1.4), believe that the rules under which20 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and Technologyglobalization has been conducted thus far are inherently unfair and are designed toallocate the benefits primarily to the already-rich countries and corporations at theexpense of the poor and vulnerable. They argue that considerations of social justicedemand that the global economic system be reformed to produce greater fairness andjustice for all citizens of Earth. And in the spirit of Hans Jonas’s notion of long-rangeresponsibility (Selection 1.3.2), the IFG proposes that certain critical resources, suchas freshwater, be placed off-limits to the market.A fourth and final kind of ethical question raised by technology concerns thescope of modern technology’s power to alter the world. In earlier and simpler times,we humans did not have the power to disturb very much the balance of nature oraffect the life prospects of other species or future generations of human beings. Butwhen we entered the nuclear age, all that changed. With nuclear weapons, we nowhave the power to destroy virtually all life on Earth. Nuclear waste material from ourreactors will last 10,000 years, posing a potential threat to generations as yet unborn.Issues and concerns of this type raise what are perhaps the most profound ethicalquestions about humankind’s relationship to nature through technology. Should wecontinue down the course set for us by Bacon and Descartes, who advised us to seekknowledge so that we could become the masters of nature, or should we change thiscourse toward stewardship and long-term sustainability?As Hans Jonas (Selection 1.3.2) argues, some contemporary technologies seem toopen new and deeply troubling ethical issues, issues of a kind that humankind hasnever had to address before. The existence of nuclear weapons, for instance, forces usto “consider the global condition of human life, and the far-off future, even, theexistence of the human race.” The emerging technology of genetic engineering createsthe prospect of our designing our own children and turning humanity itself into a kindof artifact. Some authors, such as Lee Silver (Selection 2.4.1), seem to welcome thisprospect, but others, such as Leon Kass (Selection 2.4.2), believe that we are at acrossroads that requires that we relinquish the opportunity to acquire the knowledgethat would enable us to create such a brave new world. Others, such as Michael Sandel(Selection 2.4.3), believe that we can place reasonable limits on how biotechnologyand genetic engineering will be employed on human beings that will allow some usesbut prohibit others. Genetic engineering of plants and some animal species is alreadyin widespread use, as pointed out by Claire Hope Cummings (Selection 2.4.4), and itmay already be impossible to put this particular genie back in the bottle. Jonas, for hispart, believes that technologies such as these that give us the capability to alter naturein fundamental ways should be approached with a sense of “long-range responsibility”and, above all, a sense of humility.ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, AND A SUSTAINABLE FUTUREIncreasing evidence shows that our current technological society is rapidly transforming Earth’s environment and probably not for the better. Hardly a day goes by that wedo not hear of global environmental problems such as deforestation, species extinction, depletion of nonrenewable resources, desertification, acid rain, water pollution,ozone destruction, and atmospheric warming. In part, these problems represent thelong-term and largely unforeseen effects of the Industrial Revolution, but they are alsocaused by the sheer weight of human population growth and the increasing demandsthat it places on Earth’s ecosystem.MORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 21As Robert Kates (Selection 2.5.4) points out, there has been much discussion ofthe idea of a transition to systems of sustainable development, and many organizationsand institutions now say they are committed to helping to bring about a more sustainable future. However, until recently the concept of sustainable development wasambiguous and ill defined, and discussions often tended to sidestep difficult questionsabout the real trade-offs between economic growth and environmental protection,and between the interests of the present and future generations. But a study groupof the National Academy of Sciences in 1999 helped clarify the matter by defining asustainability transition as one “that would meet the human needs for food, nurture,housing, education, and employment” for what is now predicted to be a maximumhuman population of about 10 billion people around the midpoint of the twenty-firstcentury. Meeting this goal will require significantly reducing current levels of hungerand poverty while maintaining the essential life-support systems of the planet.In 2000 the United Nations adopted the Millennium Development Goals(MDGs) in which the nations of the world committed themselves to the goals oferadicating extreme hunger and poverty; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality and empowering women; reducing child mortality; improvingmaternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other infectious diseases; andensuring environmental sustainability.14 According to the most recent MDG progressreport, some progress has been made in some regions in meeting these goals by thetarget date of 2015, but much more still needs to be done. In particular, it is crucialthat the richest countries honor their commitments to provide development assistanceto the poor countries of the world. Particularly troubling is the continued increase ofclimate-warming carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere and the continuing migrationof poor people from rural areas into already overcrowded cities. However, there aresome hopeful signs even here as Janet Sawin and Kristen Hughes (Selection 2.5.3)report in their analysis of the ways in which improved building design, constructiontechniques, and energy-saving technologies can help us to create “greener” cities. Theseeds of a future sustainable society are already present, but we need to nurture themso that they continue to grow.The global threats of the twenty-first century require social solidarity and technological innovation for their solution. These threats are different in several importantways from the threats that we faced throughout most of our previous history. First,these threats arise not mainly from the consequences of individual acts or omissionsor from forces beyond humankind’s control but from our own collective action. Second, they do not involve direct harms, for the most part, but rather increased risks ofharm that are distributed very broadly across individuals, often without their activeparticipation or knowledge. Third, the threats affect not only the present but also thefuture—often the distant, incalculable future. Fourth, they threaten not only humansbut also other animals, the natural environment, and life itself. Fifth, they are also to onedegree or another the result of technology; they are problems that have arisen in partbecause of new powers given to us by technological progress, powers that we have notalways learned to use wisely and responsibly. Sixth, they not only affect single communities or even single nations but also the whole of humankind.Our previous ethics has not prepared us to cope with such global threats. Traditional ethics has focused primarily on the moral requirements concerning individualaction, on the direct dealings between persons, rather than on the remote effects ofour collective action. This problem is particularly important with respect to widely22 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and Technologydistributed technologies, such as the internal combustion engine, whereby the cumulative effects of individual decisions can have a major impact on air quality even thoughno single individual is responsible for the smog. By and large, traditional moral normsdeal with the present and near-future effects of actions of individual human beings anddo not prepare us to deal with cumulative effects and statistical deaths. Traditionalethics, above all, has been anthropocentric—the entire nonhuman world has beenviewed as a thing devoid of moral standing or significance except insofar as it couldbe bent to satisfy human purposes. We have assumed that the natural world was ourenemy and that it did not require our care (for what could we possibly do to harm itreally?), and nature was not regarded as an object of human responsibility.In the past, we have attempted to fashion our ethical theories in terms of theseassumptions. The traditional maxims of ethics—for example, “Love thy neighbor asthyself,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and “Never treatyour fellow man as a means only but always also as an end in himself”—are in keepingwith the individualistic, present-oriented, and anthropocentric assumptions of ourethical traditions. Even the Christian ethic of universal love does not transcend thebarriers of time, community, and species. Even more modern ethical theories such asutilitarianism and Kantian ethics do not provide particularly good guidance when itcomes to the sorts of ethical concerns raised by technology. In part this is because theywere designed to be used to evaluate individual actions of particular moral agents. Butthe sociotechnological practices that comprise our collective action are not only madeup of many individual choices—such as the choice to have a child, to eat a hamburger,or to invest in a mining stock—but also the aggregation of these individual choices,plus those of organized collectivities such as corporations and governments. In mostcases, the individuals, business executives, or politicians who are making the choicesthat add up to our collective insecurity do not intend these threats to result, andneither they nor we consequently feel any sense of responsibility for them.Although individuals view themselves as moral agents and consider themselvesbearers of responsibility in all the roles in which they participate, the collectivities towhich we belong do not. All the threats that we face are in part the result of thisdiffusion of responsibility. How then should we, the citizens of Earth, be respondingto these environmental questions? Do people in richer countries have any responsibility to help those in poorer ones? Do we, in general, have any responsibilities to futuregenerations concerning the long-term social and environmental effects of our presenteconomic, lifestyle, and political choices? The notion of responsibility that we need tocultivate is not the backward-looking notion of responsibility as liability, which seeksto allocate blame for past harms, but the forward-looking sense of responsibility inwhich each of us and every organization and institution “takes responsibility” fordoing our part to combat social injustice and to protect environmental quality forfuture generations of humans and the nonhuman species with whom we share thisplanet. This notion of social responsibility, although it is voluntary and discretionary,places real demands on us as individuals and members of communities and requiresthat we think carefully about the decisions and choices that we make.All too often, decisions that involve complex political choices involving technologies are left to the discretion of elites (for example, scientists, engineers, policy “wonks,”and corporate and government officials) even though the consequences of their decisions will usually affect the interests of others who are not elites. The other interestedbut often silent parties are sometime called stakeholders. We are all stakeholders inMORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 23decisions concerning technology, but not infrequently the scientific, political, orcorporate elites make decisions about these questions in ways that primarily benefitthemselves at the expense of other stakeholders. It is often relatively easy for elites to“manufacture consent” for policies that they prefer by selectively sharing informationabout the possible risks and benefits of a particular technology policy with otherstakeholders whose interests might be adversely affected by it.15 For instance, in the1950s U.S. soldiers were ordered to witness nuclear explosions and were told thatthere was no risk of harm due to radiation. In fact, there was a risk, and years latermany of the soldiers who participated in these tests began developing lethal cancers.More recently, automobile companies, such as General Motors, conspired with giantoil companies and corrupt officials to “kill” a prototype electric car, the EV-1, despiteconsumer interest in an economical and nonpolluting alternative to petroleum-basedpersonal transportation.16To protect citizens against such unscrupulous practices, the government hasestablished various special agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration(FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Occupational Safetyand Health Administration (OSHA), which are mandated to act as watchdogs andlook out for the interests of the public and to prevent people from being exposed tounnecessary or unreasonable risks without their consent. However, the operations ofthese very governmental agencies have often become politicized, and key officialsappointed to run these agencies sometimes represent corporate interests rather thanthe public interest.Given the phenomena of regulatory capture by corporate interests, a more reliableline of defense is the hundreds of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such asCommon Cause, Greenpeace, or the International Center for Technology Assessment, who conduct independent research, educate the public, and lobby decisionmakers to enforce and protect the stakeholder interests that they are supposed torepresent. Such public-interest groups and the social movements that they representplay an important role in politics and provide a means, in addition to the ballot, bywhich ordinary citizens can participate in large-scale decisions that many affect theirlives for good or for ill.However, none of these advocacy groups can be effective without the support of aninformed and attentive citizenry. In democratic societies, individuals and groups aregiven the right to inform themselves on the issues, associate with others having similaror common interests, and participate in the political discussions that will determinewhich laws and policies will be enacted. If we fail as individuals to exercise theserights—that is, if we shirk our responsibilities as technological citizens—it is likelythat others will end up making these decisions for us, and when they do, they maynot always have our best interests at heart or in mind. If we accept the responsibilityto educate ourselves about the issues and to participate in the public conversationsabout them, then we will have some voice in how things will be decided and somecontrol over the future directions that our technological society will take. In the lastanalysis, there is no way for us to escape this responsibility, living as we do at the cusp ofthe Third Millennium, for we are now all the children of invention.Morton WinstonAugust 200724 INTRODUCTION • Society, Ethics, and TechnologyN O T E S1. For a rather long but still incomplete list of some of humankind’s most significant inventions, see the Time Line of Significant Technological Innovations on the inside front andback covers.2. Compare this definition to that found in Rudi Volti, Society and Technological Change, 2nded. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), in which technology is defined as “a systembased on the application of knowledge, manifested in physical objects and organizationalforms, for the attainment of specific goals” (p. 6).3. The term valence is also used to describe the way in which tools and technological systemshave “a tendency to interaction in similar situations in identifiable and predictable ways.”The terms end and focal function refer to the purpose in the mind of the designer of theartifact. See Corlann Gee Bush, “Women and the Assessment of Technology: To Think, toBe; to Unthink, to Free,” in Machina ex Dea, Joan Rothschild (Editor) (New York:Teachers College Press, 1983), 151.4. Rene Descartes, “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason andSeeking for Truth in the Sciences” (1637), The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. I,trans. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,1970), 119.5. Francis Bacon, “Thoughts and Conclusions,” in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, ed.B. Famington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 93.6. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).7. See Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), especially Chapter 7.8. The terms techno-optimism and techno-pessimism were suggested by the discussion of pessimism and optimism about technology found in Mary Tiles and Hans Oberdiek, Living ina Technological Culture: Human Tools and Human Values (New York: Routledge, 1995),14–31.9. See Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of UnintendedConsequences (New York: Random House, 1996).10. For more on ethical decision making, see C. E. Harris, Jr., Applying Moral Theories, 3rd ed.(Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 1997).11. John Pauls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).12. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Contribution of Working Group I to theFourth Assessment Report,” February 5, 2007; available online at http://www.ipcc.ch.Accessed July 7, 2007.13. Davis Guggenhein, An Inconvenient Truth, Paramount Pictures, 2006.14. United Nations, “Millennium Development Goals”; available online at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals. Accessed July 9, 2007.15. The idea of manufacturing consent is based on the work of Noam Chomsky, See especially, Noam Chomsky, “The Manufacture of Consent,” in The Chomsky Reader, ed.J. Peck (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 121–136.16. Chris Paine, Who Killed the Electric Car? Sony Pictures, 2006.MORTON WINSTON • Children of Invention Revisited 25
P A R T O N EPerspectives on Technology1.1 Historical Perspectives1.2 Social/Political Perspectives1.3 Ethical Perspectives– 27 –

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