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In this visionary look into the future, Freeman Dyson argues
that technological changes fudamentally alter our ethical and social arrangements
and that three rapidly advancing new technologies -- solar energy, genetic engineering,
and worldwide communication -- together have the potential to create a more equal
distribution of the world's wealth. Dyson begins by rejecting
the idea that scientific revolutions are primarily concept driven. He shows rather
that new tools are more often the sparks that ignite scientific discovery. Such
tool-driven revolutions have profound social consequences -- the invention of
the telescope turning the Medieval worldview upside down, the widespread use of
household appliances in the 1950s replacing servants, to cite just two examples.
In looking ahead, Dyson suggests that solar energy, genetics, and the Internet
will have similarly transformative effects, with the potential to produce a more
just and equitable society. Solar power could bring electricity to even the poorest,
most remote areas of third-world nations, allowing everyone access to the vast
stores of information on the Internet and effectively ending the cultural isolation
of the poorest countries. Similarly, breakthroughs in genetics may well enable
us to give our children healthier lives and grow more efficient crops, thus restoring
the economic and human vitality of village cultures devalued and dislocated by
the global market. Written with passionate conviction
about the ethical uses of science, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet
is both a brilliant reinterpretation of the scientific process and a challenge
to use new technologies to close, rather than widen, the gap between rich and
poor. Freeman Dyson is Professor Emeritus of physics
at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University. He is the author of
Disturbing the Universe, Infinite in All Directions, Weapons
of Hope, and many other books. He is a recipient of the National Book Critics
Circle Award and the Phi Beta Kappa Award in science, among many other honors.
He lives in Princeton, New Jersey. |
