Technology

In Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World', he describes a society where humanity is free, healthy and technologically advanced. Warfare and poverty have been eradicated, there is no racial discrimination and happiness reigns. Our lives now move with 21st century speed: mobile phones, computers, and aeroplanes conspire to allow us to communicate faster and more easily. Technology has indeed improved the way we live and certainly has allowed us to live longer. However, we need to ask: at what expense do we embrace technological advance?

Saint-Exupery alluded to this when he said that "The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them". A classic example of this was when the discovery of nuclear physics led to the invention of the atomic bomb, which resulted in utter devastation in World War II. Nuclear energy today is harnessed to provide electricity and power to industries and homes. However the problem of disposing nuclear waste and the destructive use of nuclear energy are issues that we face in today's relative peacetime. Iran is defying the international community by insisting on enriching uranium on its soil, and North Korea has shut out international nuclear inspectors in the past.

Frieberg was not entirely correct when saying that 'Only science can hope to keep technology in some sort of moral order". With advances in the fields of biology and genetics, one hopes that we will be able to increase yield in the crops that we harvest, or harvest stem cells so that we can grow parts of our body in the future to replace the defective parts. This has also a flip side where ethics and morals are compromised or challenged. For example, eugenics, the picking and choosing of favourable genetic traits in human offspring may lead to a world devoid of diversity. 'Scientific achievements' in stem cell research by South Korean scientist Dr. Woo-suk have been found to be fake and he and other members of his team have lost their jobs at Seoul National University.

In 'Brave New World', utopia is achieved by eliminating many things - family, cultural diversity, art, literature, religion and philosophy just to name a few. Written in the 1930s, this clearly hasn't happened today. Space research has given us Teflon which is now used as a non-stick material in frying pans. Spacecrafts have been sent to Mars and other planets so that we understand more about the universe we live in.

We experience life as it is with its suffering, misery, happiness and joy - the common denominator of the human race. Technology has not eliminated the experience of joy in seeing a new born child, or the sadness when an athlete loses a competition after years of training, as suggested by the anonymous writer. On the contrary, technology such as film and the internet has possibly brought us closer together by sharing our human experiences.