Entertainment is full of examples of technology gone wrong. Every dystopian sci-fi movie makes use of this to some degree. Either technology runs amok and enslaves humanity as in The Terminator or The Matrix, or we become so enamored of a technology we enslave ourselves to it as in Gattaca. In still others, technology becomes a tool that is used to suppress humanity, most famously in the novels 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. And if we are honest, we can look to all of these examples and see parallels with technological development today.
That’s because there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything comes with some sort of trade off or a dark side. It will always be possible to take an objective good and pervert it to something destructive. The very real life development of nuclear power is a poignant example. Nuclear power, even the old school, brute force fission reactors that are still the most common produce tens of thousands of megawatts of electricity every hour. And they do this with no carbon emissions on the production end. The only thing stopping them from producing more is their relatively small number, with fewer than a hundred operating in the United States.
However, with all that promise comes the proverbial dark side, which Hiroshima and Nagasaki experienced first-hand in 1945. While none have been used in war since then, the threat has loomed over the world like the Sword of Damocles. Trillions have been spent developing ever more powerful nuclear bombs and methods to deliver them. Trillions that could have been spent researching fusion reactors, an even more powerful energy source with a fraction of the radioactive waste of fission. Instead fusion research led to the hydrogen bomb, a type of nuke that makes Fat Man and Little Boy look like glorified fire crackers.
We stand at a similar technological fork in the road today. As our knowledge of genetics and our ability to manipulate them grows, we will be faced with difficult choices on how to use this technology. The same technology that could eliminate genetic predispositions to various diseases could also lead to triggering those dispositions in others. Slowing down or eliminating aging could create a world of selfish would-be immortals actively preventing the birth and development of future generations. The same technology that creates a new vaccine could create a new virus to unleash on an unsuspecting world.
Less dramatic is the idea that companies will simply use these advancements to control whole markets in new ways. Take the situation with genetically modified crops. While GMOs have been a great help in getting food to grow in environments that have typically been hostile, allowing more to be grown for and by those in challenging environments, there has also been a cost. Some, like Monsanto, control aspects of the GMO market with an iron grip. They do this either by engineering their seeds so they won’t germinate or in the case of a product that does, they have been known to sue farmers for their “intellectual property” because the GMO seeds germinated and spread into a neighboring field. That kind of action can kill a farmer’s business. In the case of the non-germinating seeds, a farmer is then forced to buy fresh seeds every year, instead of in the old days, growing this year’s crop from the last year’s seeds. That keeps prices artificially high and also puts farmers at risk should bad weather kill enough of their crop that they can’t afford to buy the new seeds.
The point is that we have to be very careful with how we use our technology. It can often be used to destroy rather than help others. Not only that, the destructive option is usually the easier one in the short term. Just look at fusion again. We built a bomb with it decades ago but we still haven’t figured out how to make a commercially viable fusion reactor.
Just as our choices with nuclear power defined much of the world for the latter half of the twentieth century, so our choices with genetic modification will define the world for what’s left of the twenty first. We must choose, and choose wisely.
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