Technique and responsibility
think globally, act locally, according to Jacques Ellul
pp. 115-132
in: Paul T. Durbin (ed), Technology and responsibility, Berlin, Springer, 1987Abstract
Many people and especially those with a profession are faced with a growing anomaly between the "world" of science and technology and the "world" of our society. In the former world countless specialized researchers and practitioners improve things according to the values of efficiency, productivity, cost-effectiveness, and performance, and do so with great success. For example: materials are getting stronger, lighter, and more resistant to high temperatures; computer chips are becoming better and faster; and robots are able to carry out increasingly complex tasks. In the world of our society, on the other hand, improvements in a variety of areas are accompanied by the proliferation of serious problems. The two are frequently indissociably linked to one another, and directly or indirectly to the growth of modern science and technology. For example, the attempts to make a nation more secure by the application of advances in science and technology to the design and production of arms has undermined the security of life on this planet in a way unprecedented in human history. The benefits derived from the application of chemical technology are being undercut by the partly unavoidable contamination of the ecosystem. The benefits of automation must increasingly be weighed against the enormous human, social and economic costs of making a portion of the weakest and least influential segment of the population unable to participate in the way of life of their society. The so-called information revolution is threatening individual privacy and may give the state and other large institutions unprecedented powers to monitor and control people. Technology transfer and foreign aid to the Third World often result in an effect the opposite of that which was intended. To sum up, the growing power that science and technology give us over the social and natural environments would suggest that humanity ought to be able to deal increasingly effectively with the problems that it faces, but this is not at all clear. The growing power in some spheres simultaneously reveals an impotence to deal with the problems it creates.
