Text 1A4-I
By the middle years of the 20th century, the optimistic
story of limitless progress through scientific and technological
advance came to be rivalled and sometimes overshadowed by a
much more pessimistic, even apocalyptic vision of the trajectory
of the modern project. It began to seem increasingly possible that
technology would come to master its creators and carry humanity
toward unforeseen and possibly catastrophic outcomes.
Premonitions of technological wizardry leading to
disasters are extremely old, dating back at least to the myth of
Icarus, who is said to have fatally fallen into the sea after flying
too close to the sun on wings his father, Daedalus, constructed.
As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, dark anticipations
became increasingly widespread, in works such as Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and Karel
Capek’s R.U.R. Perhaps technology, not man, was “in the
saddle,” as Henry Adams worried. And perhaps machines,
becoming ever more capable and interconnected, were the next
step in the evolution of life, destined to dominate and eventually
eliminate humanity, as Samuel Butler warned. The contours of
the future, H. G. Wells announced in one of his famous lectures,
“The Discovery of the Future,” were difficult to discern but
would surely be unlike the past or the present, and definitely
included disasters of new types and magnitudes.
In the ghastly world wars, technological advances
empowered barbarism on a new scale, destroying the credibility
of the simple modernist faith that more potent tools are a straight
path to human betterment. Rather, technological advance has
produced a cornucopia of double-edged swords, with amplified
possibilities for both progress and disaster. A growing herd of
horsemen of the anthropogenic apocalypse have ominously
appeared on the human horizon of possibility: nuclear weapons,
genetic engineering, total surveillance despotism, runaway
artificial intelligence, and rampant environmental decay.
Daniel Deudney. Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics,
and the Ends of Humanity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 (adapted).