Science and Technology

Courses Wayne State University College of Urban, Labor, and Metropolitan Affairs Department of Interdisciplinary Studies Times' Harvest courses, Winter 2001 ( http://www.is.wayne.edu/drbowen/thw05) Times' Harvest Advanced Seminar (online) ISP 3360, Section 010, Call Number 25265, 4 credits Times' Harvest Advanced Directed Study (online) a) ISP 3340, Section 010, Call Number 25785, 2 credits b) ISP 3340, Section 011, Call Number 25786, 4 credits	Instructor
	David R. Bowen 2311 A/AB Wayne State University Detroit, MI 48202	Daytime tel: (313) 577-1498 Evening tel: (248) 549-8518 FAX: (313) 577-8585 Home Page: http://www.is.wayne.edu/drbowen Email: d.r.bowen@wayne.edu At Ford: 313-390-2155


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Science and Technology

Definition of Technology

I will start with Rudi Volti's definition of technology in Society and Technological Change, third edition, pg. 6:

"A system based on the application of knowledge, manifested in physical objects and organizational forms, for the attainment of specific goals."

Under this definition, technologies are systems involving more than the physical objects. Take, for example, heating, ventilating and air conditioning technologies in buildings and houses. The systems include furnaces, fans, ducts, chimneys and air conditioners. But there are also manufacturers, distributors, designers, installers, maintenance workers, a body of law and regulation to ensure safety, and educational and training programs to train designers, installers and operators. There are textbook publishers, advertisers and so on. Examples of technology-related regulations and laws include codes for safe design and operation of boilers, and drunk-driving laws. Often, for consumer products, there are training programs for users of the technology. Consider computer classes and driver training for automobiles. Without all of these parts of a system, the physical parts would never achieve widespread use. This whole collection of parts is what it takes to make the hardware into a useful and used technology. A little reflection should convince you that a technology will not spread and have influence if only the physical objects exist, without the rest of the social support systems.

Technics

We are used to thinking of technology as the physical objects, as things - hardware. For example, computers, telephones, FAX machines. If, instead, technology is the entire system, what do we call just the hardware? Here, I will call these technics (pronounced TECK-nicks). If all we have is a technic, without the rest of the social support system, that will not spread and be used enough to qualify as a technology.

Science

I will take science to be a quest for natural knowledge. Scientific truths are not absolute, but are subject to change. There are several simple but powerful scientific principles:

Scientific knowledge or explanation must be tied to empirical experience, not based on a priori principles.
Empirical knowledge cannot be secret or depend upon personality. If a phenomenon or occurrence is to be admitted for consideration, anyone with the skill and determination must be able to verify it. For example, phenomena that can only be observed by those who believe in the phenomenon, will not be admitted for consideration.
A theory or explanation that is simpler than a rival is preferred over one that is more complication.
A theory or explanation that has a wider scope is preferred over one that has a narrower scope.

It was once believed that scientists were rational beings not swayed by ambition or passion. It was once believed that there was no such thing as "authority" in science. It has become very difficult to uphold these former claims, at least over the short term. It does seem to be true, at least to me, that ambition, passion or authority cannot stand by themselves over a substantial time. If knowledge is suppressed, it will eventually be rediscovered. The true heroes of scientists are those such as Newton and Einstein, who overthrew the established order. That is what all scientists secretly wish to do - make the revolutionary discovery.

Another important characteristic of science is that it is "progressive" in the sense that earlier results become incorporated in new development, and that new developments often become the basis for further progress. For example, as we learn more about genetics and DNA, that knowledge is turned into new experimental tools. This does make it difficult to support the claim that science is based upon direct sensory evidence (the five senses). But this has always "really" been the case anyway. For example, it is impossible to understand how the eye can give a faithful representation of an external object, without a theory of how lenses and work. And increasingly, without an understanding of how an image of an object on the retina is transformed into the mental picture of the object in the mind (the picture is not "in our eye", it is in our head).

Technology - an independent social force?

We often speak and think of technology as an independent social force, outside the influence of other sectors of society, such as ethics or public opinion, for examples. Toffler, for example, often writes this way in The Third Wave and elsewhere. Considering the scope of a technology, using Volti's definition, it is hard for me to see that the required social support can be there without a large part of the rest of society supporting the development.

There is one sense in which technology can be viewed as independent of the rest of society. It is certainly possible for a technic to be developed by a single person with minimal resources. For example, many of the first personal computers, including the original Apple (not the Mac), were developed in garages. Theoretically it is possible that somewhere, someone is cloning human beings in a garage somewhere, outside of social controls. This is not always the case of the first technics of a given type (e.g. personal computers or cloned humans). The original Apple was developed in a garage, but not the Macintosh or the Compaq. However the original technic or prototype is made, in order for the technic to develop into a full-fledged technology, many more people must become involved. People must be hired and actually accept those jobs, offices and manufacturing plants must be arranged, manufacturing machinery must be designed, built and bought, money invested, and customers found. In addition, people with money to invest must be convinced that the customers will be there. Distributors must be convinced to carry the product. Training and education for designers, production workers, distributors, service people and customers must be created. Occasionally, government will step in at this early phase, as in the case of the Supersonic Transport (SST), which was so restricted within the U.S. that it was turned into a money loser that must be supported by the subsidies of European governments. If any one of these components fails to materialize, the technic will not advance to become a technology. There are many scenarios, depending for example on how fast the technic will advance. In the case of the personal computer, there were years of experimenting, small sales and "hobby" status. The personal computer did not really become a technology until IBM decided to get involved. (IBM did not understand the market it was in, and this almost destroyed the company, but that is another story.)

So, here is the point: there are many social controls on the development of technology. The ultimate control is the necessity to convince customers to buy and use the product. Ultimately, technologists such as engineers are hired or have to find day jobs. The attention of technologists must be directed by society. Consider the shift in attention of boys from cars in the 1950's to computers today. Has the car itself changed to become less interesting? Probably today cars are more interesting, since they have an important layer of electronics. But what people sneak out of school to work on, scrape up money for, talk about among themselves, is the computer rather than the car. What has changed is not the car, but the attention of society. We already have "My Little Deuce Coupe" - who is going to write "My Gnarly Dual Processor?"

Some view the acceptance of a new technology as a type of conspiracy by advertisers and marketers to make money, and I am not denying that there is some of that. But consider the popularity of the automobile. Our automobiles today are much more than devices to go from A to B. They are status symbols, emblems of a lifestyle, mobile living rooms with great sound systems, and increasingly they are cool electrical gadgets as well. Are we forced to accept these belongings by marketers? Are these things we would not want unless we were forced to want them? It is hard for me to accept this argument, given the amount of money that we are willing to spend and the importance we attach to them. Marketers may be able to make us want automobiles a little more, but no, we want them ourselves also.

Technology influences society

Technology is not a captive force, however. It does have a strong influence on society. The earlier major stages of society - hunter-gatherer, agricultural and industrial - are all named after the predominant technology of the time. We don't label these "tribal society", "city-state society" and "nation-state society." Clearly, at least our perception is that technology plays a powerful role, even if I have argued above that this role may at times be exaggerated.

In Previews and Premises, a book of extended interviews with the editors of The South End Press in Boston, Toffler lays out his ideas about how society works as a system in more detail than he did in The Third Wave. He describes a "Third Wave Model" in which the following six sectors of society, which are loosely and informally defined, mutually interact:

Techno-sphere, the sector of technology, incorporating energy sources, production of all types of goods, and their distribution
Socio-sphere, the sphere of social organizations of all types and levels, from families to churches to corporations to governments
Info-sphere, for communications ranging from speech through smoke signals, to telephones and computer communications
Bio-sphere, containing the living environment within which the society exists
Power-sphere, containing the types and exercise of power over others
Psycho-sphere, "a sphere of intimate relationships, subjectivity, and personality"

Toffler does not claim that these are the only valid ways that societies can be analyzed, and he does not develop these spheres into classical mutually exclusive categories - there may, for example, be some confusion as to whether the cell-phone belongs in the techno-sphere or the info-sphere, or indeed about how it might be divided up. (In a classical category, there is no ambiguity about which category a given object or concept falls in, but real categories usually turn out not to satisfy this expectation.) The usefulness of these categories is that they are complete enough and small enough in number that we can think about the internal interactions of a society.

Technological Change / Its Impact on Man and Society, published in 1970 by Emmanuel Mesthene, Director of the Harvard University Program on technology and Society, analyzes several ways in which technology can influence social values, which Toffler would probably assign to his psycho-sphere. Mesthene quotes another scholar in this area, Robin Williams, as follows: "A society in which the store of knowledge concerning the consequences of action is large and is rapidly increasing is a society in which received norms and their 'justifying' values will be increasingly subjected to questioning and reformulation," and as describing values as "those conceptions of desirable states of affairs that are utilized in selective conduct as criteria for preference or choice, or as justifications for proposed or actual behavior." Robin Williams also lists "some fifteen major value-belief clusterings that are salient in American culture, as follows:

activity and work;
achievement and success;
moral orientation;
humanitarianism;
efficiency and practicality;
science and secular orientation;
material comfort;
progress;
equality;
freedom;
democracy;
external conformity;
nationalism and patriotism;
individual personality;
racism and related group superiority."

It is important to understand that not everyone holds these views all of the time. The claim is that, at various times and in various groups, these views have all had influence in the U.S.

Mesthene writes, "It seems clear that values in this sense have their origins in the patterns of choice behavior that are characteristic of any given society. What we mean when we say that a society is committed to certain values is that the people in that society will typically make judgments and choose to act in ways that reveal and reinforce those values. It seems equally clear that choice behavior [the behavior of making choices - DB] is determined, or at least circumscribed, by the options available to choose from at the time the choice is made. We can choose to go to the country or to go to the moon, but we cannot at this time choose to go on living for 150 years, because that option is not now available to us.

"Available choice options do change over time, of course. Thirty years ago [written in 1970, remember - DB] we could not have chosen to go to the moon; 30 years from now [well maybe 30 years from 2001 - DB] we may succeed in extending the human life span to 150 years. When options are thus changed or expanded, it is to be expected that choice behavior will change, too, and changed choice behavior can in turn be expected, given appropriate time lags, to be conceptualized or 'habitualized' into a changed set of values."

Mesthene describes three ways in which technologies can influence values:

The direct effect, as when a technology makes realization of an existing value possible or even easier or less expensive. The computer and the Internet have recently made direct communication easier and less expensive, so maybe a current emphasis on values in communication such as openness, honesty and "transparency" are increasing in value, and individuals are criticized for failing to exhibit such values.
An indirect effect, such as "often comes about through the mediation of some more general social or cultural change produced by technology." One path is the effect of technology on the economy. An example important to the Detroit area is pollution and global warming due to automobile use, among other contributors. Cars today are far cleaner than those before the use of microprocessors to control emissions, starting in the 1970's. And significant recent improvements have been made in the last five years. However, as we have grown more affluent we have bought more vehicles and driven them further each year, and total pollution due to vehicles has risen. Additionally, other sources, such as lawn mowers, marine engines, charcoal lighter fluid and lawn treatments have increased air pollution. This creates a general social demand for cleaner air. Pollution from vehicles is only one source, but it is easier to regulate, because there are fewer manufacturers and the product is expensive enough already so that another $100 (as long as all of the manufacturers have to conform) will not destroy the market. Hence the steady tightening of the regulations on vehicle emissions.
Technology (and science) can also have an effect on religious values. An important current example is contraception and abortion. In earlier times, fertilization and conception were viewed as a single event, and human life was viewed as beginning then. But now we have knowledge that there is a required series of steps, and we have the technology to intervene in that process at many points, and even to bypass the "natural" process altogether. To be specific, the natural process is (a) ejaculation or implantation of the sperm, (b) ova maturing in the ovaries and descending to the Fallopian tubes, (c) mobile sperm traveling towards the ovum, (d) a single sperm fertilizing the ovum in the Fallopian tubes, (e) the fertilized ovum (initially a single cell) traveling towards the uterus and becoming fixed or implanted there, (f) the maturation of the ovum through many stages into a fetus, and (g) birth. Each of these steps involves a significant amount of time (from one to three days for sperm traveling to fertilize the ovum, to nine months for maturation of the ovum) and risk (approximately two-thirds of the time, sperm fail to fertilize a mature ovum, and implantation often fails also. During most of maturation, the fetus looks very different than a human being after birth; for example at various early stages it has gills and a tail. At the earliest stages it is simply a mass of undifferentiated cells. During the later stages it closely resembles a human after birth. The brain continues significant physical development for five to ten years after birth, and maturation is not complete until late teenhood. Sexual organs and attitudes also mature well after birth (some may claim that the attitudes never mature!). The accepted principle seems to be that human life is to be protected, but now that we know the process, when does human life begin? There is virtual unanimity that it does not begin before fertilization, and there is virtual unanimity that it begins before or at birth, or perhaps even in the third trimester when the fetus begins to closely resemble a human baby after birth, and to be viable outside the womb with present technology. The percentage of people who think that life begins before conception is 0% (notwithstanding the Monty Python lyric that "every sperm is sacred"!) and that percentage rises towards 100% at some point that is, say, one month before birth, at which point premature babies survive routinely and without heroic measures. Can it be a surprise that there is controversy over exactly when life begins and is protected, now that we have knowledge of this process? And especially when we can intervene and block or promote the process at many of these points, and more technology arriving annually. The new "morning after" pill, RU 486, acts to block implantation in the uterus, for example. One type of fertility drug increases the number of ova that mature during one cycle. Exactly what do we mean by the point at which human life begins? Can it even be said to begin at a particular point? Such questions confound our earlier set of values. Can something be, say, 50% human, and would that mean that it is OK to block 50% from further development, or to take a 50% chance on blocking further development, or are the only choices 0% and 100%? New questions, new behaviors, but what are the new values?

Mesthene's point is that we should expect a period of controversy while the new knowledge and technology result in new choices and behaviors. At some point a revised set of values will emerge and become the new received or customary values.

Is this a calm, rational decision-making process, as Mesthene's cool and logical analysis might seem to suggest? No, this is a passionate and even at time violent disagreement of the type that Toffler seems to relish so thoroughly.

Another point here: does all of this scientific research and technological development occur in a social vacuum? Interest and attention of some focus on this process, and new technologies are eagerly awaited by some and dreaded by others. A male contraceptive has long been anticipated, for example.

So society - all of the others of Toffler's "spheres" - influence technology, and technology in turn influences all of the others. That is the same way that it works for the other spheres, both influencing and being influenced. If all that we do is predict what technology might be in the future, we will miss all of the influences of the other spheres, which are changing also, especially in dynamic times such as our present, and we will miss not only the effects on the other spheres, but by missing the effect of the other spheres on technology, we will make mistakes in what future technology will be like as well.

If, in some of the future essays, you choose to imagine or forecast what your life might or will be like in the future, and you describe only new technology, then you should be prepared to justify paying attention only to this aspect. This approach is sometimes called "techno-determinism" - what happens in the rest of society is determined by technological factors only. As we will discuss in class, if you are a "late adopter" of a technology, it can sometimes seem as if you are forced to adopt it. However, think back about the development of the automobile. We by them all because we love them (maybe not you individually, but as a group, oh yeah). Once they become built in to our other arrangements, they become a necessity.

Types of Technology

A common statement about technology and society today runs along the lines of, "This is the Age of Technology." For me, such statements are a product of provincialism - the characteristic of someone from "the provinces" or rural areas, someone who has a restricted experience of and view of society, and whose eyes will be opened when they see the variety in "the big city." Technology has been with us from time immemorial, even prior to human history. Some of the first tools found are stone tools (it is called "The Stone Age" for a reason). The manufacture and use of these tools are mostly lost to us today, but it is clear that many of the more advanced required long practice and learning from other craftsmen, the best choice of materials, understanding the required use, and good design, sometimes even including aesthetic considerations. Agriculture is a technology - the planting of seeds, the timing of that planting, cultivating or loosening the earth to bring up nutrients from the deeper unused soil and to admit nitrogen from the air, letting fields lie fallow, crop rotation, setting grain aside for planting next year's crop, selecting the best varieties - this is very sophisticated stuff, stuff that we are still learning about. Today, farmers have Global Positioning System receivers in their tractors, that send wireless data back to a desktop computer, including information on crop yields, to manage their fields down to areas much smaller than an acre. This can result in substantial increases in yields. But even in the agricultural era, this was a technology. Hunter-gatherers do not understand why or how to use a hoe. A hoe is a technology to loosen and aerate the soil, and sometimes to get rid of weeds. Now it is true that members of agricultural society probably did not have this understanding of the hoe; their knowledge was empirical rather than theoretical. But they knew how to design, make and use a hoe.

Historical relationship between science and technology

The relationship between science and technology, between understanding the natural world and making use of it, has changed markedly over time. At the time of the ancient Greeks, the two fields seem to have been relatively independent of each other. There was plenty of technology - farming, metallurgy, architecture, navigation etc. - but it had mostly been discovered through trial and error. While there was also plenty of theorizing about the natural world, it seems to have been from idealized principles such as the perfection of the circle and the sphere, rather than based on skepticism and empirical experience. During the Middle Ages, for example, the idea of alchemy - the transmutation of lead into gold - took hold, possibly from Arabic philosophy. Hundreds of years were spent in pursuing this, and much of a practical nature was learned about metals, but with little advance in basic understanding. The idea of the systematic study of the natural world using empirical experience and logic arose in the 17th century, for example with Francis Bacon. Initially, science was driven by technology. New methods would be found, and scientists would react by trying to devise a theory. The development of the steam engine and attempts to get more work out of the same amount of coal, is an excellent example. these attempts gave rise to the theories of Thermodynamics and Entropy, and led to real advances in technology in addition to theoretical understanding.

By the time of the twentieth century, however, the balance had swung the other way. Many of foremost technologies in our lifetimes have all been predicted in advance by the application of scientific theories. Atomic energy, the laser, the microchip, the computer, space travel, and genetic engineering are examples ("designer genes"). Crop breeding was done on an empirical basis until recently. The science of designing drugs and metals have also taken theoretical turn near the end of the century. Even in engineering, "faster better cheaper" often means to design the product on the computer first, and build the prototypes later.

For this reason, some have called Third Wave society "The Age of Knowledge."