Today in Technology History
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December 11
On December 11, 1964, the American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a lecture at the University of Oslo in connection with that year's Nobel Peace Prize, which he received the day before. He argued that progress in science and technology was not equalled by "moral progress"; instead, mankind suffered from a "moral and spiritual lag":
This evening I would like to use this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man's scientific and technological progress.
Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.
Of course, there are fundamental differences between technological problems and the social problems that Dr. King discussed in his Nobel lecture. While there have always been clear-cut answers and indisputable solutions in the realm of technology -- an airplane either flies or it doesn't; a computer either starts or it doesn't -- there are no such certainties in the social realm. It's easy to define progress in science and technology, but what constitutes social progress will always be debatable.
Although, admittedly, we are now in an era when progress in technology, too, is becoming a matter of debate, since certain advances in technology -- particularly in biotechnology -- are raising potent moral and social questions. We'll have to answer those questions before we cross what Dr. King called the "threshold of the future."
Related link:
Click here to read Dr. King's Nobel lecture.
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