Icarus or the future of Science revisited.

Are we still waiting for the future, are we already living the future we imagine years ago, or are we living a future that has surpassed our expectations?

We are living in a world where we see technology in a daily basis, and in ways which many of us never imagined, but now that it’s present in our lives, we wonder, how did we ever lived without it.  This new dependence on technology, which increases as time passes by, makes us ask ourselves what is the role of technology in our society, how it affect our traditions, our economy,  our life: present and future.

Bertrand Russell in 1924, asked himself this same questions and wrote Icarus or the future of science to explain what to him was the role of science and technology in society and how it will develop in the future if following the same trends. But after almost 100 years later of this, many aspects in this article may have changed while many others may still apply to the life we are experiencing.

Russell states that science is used to promote power of dominant groups rather than to make human life easier and happier. But is this really true? Science began to develop when people started to question themselves how things worked and why things happened, later on they began to apply this knowledge in order to make life easier and gain some benefit from the knowledge they recently acquired. The tricky part is who is gaining these benefits and for what purposes, is the knowledge obtained used for the well being of the human race or for its doom.

“The human instincts of power and rivalry […] will need to be artificially curbed, if industrialism is to succeed” (Russell). As previously stated, the tricky part in scientific knowledge is who is in charge of these developments, obviously we the humans are the ones who have control of discoveries, new findings, research, inventions etc. But as Russell states, the human race is not perfectly rational, it is very influenced by passion and emotions, and this premise hasn’t changed over time, it’s as valid now as it was in Russell’s times.

But only certain people are able to make important decision related to science, and the problem nowadays is that the decision makers are more interested in choosing the option that generate more profit rather than the one that benefits the most to the people. So Russell’s thesis “science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups, rather than to make men happy” (Russell), may not be so wrong, even though we have seen that society has benefit a lot from technological development, we have also evidenced wars caused by this matter. 

The difference in Russell’s time and the present day can be defined that nations back then fought and competed between them mainly for raw materials and markets, while now, nations compete for technological developments, information and innovation. Also, Enterprises are more interested in the cognitive abilities of their workers, because this will increase efficiency and optimize the resources available. Nations and enterprises now fight for human capital. The present economy is based on innovation along with information technologies.

But now a days, not only information technologies take an important role in our societies, even though internet has been one of the greatest inventions of our era, there are other branches of science that are very important in our times and may be a little bit different from Russell’s time. In Icarus of 1926, Russel mentions that the main branches of science are physical sciences, which includes chemistry; biological, and anthropological, which includes human physiology and psychology, history, and economics. In our present times, there is an increasing need of interrelation, where many branches of science contribute with knowledge to create a new one. Biotechnology is such an example, this new branch of science is completely interdisciplinary, because it needs chemistry, biology, informatics, etc.

Biotechnology has contributed with new things to our society, with the production of transgenic animals and plants, which they are nothing more that plants and animal genetically modified, this surpasses de idea of eugenics, presented in Russell’s article, the belief that it is possible to improve qualities of the human population by incouraging or discouraging reproduction of persons having desirable traits or undesirable traits respectively, has taken the next level in which we can actually choose what traits we want to have and which we want to eliminate.

The world we see now is different from the world Russell saw, ergo the differences in the way he and we see science, but one question is still out there: in the end, will science prove to have been a blessing or a curse to mankind.

Bibliography

Russell, Bertrand. "Icarus or the future of science." 1924. 27 September 2010 <http://cursos.itesm.mx/@@/96846F86CA206A1C457BA0B484F5668E/courses/1/MTY.H2007.10.1013.14798/content/_37423411_1/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20Icarus,%20or%20The%20Future%20of%20Science.pdf>.