Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 5 · column 1 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
In 1977, at the invitation of the Shah of Iran, veteran science writer Lee Edson joined a group of journalists for a tour of the Shah’s Imperial Court in Tehran. The special event was intended to show the West that Iran had entered the technological age.
In one of the gilded rooms an Iranian minister sat with his back to an array of computers which he proudly announced were programmed in three languages. But when Edson requested a demonstration, the minister was unable to comply. The computers had no data base. All the fancy new equipment was useless.
While the incident is comic, the lesson is clear. We must march into the technological future at a measured pace.
The recent nuclear disaster at Chernobyl serves to remind us of our own failure at Three Mile Island. The Challenger space shuttle debacle sobers us further. As Peter McGrath writes in a recent issue of Newsweek, “the momentum of technology is outstripping our ability to manage it.”
It has not always been so. Looking back to the ’30s, Lee Edson recalls a “gee whiz” attitude toward technology on the part of the American public. Technology was amazing, marvelous, even miraculous, but quite manageable. And something quite apart from society.
World War II — a technological war — changed all that. Developments from radar to the A-bomb proved that technology was serious stuff, that it was the major determinant of the world to come. The result was a growing interest in scientific advancements, an interest which quieted in the ’50s only to be reawakened by the Soviet launching of Sputnik.
In the ’60s and ’70s, however, despite the fact that we put a man on the moon, technology became the enemy in America. It couldn’t win s limited war in Vietnam. It produced debilitating substances like agent orange. And it was polluting out own back yard.
The price tag — in the billions of dollars — was as high as the satellites orbiting the earth. But what was the relevance of this technology to man’s well-being?
The question is still being asked. For the last 16 years Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering has been teaching a course on the complexity of socio-technological problems. It has been taken by students across 40 departments in each of the university’s eight colleges.
But by far the Commonwealth’s most extensive commitment to addressing the complex issues of technology lies in the School of
93.8%