Brad Fregger: I first met Bill Harman when I was involved in future studies from a capitalistic point of view, and when I was interested in the possibility of there being a humanistic capitalism. This is a term that means capitalism really cares, believe it or not, about people, and the term “humanistic capitalism” was coined right here by this gentleman, and it is an exciting thought to me as a free enterprising person.

Mr. Willis Harman

“THE CHANGING ROLE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR ABILITY TO COPE WITH THE PROBLEMS OF THE EARTH”

“The changing role of science and technology,” the title sounds innocuous enough; even dull. To grasp the implications a fundamental role change could have, it is helpful to compare this title with that of an imaginary paper in the late Middle Ages: “The Changing Role of Philosophy and Religion.” Such a paper was never written as far as we know, but had it been it could have referred to a fundamental shift in the dominant institution (religion to industrialized technology). The change took several centuries to take place fully, but its nature might have been discernible in the early stages if one were looking for the right sort of clues.

The signs we seek to examine may point to an equally momentous change, taking place far more rapidly. It may be as hard for us to take this eventuality seriously as it would have been for our hypothetical forecaster’s readers to imagine the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. The issue is an important one to consider, however. Our individual and collective actions are greatly influenced by our pictures of where we are in history.

This change in role has three important aspects:

Changes in the nature of societal problems
Looking backward for a moment, we may observe that science and technology have been particularly successful at solving problems and exploiting opportunities in areas such as:

On the other hand, the problems that give most concern for the future appear to arise from or are associated with continuation of a number of contemporary trends, including:

Increasing dependence of the individual on the technical order for satisfaction of his needs

This second list of trends is closely related to the first list (of success areas); the trends are partially consequences of or are reactions to those technological successes. To put it another way, the problem-solving role of science and technology has throughout most of the part of two centuries predominantly in responding to the challenges and limitations of man’s natural environment. The future role may lie much more in dealing with the consequences of his technological environment.
This fundamental change in the nature of the problems being dealt with implies a change in the kinds of science and technology. Probably, for example, there will have to be a new synthesis of social-science and humanistic knowledge with the physical and biological sciences into multi-disciplinary approaches.
Changes in attitudes toward science and technology

The first strong signs of public disenchantment with science and technology appeared in the 1960s. They involved both an awareness that the social costs of some technological applications might outweigh the benefits, and also a distrust of Big Science and its involvement with the “military-industrial” complex. By the 1970s these signs had evolved into three attitudes of significance for the future:

The reassessment of priorities became first clearly evident with the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) and SST (Supersonic Transport) controversies. Two aspects were at issue—the possibility of social costs outweighing benefits of new technologies, and the seemingly inexorable march toward more and more technologically complex, expensive, and powerful military technologies capable of mass destruction and worldwide long-term detriment.

Somewhat simultaneously, and perhaps not completely deliberately, national science policy underwent a significant shift associated with the “Mansfield Amendment,” resulting in an overall de-emphasis on basic research. Within the scientific community arose still another thrust—a protest against the prediction-and-control physicalistic emphasis carried over into the human sciences, and a call for “humanistic science” in the social science areas. As the environmental, resource depletion, and international redistribution problems became more pressing in the ‘70s there began to be heard a call for a retraction from energy-wasteful, materials-extravagant, environment-polluting technologies and the development of “appropriate” technology.

This kind of reassessment led to widespread recognition of the need to do a better and earlier job of assessing future consequences of technological developments, and of comparing technological options with these long term and second-order consequences in view. Integrative technology assessments have been carried out by the Office of Technology Assessment (formed by Congress in 1972), and also by EPA, ERDA, and NSP. Despite methodological problems, the concept of technology assessment is now well established and the issues (if not the term) are firmly in the public mind.

Perhaps the most significant change in attitude is the growing insistence on public participation in decisions on major scientific and technological issues. These matters are too important to be left to scientists and technical analysts, is the growing mood. On issues of nuclear safety, hazardous substances, power plant siting, ozone level in the stratosphere, probability and consequences of oil spills, and numerous others yet to come, public interest groups have shown a willingness to acquire and analyze detailed scientific knowledge and to challenge the opinions of experts with those of other experts.
They have raised issues of broad social consequences, harm to future generations, and equity that far transcend their own economic interests. They have made it clear, in actions ranging from initiatives to insistence on public representation in technology assessment, that the public is to be reckoned with in future scientific and technological decisions, even those which but a few years ago would have been considered so recondite that the opinions of scientific specialists would have been assumed to be final.

Changes in the science-technology paradigm

There can be little question that the dominant science-technology paradigm (in the Kuhn sense) is being challenged by some of the developments mentioned above. If there is a replacement paradigm, it is emergent and its form is not yet clear. From the nature of the challenges, however, it would seem that the candidate paradigm would substitute for the dominance of the following left handcolumn characteristics a complementarity or balance between the characteristics of both columns:

Kuhn defines the dominant paradigm, essentially, as the total pattern of valuing, seeking, and conceptualizing knowledge associated with a particular vision of reality. Thus, in a sense it is, most fundamentally, the dominant vision of reality implicit in industrialized society which is being challenged. The challenge of this new science is, put concisely, to recognize as complementary and of comparable significance both the realm of human experience heretofore left as the domain of the humanities and religions, and to develop methodologies for exploration and conceptualization that are appropriate to the full range of human experiencing of reality.

Because of the nature of the problems we face, and brought about partly through changing attitudes toward the role and requirements for science and technology, we see the possible emergence of a new science and technology as different from the old as that was from philosophy and religion.