science was not confined to discovering what technologies are possible; it also predicted consequences and side effects of those technologies.
About 4% of the U.S. population has a degree in science or engineering. For most of the others, exposure to science is generally indirect: basic science ⇒ applied science ⇒ engineering ⇒ technology [Derry, 1999]. Technology is the tangible result of combining applied science with engineering and business skills.
Popular opinion of science and scientists waxes and wanes with attitudes toward technology. After the technological enthusiasm and optimism of the sixties, the rock group Jefferson Starship [1970] sang: “Do you know we could go, we are free. Anyplace you can think of, we could be.” A decade later, however, a society that seldom can think more than four years ahead encountered the consequences of past technological decisions and found that the technological ‘gift’ of comfort actually has a price. “Comfort, that invader that enters as a visitor, stays as a guest, and becomes master” (Sufi saying). Someone must be blamed, and a musician said to my wife: “Oh, you’re a physicist. I suppose you build bombs.” Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. In the nineties, technological development led to improved standards of living and an exuberant tech bubble. Ethical concerns and fears about technological developments have shifted from atomic weapons to genetic engineering.
“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.” [Buddhist proverb, cited by Feynman, 1988]
“We fear the cold and the things we do not understand. But most of all we fear the doings of the heedless ones among ourselves.” [a shaman of the Arctic Inuit, cited by Calvin, 1986]
The beneficiaries of technology have the opportunity to see its shortcomings. In contrast, people whom I have met in underdeveloped countries simply hunger for its rewards and for its escape from boring drudgery. Few of the critics of science accuse it of being evil, but many accuse it of being amoral. One can counter such arguments by asking whether the professions of farming and carpentry are also guilty of amorality. Or one can recall that science’s highest value is truth (Bronowski, 1978), and that we judge truth from criteria of beauty, simplicity and elegance; is this amorality? But such arguments miss the point. Some people simply are becoming disillusioned with technology, and they are replacing the illusion of technology as magic bullet with one of technology as evil destroyer.
“Daedalus, who can be thought of as the master technician of most ancient Greece, put the wings he had made on his son Icarus, so that he might fly out of and escape from the Cretan labyrinth which he himself had invented. . . He watched his son become ecstatic and fly too high. The wax melted, and the boy fell into the sea. For some reason, people talk more about Icarus than about Daedalus, as though the wings themselves had been responsible for the young astronaut’s fall. But that is no case against industry and science. Poor Icarus fell into the water -- but Daedalus, who flew the middle way, succeeded in getting to the other shore.” [Campbell, 1988b]
The relationship between science and society is changing, in response not only to evolving perceptions by society, but also to other evolutionary pressures. Both the tasks and needs for science are adapting accordingly.
Science has transformed the highly generalized and adaptable human species into the most adaptable species that the earth has ever seen (Bronowski, 1978). Yet arguably we have increased
