“Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Robert J. Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, uttered these portentous words from a sacred Hindu text to acknowledge his role in creating the most destructive technology in history. Our mastery of science has, more than any other characteristic, differentiated homo sapiens from all other species on the planet with the gift of mechanical advantage. We have risen to the top of the food chain and taken our seat on the throne as masters of the Earth because of our ability to combine elements of our environment into tools that amplify the potential of our bodies. However, every gift of science has been like a double-edged sword that cuts the wielder when mishandled. 

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Oppenheimer knew well enough that science does not progress in a vacuum. The nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing many thousands, was meant to be the coup de gras to finally end WWII in the Allies’ favor. Every step of scientific progress has brought some measure of advantage to the society which spawned it and has caused problems, some deadly, for unfortunate groups in each society. When Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, he did not foresee that his achievement would earn him the moniker “the Merchant of Death.” Chastened, he used his amassed wealth to create the Nobel Peace Prize as a belated effort to mitigate some of the damage his invention had caused. Similarly, Sara Winchester inherited a vast fortune from her father who invented the repeating rifle, a weapon of sufficient power to give American settlers a significant advantage as they fought Native Americans for the mastery of the land. She spent the last 38 years of her life obsessed with continuous construction that transformed her family mansion into a labyrinth, allegedly to hide from the numerous vengeful ghosts of people killed by the rifles that were used to kill them. Scientists, if they are being honest, must admit to the outsized impact they have on the lives of every person in our civilization.

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The progress that science brings, however, does not benefit everyone equally.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are many examples of inventions that, for example, put legions of workers out of their jobs. For more than half a century, women in the US worked as switchboard operators until they were put out of work by the electrical switchboard because it saved the company money that would have gone to wages. The plastics industry has gutted the formerly dominant canning and glass packaging industries, and airplanes put multitudes of sailors on passenger ships out of work. A small cadre of owners of capital have benefitted the most from our mechanical advantage, leveraging it with social advantage to create a crop of billionaires who wield outsized influence over American society while millions of homeless wander the streets and alleys in search of food and shelter. They have also been excluded from the fruits of technology. 

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How many people have been hurt by the double-edged sword of technological progress? Uncountable. Yet, we tend to dismiss the potential negative consequences. We accepted the plastic products and their almost magical ability to provide any form of sterile packaging for our food and medicine. Now we have to deal with the conundrum of plastic waste that will be cycled through our bodies in the form of microplastics for centuries. The internal combustion engine allowed faster travel and boundless versions of useful machinery, but now it threatens our very existence with global warming. Nuclear energy provides relatively safe, efficient and carbon free power but saddles us with millennia of waste products and the specter of nuclear annihilation. If technology is like a sword, its edges continue to get ever sharper.

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Now we are faced with the advent of new technologies that bring promise and peril on an even greater scale. Artificial intelligence will transform society, putting even more power in the hands of the rich and powerful. Even so, many scientists warn of the danger of humanity losing control of a new species of sentient machines. Biotechnology such as gene splicing will allow people to live longer lives and, at some point, give people the ability to enhance and transform our bodies. Direct internet interfaces like Elon Musk’s proposed Neuralink will create a mental form of mechanical advantage that will make humanity almost godlike, yet will inevitably create new and more powerful forms of addictions and enable mind viruses and mental control of the masses. So far, our cleverness has kept us one step ahead of complete calamity. Lacking any viable controls over either the development of new technology or the way it is disseminated throughout society, we can only rely on our good fortune to continue. As humanity reaches further into the black box of technological mastery, we must be careful what we pull out, lest we turn our treasure chest into Pandora’s Box.