| Books. Science. Social justice |
[Jan. 18th, 2004|07:34 pm] |
Freeman J. Dyson. The Sun, The Genome and The Internet. Tools of scientific revolutions. isbn 0-19-512942-3
It is easy to make a list of historical examples showing how technology has sometimes contributed to social justice. In the fourteenth century, printing change the face of Europe, bringing books and education out of monasteries ... gave power to the Bible and led directly to the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe.
More recent techs that contributed ina practical way to social justice were the tech. of public health, clean water supply, sewage treatment, vaccination, and anitbiotics. The technologies of synthetic materials.
The technology of household appliances made servants unnecessary, and at the same time the chlidren of the servant class began to go to college and make the transition to the middle class. The transition was not painless, but it was less painful than a civil war. p 50-51
Edward Teller. Why things bite back: a step forward in technology tends to bring with it an unexpected step bacward. p53.
The thing the patient needs the most, and the thing hardest to find, is personal attention. Distributed unequally. p 56
![[info]](http://lj.rossia.org/img/userinfo-lj.gif) watertank@lj: not only in medicine, also in entertainment, food (fast food), office, and social services. network communications, e.g. blogging, instant messaging, etc. as a replacement.
Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. ...argued that the Protestant ethic came first, the rise of capitalism and the technlogies assiciated with capitalism second. Weber said that ethics drove technology. I (F.J.Dyson) say that technology drives ethics.
His historical vision remains profoundly true. It is true that the religious revolutions of the sixteenth century engendered an ethic of personal responsibility and restless inquiry, an ethic that encouraged the growth of capitalistic enterprise and tech innovation. Issac Newton was a Protestant theologian.
It is true that ethics can drive tech. I am only saying that this is not the whole truth, that tech can also drive ethics, that the chanin of causation works in both directions. The tech of printing helped to cause the rise of the Protestant ethic just as much as the Protestant ethic helped to cause th rise of navigation and astronomy. p 60
watertank@lj: At wich point changes in a sub-system escalate changes in the super-system? It would be interesting to trace the changes in ethics over time.
!!!! Fuels produced from energy crops are storable. To make solar energy cheap, we need a tech that combines the advantages of photovoltaic and biological systems. First, crop plants could be developed that convert sunlight to fuel with efficiency comparable to photovoltaic collectors (10%). Second, crop plants could be developed that do not need to be harvested at all. An energy crop could be a permanent forest of trees that convert sunlight to liquied fuel and deliver the fuel directly through their roots to a network of underground pipelines. p 69 |
|
|
| Comments: |
For now I think the staring point that will prove most fruitful initially would be plants that would have quick growing and harvesting times, plants that could be almost entirely converted to some sort of fuel.
The pun may or may not have been intentional.
Brazil had tried it with ethanol, but it didn't work for economic reasons.
Dyson's idea is pretty far-fetched but I like its sci-fi quality. | |
![[info]](http://lj.rossia.org/img/imported-profile.gif){kind=small}