Technology and the future
.... • In Alvin Weinberg’s essay “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?,” Weinberg provides a series of technological solutions to some of the social problems in the world during the mid-1960s. The problems that Weinberg acknowledges include world population, deterioration of the environment, educational systems, decaying cities, race relations, and poverty. Weinberg suggests that these social problems can be circumvented or at least reduced to less formidable proportions by the application of the Technological Fix, rather than by the methods of social engineering. A good example of this is controlling world population through the Intra-Uterine Device (IUD). Before the IUD was invented, birth control demanded very strong motivation of countless individuals. Even with the pill, the individual’s motivation had to be sustained day in and day out. But the IUD, being a one-shot method, greatly reduces the individual motivation required to induce a social change. The answer to the question “Can technology replace social engineering?” is that technology will never replace social engineering, but it will provide to the social engineer broader options, to make intractable social problems less intractable. Perhaps, most of all, technology will buy time-that precious commodity that converts violent social revolution into acceptable social evolution. • In Alvin Weinberg’s essay “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?,” Weinberg provides a series of technological solutions to some of the social problems in the world during the mid-1960s. The problems that Weinberg acknowledges include world population, deterioration of the environment, educational systems, decaying cities, race relations, and poverty. Weinberg suggests that these social problems can be circumvented or at least reduced to less formidable proportions by the application of the Technological Fix, rather than by the methods of social engineering. A good example of this is controlling world population through the Intra-Uterine Device (IUD). Before the IUD was invented, birth control demanded very strong motivation of countless individuals. Even with the pill, the individual’s motivation had to be sustained day in and day out. But the IUD, being a one-shot method, greatly reduces the individual motivation required to induce a social change. The answer to the question “Can technology replace social engineering?” is that technology will never replace social engineering, but it will provide to the social engineer broader options, to make intractable social problems less intractable. Perhaps, most of all, technology will buy time-that precious commodity that converts violent social revolution into acceptable social evolutio...