It is very easy to forget that high-tech engineer is a species that only thrives in politically stable countries.
Standing on the shoulders of giants is not only about your predecessors that solved engineering problems so you can dive even deeper - it is also about society which found better ways over time for effective financing that allows science&engineering to happen.
Also please read (for example) about Samsung and Nokia - they were forced to change industries by politicians in their respective countries.
I disagree, a lot of nations became stable because of engineering solutions in the first place and also more scientifically literate. There is a ton of examples of this. The first telescope, as an example, thanks to Hans Lippershey and Galileo Galilei showed that the earth wasn't flat and removed some power from the church it also clearly made us see that the sun doesn't go around the earth so it showed that Copernicus was right all along. A big discovery that made people doubt the christian religion and change the political landscape forever.
All big scientific discoveries changed the societies in a big way and there is no going back. Scientific discoveries and technological innovation is the only thing that push a society forward.
No, man, that's simply not true. That's an incredibly technocratic view of the world.
Using the U.S. as an example, the (belated) end of slavery in the U.S. didn't come about from a scientific discovery or a technological innovation. Technics played a part in the exacerbation of the issues, but it was politics, culture, language, religion and "spirit" that ended state sponsored slavery. I think that was a decently large push forward for society.
As an example, consider reformation: many attempts have been made at reforming the church, but the first successful one happened only after the printing press got widespread enough that the reformational thesis could spread around the Europe very quickly.
Or you could reasonably argue that the end of feudalism happened because of gunpowder and accessible firearms. Where previously a person had to train half of their life to be able to fight with an armoured knight, suddenly with firearms, anyone could become effective in the field in pretty much no time. This shifted power away from the local lords in a significant way.
There are plenty of similar examples you can find in all of history. You can probably shoot plenty of holes through them, too, but still, this for me sounds like a most plausible theory of social changes of the ones I heard.
Just ask the people that have a fulltime job but still cannot afford a place to live if slavery has ended. But sure, politics can change some things but in the end it doesn't change much.
To add to my point, politics may alter how we live but it doesn't bring anything new into the world. If we want to progress, we need to solve issues and take away the need for people to do stuff we don't want them to do. If you had todays farming equipment for example, there would never had been any slaves because one machine can do the job of hundreds of slaves. The machine doesn't have to be fed and managed, the machine doesn't fight back.
I believe we can solve any such problem with technological advancement and thus our money should be heavily invested there.
Who wants to live in a technologically sophisticated world if most of the spending goes to war, surveillance, bailing out rich bankers, healthcare insurance, and just housing, anyways?
What if you would reverse that? Don't you think we would be better off in every way possible?
As technology increases our suicide rate isn't really consistently declining. Our prison population has increased. Technology cant make those improvements alone. We need improvements in governance, culture and education for this to happen.
Technology can be used for good or bad. By itself, it is just a tool, it's up to us to decide if we are going to end up in a police state with constsnt surveillance and tyranny, colonize Mars, create weapons that can wipe out most of humanity, solve healthcare problems, etc.
But we also live in a time with least war and a lot less suffering in general. Technology may be a tool, but science is not. With science we can prove that x makes more people happy and reduces suicide rates and hence make that choice.
The issue is that science is not really that present in the chamber of politics. With a more science-heavy government investments would look a lot different.
I am not advocating for technology alone, basic science plays an equal or even more important role in shaping the society. Science has values and it is the only true values that exist. I would argue that with help of the scienctific method we can figure out what makes people happy and implement it politically. But the progress still starts with science.
You need to put that scientific method you are talking about to use. Are people really happier today than in 1950? Why is the suicide rate going up
The difficulty with your argument here is that tech has enormous potential to make life better, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it will. You may be interested in noting that this is a common idea: I've seen the popular science educators like Sagan, NDT, Nye all say this...
That the Earth is not flat has been known since ancient times. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth.
With increased technology it was easily disproven.
My bad and thanks for correcting and enlightning me :)
>With increased technology comes more liberties for all.
...uhm. What? How? Examples? a line of thought? Gimme something here.
>Progress is not made by politicians, it is made by engineers.
Again, what? That's an overwhelmingly naive and narrow view of the world. JFK helped expedite aerospace research, as well as the NASA administrators who didn't do any engineering work but kept the agency running on track? They get no credit in the 'progress'?
Politicians were not partly responsible for the development of long range rocketry and nuclear fusion that came out of WWII?
It's strange to me that people are assuming that when I question the _kind_ of technological advancement being focused on that I'm critiquing _all_ technological advancement. I challenge you to find that critique in my words. Again, I would be most excited about a future where the _primary_ goal of the progress is the reduction of inequality. How can we talk about 'progress' without first talking about the rubric for progress itself? How are we (you) defining progress?
> ...uhm. What? How? Examples? a line of thought? Gimme something here.
Electricity, internet, radio, engines, cameras, etc.
> JFK helped expedite aerospace research, as well as the NASA administrators who didn't do any engineering work but kept the agency running on track? They get no credit in the 'progress'?
You're just enforcing my point, this is people who understand that we need technological progress in order for us to move forward as a society. Of course they are part of the progress, they help enable the progress to go faster.
> Again, I would be most excited about a future where the _primary_ goal of the progress is the reduction of inequality.
It is my belief that this will never happen, at least not untill we have progressed so far that everyones needs are met. Until then, there is no real incentive for people to reduce inequality. Just look at history, we've never been able to do this so far so there is no reason to belive that we suddently change our behavior.
I am defining progress as a lot of things, it can be the discovery of something new but it can also be an invention that benefits just a small number of people. In the long run, most new inventions will benefit everyone.
I agree wholeheartedly with that. Let's consider those people, and lets consider some other, mmm, how about Rwandans as well. Has electricity and the radio, cameras and engines increased the liberties of those people? I many cases a lot of those technologies have been used to remove liberties from those people, and sometimes to even kill them.
We have the technology now to meet everyone's need. Right now. We can produce enough food, we can build enough houses and supply everyone with enough calories. What technological things need to happen in order to distribute our resources accordingly? You'll probably say that's not a technological problem, at least not primarily, and I agree. This is the larger point I'm trying to get at and challenge others to address. I don't believe the most exciting future is one that requires enormous technological progress and when we focus on enormous technological progress for the sake of progress, rather than the sake of equality, well then we as a society continue to create a world the mirrors our goals: progress instead of equality.
>Until then, there is no real incentive for people to reduce inequality.
Sure there is, it's called compassion.
As for questioning the kind of technological advancement and the reactions to it, I think the defensive comments come from a combination of the following:
1. Questioning spending on space exploration in the topic about space exploration is like questioning the existence of football on a football match. You're talking to an audience who loves it and telling them that it takes resources away from More Important Things. Except that space is at the same time much more underfunded and much more important than football, baseball, basketball, movies, concerts, celebrity gossip and all the other stuff people like[1]. So it kind of feels unfair to single it out here.
2. Basic research is increasingly becoming underfunded. The funny thing about solving the world problems with technology is that, more often than not, what enables those technologies is pie-in-the-sky research with no expected immediate results. This doesn't fly well with the markets, and as countries increasingly treat science in the same way market economy does, the funding for long-term research is in ever greater jeopardy. Attacking space exploration through arguments of other more immediate problems is in a big way attacking basic research.
3. People need to dream about better future. Space exploration is somewhat unique that it captures and nourishes the imagination and hope for a better world.
4. We have enough resources to solve the more important problems like clean water and food for all. And yet they are not solved. Taking the meagre few $B from space research will most likely not help in solving those problems, but it will shut down space research.
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[0] - Note that in that they're not unique - theoretically, a private institution with large amounts of resources can do the same thing too. Still, to date, it's usually governments that are willing to spend money on actual research.
[1] - Also, there's plenty of money in wasted military spending that could be taken first, even without reducing the actual military capabilities of a country.
Progress is not made by politicians, it is made by engineers. If you want clean water for all humans, you should be supportive of discovering new stuff.
For example, for humans to survive in hostile environments on other planets we need to create new innovations and that creates a big incentive to figure out technological solutions to hard problems.
Turning salt water into drinkable water is one, this one is actually already solved and being implemented across different countries and if we can improve that and make it cheaper we will have solved the problem of water already.