Monday, November 07, 2005

Technology VS Ethics

I remember reading as a child fairytales about the noble and fearless heroes who defeated their enemies and saved beautiful ladies using the magic things and their own merits to fulfill their quests successfully. I was simply fascinated by the hats which made the heroes invisible and saved them from evil forces; by the magic carpets which could give advice and transfer people for long distances and let them return to their beloved in the right time; by the table-cloths which provided the wanderers with food during their long and perilous journeys. And what I wished for was the possibility for all people to have all those magic devices in real life.
But when I grew older I realized it was a blessing that mankind did not possess such magic things, for they would never have been used for good purposes: thieves would definitely have used the magic hats for stealing, lazybones would surely have used magic carpets and table-cloths to shirt work, because, unfortunately, despite all the progressive trends in technology, humanity has made little progress in its morals and ethics, which is proved by the history of technological development.
Whatever has been invented with good intentions was used to pave the road to hell. Weapons, meant to help people to protect themselves, have always been used for struggling for power, turning weapons into the industry of death and the art of killing without need. Medicine aimed once at promoting health and prolonging human lives, deals nowadays with gene-techniques, euthanasia and cloning, which is the direct threat to human life. And if the first two items can be somehow justified, for they probably do some good, then cloning is absolutely absurd – what do we need to clone a man for, when any woman can give birth to one easily?
Or, let’s take the case with computer and TV screens. Screened words and images, written, uttered or animated, have alienated people from each other and lowered the literacy rates. And the problem is not that people do not know their neighbors or do not read books, the problem is that they even do not bother to. Humanity is turning into a mass of robots, frozen at the screen nets, treating the world as a number of algorithms and buttons, where it is possible to shoot and to delete everything, and then to press “reset” and to start the game anew. The generation of users, refined in web-graphics, taught not to think that death is death even on the screen, looks at the world outside the window with indifferent eyes and hurries back to their screens.
To cut it shortly, I have only one thing to ask: “Quo vadis?”