Beyond Paradise: Technology and the Kingdom of God

Beyond Paradise

Technology and the Kingdom of God

A Prophetic Primer for Church Leaders

Jack Clayton Swearengen

BEYOND PARADISE

Technology and the Kingdom of God

Copyright © 2007 Jack Clayton Swearengen. All rights reserved. Except for brief

quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

ISBN 10: 1-59752-842-0

ISBN 13: 978-1-59752-842-9

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7503-3

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter 1: Technology Changed the World

Chapter 2: In Technology We Trust

Chapter 3: Transcending All Limits

Chapter 4: The Myth of Morally Neutral Technology

Chapter 5: Impacts in the Physical Realm

Chapter 6: Impacts in the Social, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Realms

Chapter 7: Ethics and Values in Engineering Design

Chapter 8: The Spirit of the Age

Chapter 9: Personal Mobility: The Greatest Freedom?

Chapter 10: Technology and the Kingdom of God

Chapter 11: What Then Should We Be Doing?

Bibliography

To my family—

who tolerated me during four years of writing.

And, come to think of it,

forty years of preparation.

And to the reviewers—of chapters and more:

Bev Beckendorf, Peter Bosscher, Andy Dryden, Denis Haack, Ginny Hearn, Walt Hearn, Adrienne Kuehl, Joel Lipkin, Dan Melligan, Ron Miller, Terry Morrison, Al Segall, Tim Stafford, Pete Swearengen, Ken Touryan, Diana Van Konynenberg, Rich Van Konynenberg, Bob Wauzzinski, John Wood, Ned Woodhouse.

Many, many thanks.

Prologue

One day, while I was working on this book, my wife, Nancy, went to see our family physician about upper back pain. The visit took longer than we expected, so on the way home she called me on the cell phone to say she would arrive shortly. Such is the convenience of the cell phone. But an all-too-common hazard of the technology intervened: she took her eyes off the road while dialing, ran over the curb, and into a fire hydrant.

Another technology then came into play: air bags. Because she is barely 5’2, the driver’s side air bag hit her with full force, breaking her right arm in four places and removing much skin from her lips—and also knocking the cell phone to the floor. When the telephone rang at home, I could hear traffic noise and eventually a policeman speaking to Nancy. I realized I was listening in on the aftermath of her accident. Because the cell phone had alerted me, I drove the route I knew she would travel, and found her unconscious in the driver’s seat but with an ambulance already on the scene. Thanks to wireless communications technology she was able to get rapid medical attention; and thanks to advanced medical technology she has recovered. The industry has now learned that explosive deployment of first-generation air bags could injure children and small adults. Hence second-generation bags were designed to inflate less violently, and third-generation systems now include a seat sensor that prevents deployment if the occupant weighs less than eighty-five pounds. So, cell phone technology caused" Nancy’s accident, but also allowed emergency personnel (and me) to reach the scene quickly. Air bag technology was developed to prevent injuries, but in this case it was the source of injury.

Cell phones offer the great convenience of mobile communication. Gone are the days of searching for a phone booth, a parking place, and coins only to discover the phone book missing. But multitasking drivers—using cell phones, fiddling with their radios or applying makeup—are involved in nearly eight out of ten collisions or near-crashes.¹ Headsets or hands-free cell phones do not solve the problem, because it seems that using mobile phones while driving is just as dangerous whether drivers are chatting through a headset or holding on to the hand set.² It’s not just keying in phone numbers or calling up messages but the conversation itself that is distracting.³ A similar outcome applies to air bags. They protect us from one kind of hazard but introduce a new one.

If we study technology and technological society we will discover these are just small examples of a recurring pattern. It turns out that all technologies have consequences that were not part of the original intent and are usually not anticipated. When we implement technological solutions to these introduced problems we discover new surprises which then need to be solved and so on. And as we get locked into this pattern we may be distracting ourselves from seeking more durable social solutions to the problems we are trying to solve. Moreover, technology is a distraction by itself—demanding our time and attention for selecting, acquiring, learning, operating, maintaining, and disposing. Ellen Goodman wryly noted that with the countless hours she spent learning how to operate and maintain high-tech devices she could have learned Mandarin. But, she lamented, the language skill would have been of lasting value whereas the procedures she had to master for the devices became obsolete and utterly useless.⁴ Clearly along with technological progress our lives have become much more complicated. Ultimately technology may be a profound distraction, diverting us individually and collectively from our highest calling—the kingdom of God.

All this serves to introduce the first purpose of this book, which is to convince Christians that technology assessment is worthy of inclusion in discipleship. Actually it is more than worthy—it is an indispensable part of faithfully obeying the Scriptural directives to fill, subdue, rule, cultivate, and keep. These directives comprise the foundations of the culture mandate; and if our response is measured by population growth, industrialization, wealth, consumption, and the human footprint on the planet we have done superbly. Technology has been the key. It has enabled Earth to support many more human numbers, protected us against the forces of nature, relieved suffering and drudgery, provided great advances in communication, mobility, biology, information and other fields, and produced great wealth for many people, at least in Western nations. All this success has convinced some that progress based upon technology is unlimited. But along the way we have fashioned a society that is technological before anything else.

Most Christian leaders avoid discussion of science and technology because they don’t know the languages of either discipline and don’t understand the issues that science and technology are hurling at us. What, for example, might be the biblical position on globalization? On energy use and global warming? On eugenics, transgenics, nanotechnology, and GMOs? On privacy and surveillance? Some may question whether these are biblical issues at all. As a result of this lack of understanding, both leaders and their congregations are at a loss when the opportunity arises to provide biblical insights into contemporary issues. And they become vulnerable to unnecessary polemics between science and faith.

Hence the Church needs a crash course in technology and culture. In my structured engineer-type way of thinking I would describe the need this way: To grow as disciples of Jesus Christ we must discern how much our lifestyle, values, and worldviews are shaped by non-biblical influences. This in turn means that we understand whether or to what degree the scientific-technical worldview is biblical. Next, believers must be equipped to serve as God’s agents. To carry out the Shema and the Great Commission we must understand the spiritual forces that stand in opposition to the gospel. What are the gods and idols of our time? What things are replacing God in people’s lives? Serving as God’s agents for the advance of His kingdom means that we work for His purposes of reconciliation, healing, and transformation. Because technology dominates our lives and our culture, authentic discipleship must include steering the technological enterprise toward biblical norms.

The second purpose of Beyond Paradise is to explain how the Church can use biblical values to confront the scientific-technical worldview and influence contemporary technological culture. Practical means are presented for assessing the arrows of technology and progress and redirecting—i.e. steering—them toward spiritual, social-cultural, aesthetic, and environmental sustainability. A theology of technology begins to emerge from the process. Such a theology has yet to be discussed—let alone adopted—by the Church. Nor to my knowledge has any previous author set forth a path for the Church to serve as transformational agent for technology. Unfortunately, becoming a Christian does not automatically transform our worldviews or even give us new discernment.

Beyond Paradise is intended as a primer for readers who aren’t ready yet to grapple with the existing philosophical treatments of the subject. It is intended for Christians who are seeking to be faithful to the whole of God’s revelation and to church leaders who desire to help their congregations apply biblical principles to the contemporary issues of Western society. I presume that all of my readers are users of technology, and that no Luddites will be attracted to the book. Principles for developing and using technology and steering the technological enterprise are developed from Scripture, including the means for influencing our culture. The book is also for Christians who develop technology. Some technology students may not be sure why they are in engineering or other applied sciences, or have some doubts about being there. The book will help in choosing a first job, which should entail more than selling oneself to the highest bidder. If you are already employed in technology, you may find ideas to help you exert an influence in your workplace, perhaps through innovative approaches that achieve organizational objectives but come closer to biblical ideals. That is good preparation for a time in your career when you may become a decision-maker for your organization.

Chapters 1–3 present a time-scale portrayal of technological civilization. Technology’s origins and development are reviewed, and its effects on human civilization, other species, and the planet itself are examined. The development affirms that technological probably characterizes contemporary Western civilization better than any other word. Chapters 4–9 comprise a discussion of the consequences. Working with the engineering concept of limits, likely techno-futures are described and examined in terms of environmental, social, and aesthetic sustainability. The scientific-technological worldview confuses progress with growth, exalts personal mobility as the greatest freedom, and discounts any notion of limits to human endeavor. As a result the social and spiritual elements of our culture are threatened as much as the physical environment is—perhaps more. Chapters 10 and 11 present a biblical foundation for technology as the platform from which technological civilization may be redirected toward four-fold sustainability. Acting individually—and collectively through the Church—God’s people can provide the missing vision and lead the way toward healing of society.

I have endeavored to use contemporary illustrations that should be familiar to both laity and clergy. Many of the illustrations are from my personal experiences, and to a significant degree the book integrates the separate pieces that comprised the topics of my journal papers in the field of technology and society. In summary, my objectives are to:

1. convince Christians that technology is shaping our culture and dominating our lives for better or worse;

2. persuade us to be proactive; to manage the impact of technology in our lives individually and to demonstrate that alternative to the general culture;

3. unpack the scriptural mandate for doing these things;

4. develop a biblical foundation for technology; and

5. provide practical means for assessing and steering technology toward biblical norms.

Objectives 1 and 2 are developed by means of examples from past, present, and future technologies. Items 3 and 4 are derived from Scripture—together with insights from theological and sociological treatises. The means for pursuing objective number 5 are adapted from an analysis of industrial ecology (IE). We discover that the foundations of the young discipline can be derived from Scripture; so the methodology can be extended from environmental sustainability to the social, aesthetic, and spiritual realms. The concept of Hippocratic engineering is introduced for biblically-based technology development.

JCS

October 2006

1 Klauer et al., The Impact of Driver Inattention.

2 McEvoy et al., Role of mobile phones in motor vehicle crashes.

3 Quoted in Granelli, Headsets don’t reduce accident rate, A1, A13.

4 Goodman, Have your toothbrush call my laptop, G1, G8.

Chapter 1

Technology Changed the World

Announcements proclaiming that particular technologies will change the world are familiar—and some technologies have changed things in big ways. The social and cultural changes brought about by the printing press, gunpowder, personal computers, automobiles, railroads, steamships, airplanes, antibiotics, and many of other technologies were profound. But revolutions are easier to identify using hindsight rather than foresight. In 1883 Lord Kelvin predicted X rays will prove to be a hoax. In 1932 Albert Einstein remarked there is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. Thomas Edison thought alternating current would be a waste of time. Everything that can be invented, has been invented, announced Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office in 1889. ¹ Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when he was Secretary of the Navy, predicted that airplanes would never be useful in battle against a fleet of ships. In 1960 the New York Times predicted a flourishing civilization on the moon twenty or thirty years hence. ²

In terms of technology, people living at the time of the Civil War had more in common with the patriarch Abraham (ca. 2000 BC) than with people living in America in the latter half of the twentieth century.³ If a person were transplanted from 1865 to our modern society, he/she would struggle to comprehend the leaps that had occurred in military technology, transportation, communications, medicine, and many other areas. Commercial jet aircraft service was inaugurated in 1952; Sputnik—the first man-made satellite—orbited Earth in 1957; and in 1962 the first U.S. nuclear power plant began generating electricity. In July 1969 Neil Armstrong walked on the moon; and in 1972 the American Board of Nuclear Medicine administered its first certification exam. The entire semiconductor revolution, with microchips leading to a new world of communications, information management, automation, labor-saving devices, and entertainment occurred during the second half of the century. In 1990 when the Cold War ended, the atomic Scientists turned their doomsday clock back an additional few minutes before midnight.

Perhaps of all technological breakthroughs, those in medicine affect our lives in the most personal ways. When I was two years old I came down with a severe case of pneumonia. I faintly recall being in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Zanesville, Ohio, in an oxygen tent. Years later my mother told me that our family physician doubted that I would survive unless he could obtain some penicillin, which was being hailed as a new wonder drug. That was the year after Pearl Harbor, and all of the limited supplies were reserved for the military. Somehow our doctor must have succeeded in finding enough penicillin, because I recovered. My early childhood memories also include seeing houses posted with quarantine notices because some child inside had scarlet fever or some other contagious disease.

After the Second World War we moved to Pasadena, California. My mother enrolled her three children in swimming classes at the nearby public pool just as an epidemic of poliomyelitis began sweeping the nation, paralyzing and killing children. Everyone knew of someone who had gotten polio; three of my cousins in Chicago—all in the same family—contracted it. Summers became seasons of fear for parents. All they knew to do was to keep their children away from public places and have them avoid excess exertion. So, as the days warmed into summer we had to drop out of swimming and stay at home. But the Salk vaccine ended the siege; and since my childhood pneumonia bout, vaccines have been developed for many of the other diseases that had previously gripped people in a climate of fear—tuberculosis, measles, mumps, smallpox, chickenpox, plague, and influenza.

When I was in high school, my pal Greg’s brother died of kidney disease, followed soon after by his father. Doctors informed Greg that he was genetically destined for the same fate. His kidneys did fail, but by then the dialysis machine was available, so Greg went into the hospital three times a week for dialysis. He had headaches afterward, but the treatment kept him alive for several years until finally he was able to have a kidney transplant. Without that dialysis machine, my friend could not have lived to see his two children grow up. Today, even when dialysis is still required, the treatment for kidney failure has greatly improved. Medical science has learned to transplant internal organs, provide artificial life support when vital organs fail, perform fantastic skin treatments for burn patients, and even cure some types of cancer. The human genome has been mapped, biological science is beginning to develop means to treat and cure some hereditary diseases, and bioengineers are developing mechanical or electromechanical replacements for damaged body parts.

Not long ago the National Academy of Engineering and a consortium of engineering societies sought to identify the most significant engineering triumphs of the twentieth century. The top twenty vote-getters were compiled in A Century of Innovation,⁴ along with a description of the benefits delivered. The winners are listed in Table 1.1. Abundant,

Table 1.1.

available electric power was voted the top innovation, because it helped spur America’s economic development, and the benefits were distributed from cities to farms. Health technologies indisputably belong on the list, but would not have progressed without electrification, refrigeration, electronics, imaging, and quite probably clean water supply. Air conditioning and refrigeration were included because often we take the likes of refrigeration and air conditioning for granted even though they have significantly improved our sense of comfort and contributed to our physical health, giving us the ability to transport and extend the shelf life of food. Radio and TV were included because they are much more than mere entertainment devices. They have changed the way we view the world and our place in it. And the telephone has made the whole planet a smaller but much more connected place for all of us.

Computers are in the list, as we would expect. Today’s young people can hardly imagine living without computers. Yet at the end of the 1950s only 2,000 computers were functioning in the whole world. The best of them, such as the UNIVAC, the IBM 702, and the DEC PDP-11, could execute maybe 10,000 machine instructions in one second. By the year 2000 there were 300 million active computers capable of executing several hundred million instructions per second. That represents a four-billion-fold increase in computing power in 40 years, or an annual growth rate of 56%! This phenomenal increase in computing power is manifest in the growth and increased sophistication of both embedded systems (such as microprocessors) and outside systems (such as the Internet). In addition, manufacturing and distribution processes have been enhanced by increased use of computing power and technology, so that our automobiles are assembled and painted by robots, and laser scanners provide retail check-out and re-order inventory at the same time.⁵

Many of us have been directly affected by recent advances in medical science. For about a decade, our adult son—and father of three school-age children—had suffered from epileptic seizures. In recent years they became more frequent and more debilitating. Anti-seizure drugs, although initially effective, were no longer able to control the episodes, and eventually Peter had to give up driving. Perhaps in bygone days when extended families lived under one roof, the family could have distributed the care-giving and shared the chores, but in contemporary American culture young families are on their own. Although facing a difficult existence, Peter had the advantage of living in a big U.S. city (San Francisco, California) where modern medicine was available, specifically in a neuroscience unit specializing in epilepsy. A week spent in the hospital for advanced diagnostic testing enabled the doctors to pinpoint the source of the seizures to a small region in his brain. Joyously, we learned that the seizures originated in his temporal lobe, in a place accessible to surgery. Additional tests permitted the doctors to understand his brain’s neural patterns and predict the impact of surgery. Each brain hemisphere was sedated in turn while he responded to a variety of questions and stimuli. It became clear that Peter had a congenital vascular abnormality that was causing blood to leak. Could the leakage have been exacerbated by years of playing soccer, one of his favorite sports? At any rate, certain decay products of the leaked blood had been toxic to his brain tissue.

A few weeks later, a neurosurgeon removed the abnormal vessels and the damaged tissue. His surgery was guided by the battery of diagnostic data previously acquired on Peter’s condition. Peter was even awakened during the surgery to answer questions! I might be less inclined to tell this story if the outcome weren’t positive; but it was. Peter is healed. A few months after surgery, he had one seizure while playing squash, but the neurosurgeon dismissed its significance as due to overstressing his still-not-fully-healed brain. Now he takes minimal medication and has been free of seizures for more than two years. But even if he hadn’t been cured, the medical diagnostic and surgical procedures make quite a story, and Peter is telling it. With his doctors’ encouragement, he made a video record of his tests and surgery. With support from the Epilepsy Foundation, that record is being edited into an instructional video.

Innovation in health technologies shows no signs of slowing. Consider some developments from the year 2003 alone. Surgeons in Napa, California, used robotic extensions of their arms and hands to perform minimally invasive surgeries (MIS) through tiny incisions, while still having the three-dimensional view of open operations. In a classic heart operation, a foot-long incision might be made and rib bones broken to open the chest cavity. With the robot, the surgeon cuts only two or three small holes, 5 to 8 millimeters in diameter, for the robotic arms to enter. The patient’s heart does not have to be stopped for the procedure, nor must the patient be put on a heart-lung machine to survive.⁶ A company in Sunnyvale, California, has gone into business as the world’s first producer of surgical robotic arms. Scientists in North Carolina built a brain implant that permits monkeys to control a mechanical arm with their thoughts. The remote arm was connected to the monkey’s brain, possibly the first time that mental intentions have been harnessed to move a mechanical object.⁷ In England a neurosurgeon implanted an electrode into the medial nerve of his arm to link his nervous system to a computer. Then, from a laboratory in New York, he was able to move a mechanical hand in England by thinking about it and moving his own fingers.⁸ At Walter Reed Army Medical Center an amputee learned to control his prosthetic arms and hands by electrical impulses from muscles in his forearms—the same muscles he once used to move his real hands and wrists. The impulses went to microprocessors powering motors in his new electromechanical wrists and arms.⁹ A U.S. research consortium announced progress on a retinal prosthesis, a seeing eye chip with as many as 1,000 tiny electrodes, to be implanted in the eye. It has the potential to allow people who have lost their sight to regain enough vision to function independently.¹⁰

Changes in communication have been almost as dramatic as those in medicine. The Gutenberg printing press first made it easy to communicate the exact same message to a large number of people beyond voice contact and for the readers to absorb the message at their own pace. Today many modes of telecommunication supplement the printed page. The Internet and other media are interconnected by satellite, fiber optic cable, or atmospheric radio waves. Some futurists have predicted that within a generation, up to half of all human interactions will be via tele-living. Photos, movies, and videos provide experiences that are both virtual and repeatable, even for those who cannot travel.¹¹

For those who are mobile, transportation has expanded to all the firmaments, from land and water to the sky and finally space. Think of how the power to propel us on our journeys has changed: from human to animal to wind power, then steam and electric power, the internal combustion engine, jet aircraft, rocketry, and nuclear power for ships. Much of today’s transportation is guided by inertial navigation, radar, or a global positioning system (GPS). According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, in 2003 there were 230.2 million registered vehicles in the United States, up from 225.7 million in 2002 and more than the number of licensed drivers.¹² A vast infrastructure has grown up to support the use of automobiles. Following the same course, an industrial complex called general aviation now supports a growing number of private pilots and aircraft, and another supports recreational boating.

What Do We Mean by Technology and Culture?

So far, I have been using the word technology and describing culture without defining the terms, so it is time to develop some working definitions before delving more deeply into the relationship between them. If we were to give theologians the first opportunity to define the terms, they would probably point to the first two chapters of Genesis, which describe God’s work of creation and present His first instructions. The Creator gave human beings freedom not just to enjoy the creation, but to use it, within limits, to develop culture. In that context, culture refers to the total result of human activity; civilization would have a similar meaning. So defined, culture encompasses all human achievement: the work of human minds and hands. It is the artificial, secondary environment that humans superimpose on the natural. It includes language, habits, ideas, beliefs, customs, social organization, inherited artifacts, technical processes, and values. As theologian Richard Niebuhr pointed out, gifts of nature are received as they are communicated, without human intent or conscious effort; but gifts of culture cannot be possessed without effort on the part of the recipient.¹³

What definitions would an anthropologist contribute? In anthropology books from the 1880s, it is the making and use of tools that distinguishes humans from animals. Benjamin Franklin allegedly coined the term homo faber—man the tool maker—and Karl Marx used it in his writings.¹⁴ Today it seems clear, however, that some animals, birds, and even insects use objects such as sticks and rocks as rudimentary tools. One might argue that a spider web and a cocoon are manufactured tools. Looking back on the Industrial Revolution and its consequences, I am compelled to add potens (power, powerful) to Franklin’s definition, because the distinguishing characteristic of industrialization is the harnessing of natural energy to accomplish human purposes. So my definition of human becomes Homo potens faber—Man the power tool maker/user. I concede that an eagle flying on updrafts and turtles using the high tide to lay their eggs also are harnessing natural energy. But they are merely using it, not consciously transforming it to accomplish new ends. A psychologist would probably add self-awareness to the definition of what it means to be human, although self-awareness is arguably present in certain animals. If the psychologist added "seeking of purpose and meaning in existence to their definition then the theologians might agree.

In both common and academic usage, the word technology is variously used to refer to tools, instruments, machines, organizations, media, methods, techniques, and systems. French sociologist Jacques Ellul adopted an even broader umbrella of technique, which he defined as the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency . . . in every field of human activity.¹⁵ For now, the following set of definitions for technology will suffice, along with the association of an academic discipline for each definition.

• The process of extending or modifying the natural world: bigger, smaller, faster (engineering)

• Bodies of skills, knowledge, and procedures for making and doing useful things (social science)

• The defining mark of human beings (anthropology)

• A special form of knowledge that is compatible with science and controllable by the scientific method, and produces some practical end (philosophers of science)

• The definitive characteristic of modern society (sociology)

What Purpose Does Technology Serve?

Western societies have moved far beyond the simple identification of technology with tools and machines. According to social critic Lewis Mumford, today technology includes the whole of our material culture.¹⁶ Engineering students have been taught for years that technological developments arise to fill needs, as reflected in the saying that necessity is the mother of invention. But as social philosopher Carroll Purcell puts it, many modern ‘needs’ are themselves inventions, the product of an economy that stimulates consumption so that it can make and market things for a profit.¹⁷

The broader definitions of technology have given rise to correspondingly broader visions of the purposes of technology. The first and probably most familiar purpose is to make human life safer. Before the Industrial Revolution, that objective was more or less limited to subduing or managing the hostile forces of nature, including wild beasts and acts of God such as extreme weather, flood, fire, or famine. Today, although we would add subduing pathogens and developing artificial organs and new treatments for disease, congenital defects, even the effects of aging, we still refer to acts of God, and look for technological solutions to harness nature or make it more predictable.

A second purpose is more recent in origin than the first; certainly it emerged subsequent to the Industrial Revolution and perhaps since the age of automation. This purpose is to relieve drudgery and suffering, especially as related to repetitive, dangerous, or arduous tasks. ‘Labor-saving devices’ for the household and robots to replace assembly-line workers are examples. From a theological perspective, the first two purposes could be understood as mitigating some of the effects of humanity’s fall from the state of innocence that humans enjoyed in the Garden of Eden.

A third purpose of technology is to provide material prosperity, by increasing the rates of resource extraction, goods production, and global commerce. This is arguably the most notable aspect of technology’s contribution to human welfare, because three major advances—the initial development of tool use, the agricultural revolution, and the Industrial Revolution—each revolutionized human culture and enabled quantum jumps in the population of the planet. Each revolution allowed people to be better fed, clothed, housed, protected, and healed.

The Industrial Revolution actually included a second agricultural revolution, which went beyond the initial use of tools to cultivate and irrigate the soil.¹⁸ This second revolution was characterized by mechanization of agriculture, and it was enabled by inventions such as:

• Jethro Tull’s seed drill (1701)

• James Small’s cast iron plow (1765)

• Andrew Meicle’s threshing machine (1780)

• Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper and binder (1834)

• Anna Baldwin’s suction machine to milk cows (1878)

• The Haber-Bosch process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen (early twentieth century)

Today the entire food system has been industrialized and automated—by refrigeration for crop transportation and storage; fossil-fuel based fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; irrigation, ever larger mechanical systems for cultivating, planting, and harvesting; global positioning systems, and computer analysis to optimize fertilizing & harvesting. Crop hybridization produced the first green revolution; but today innovators hope that agricultural biotechnology (genetically modified organisms, or GMOs) will lead to a new green revolution.

It could be argued that the U.S. is undergoing a contemporary knowledge revolution as it morphs from a manufacturing to an information society. An optimistic assessment has globalization of information technology (IT) producing a new wave of job growth in the U.S.,¹⁹ and a case may be made that the knowledge revolution is revolutionizing culture. However, IT has not yet enabled a jump in the Earth’s carrying capacity—its ability to support life. If it can affect such global issues, the most likely avenue will be indirect—through genomics, biotechnology, high-tech agriculture, and miniaturization.

Each technological revolution established what appeared at the time to be unlimited resources for population growth. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, the third purpose of technology has taken on additional significance, because concerns are growing about the long-term impacts of human activity on Earth’s life-support systems. Population levels, economies, and cultures are inextricably linked to how we use, produce, process, dispose of, and recover or recycle natural and synthetic materials and energy, and the innumerable products made from them.²⁰ For those reasons, the future trajectory of Earth’s human population is uncertain. Will we experience continued growth, or are we approaching decline, even crash?

A fourth purpose of technology is to achieve security and hopefully even world peace. During the hunter-gatherer period weapons were used to fend off enemies; but in the twentieth century the development of armaments accelerated dramatically, along with their applications in battle. When we apply satellite imaging technology to watch our adversaries we are even using technology to manage uncertainty. Beyond national security, people increasingly look to technology to provide domestic, social, and personal safety and security. Examples include detection, tracking, and access denial systems; intelligence technologies (such as eavesdropping, wiretapping, and); cyber security through spam blockers, antiviral software and anti-spyware.

A fifth purpose follows closely from the fourth, although it is more closely related to economic security than to military security. In this case, technololgy is used to export democracy and capitalism in the process of globalization. Globalization is technology-enabled, through the Internet, jet transport, and containerized freight. Advocates of globalization believe that trading partners don’t make war on each other; democracies don’t start wars, and that global commerce is the best way to increase the material well-being of the less-developed nations who are often our adversaries. The fourth and fifth purposes for technology were combined to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The pre-emptive attack was rationalized on the basis of a threat to U.S. domestic security, and the political objective was to install Western-style democracy. For better or worse, however, globalization includes the export of Western (especially U.S.) culture.

A sixth purpose is more futuristic and actually cross-cuts all the others: use of technology to shape our destiny as a species. Today science news, and to some degree popular news, is replete with announcements of scientific advances and speculations about where they are leading. Engineers collaborate with geneticists, biologists, biochemists, and materials scientists in efforts to redesign living organisms. Cross-disciplinary research programs combine molecular-level computing, nanotechnology (with characteristic dimensions on the order of molecular dimensions), and genetic manipulation to develop human-machine hybrids—or cyborgs. What was once science fiction is being touted as the next step in human evolution.

Big Technology—Big Impacts

Western civilization was revolutionized by industry and commerce, but not without cost. Samples of hair from historical figures like Newton and Napoleon show the presence of toxic elements such as antimony and mercury. By the 1800s, certain trades were associated with characteristic occupational diseases: chimney sweeps contracted cancer of the scrotum from hydrocarbons in chimney soot; hatters became ‘mad’ from nerve-destroying mercury salts used to treat felt fabric; and bootblacks suffered liver damage from boot polish solvents.

Industrial economies were built of iron and steel. Early craftsmen found that wood, burned in contact with certain minerals, changed them into metallic substances of great usefulness. But wherever the iron industry took hold, the production of charcoal consumed the forests of the land. That early material shortage became a crisis that led to the next great advance in metallurgical engineering. The smelting of iron using coal instead of charcoal determined the subsequent history of Britain and, indeed, of the rest of the world.²¹

As the end of Britain’s forests drew nearer, admirals and statesmen became alarmed for the future of British supremacy at sea if their oak timber were depleted. Thus one of the purposes of the colony to be established in America for Queen Elizabeth by Raleigh’s expedition of 1585 was the production of iron from the ores and immense forests of the new continent. After Virginia was at last founded in 1607, one furnace and two small forges were erected at Falling Creek, 66 miles above Jamestown. According to historian Richard Kirby, it was their lighting that provoked the massacre of March 22, 1622. In order to preserve their forests, the Indians wrecked the furnaces and slaughtered the workmen.²²

Pursuit of prosperity through technology made the first industrial cities nearly uninhabitable. The London of the novels of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle was enveloped in darkness from coal smoke and soot; slag heaps accumulated in neighborhoods; the Thames River was an open sewer; and the stench of industrial, human, and animal waste filled the air. Child labor was the norm; many children and adults died from typhus, cholera, and pneumonia. Pittsburgh and Chicago in the U.S. were not much different, although child labor was less common. In the twentieth century Automation caught on as a means to reduce human exposure to hazardous industrial activities as well as to increase productivity.

Individual technologies intended for social good can be misused. Some analysts argued that the mere possibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative was sufficient to force the Soviets to capitulate in the arms race. In the moment of triumph at the end of the Cold War, a U.S. State Department employee suggested that we might have arrived at the end of history.²³ He meant that Western capitalism and liberal democracy had trumped all other human achievements in self-government and human welfare. Then on September 11, 2001, I was teaching an engineering class on systems design when the news came that four American commercial jets had been hijacked and turned into weapons of mass destruction, a phrase