The Idea of progress - publié le 28/07/2020

Extraits

[...] the technological progress is undeniable. While these technologies were at first created to facilitate the accomplishment of men, that is requiring fewer workers for product, they are now supplanting it: why bother hiring truck drivers when trucks will soon be able to drive themselves? This has vast and still developing impacts on unemployment and, as a result, on the identity of a society. Technological progress has outpaced human progress, as highlighted by the very famous defeat of Chess champion Garry Kasparov by Deep Blue, a chess-playing software obsolete by today's standard, all the way back in 1996. [...]

[...] In our world the situation is less drastic, but it should still raise serious doubts as to how the technological progress is regulated. As the recent Cambridge Analytics scandal revealed, Facebook, Google and other informatics technology behemoths are using the gigantic amounts of data they collect on all citizens for commercial purposes, which includes convincing people into buying certain products, or even supporting certain political leaders. The questions raised by Huxley and Orwell are very contemporary despite their age, being in line with societal, as well as political, issues that our society has not yet managed to handle, such as the responsibility of scientific advancement (is a scientist responsible if his discoveries are used for bad purposes?) and the risk that new technologies and automatization will supplant human work. [...]

[...] Throughout his life, he fought for the end of discrimination, and for the recognition that all people deserve the same rights. Through his famous speech, he wanted to share his dream with all the colored people of America, a dream that social justice will one day be achieved: have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character". [...]

[...] In the document chosen, the author shows us the functioning of the so-called Bokanovsky's Process, a fictional process of human cloning, key to the functioning of the absolutistic ruling regime in the world envisioned by Huxley. This process, in the author's own words, is described as "the principle of mass production at last applied to biology", the industrialization of human recreation organized by and through machines, as well as algorithms deciding who gets to get born in what social class. [...]

[...] While this seems harmless, it puts technology at the center of a very intimate moment of human nature. While some may say that it does nothing more than give control to humans over the random allocation of genders, the authors argue that it is a dangerous first step down a road we would not want to walk on, leading to people customizing their child as if they were buying a product in a supermarket. Besides the obvious negative consequences these technological advancements have on people, such as leading parents to be perfectionists regarding the physical conditions of their children, it can also give vast powers to the few people controlling these technologies. [...]