"Safe" Technologies That Kill
Technology is always subject to human decisions

Author: P. Fernando Pascual, L.C | Source: Catholic.net

Technology saves work, reduces the risk of human error, facilitates access to many material goods. But the safest technology cannot guarantee health, life, or the complete absence of errors.

First, because technology is human work, subjected, like all human, to flaws that the most insightful minds cannot completely suppress. Secondly, because technology is available to men with all that is good and with all the bad things in their hearts. That's why a pharmaceutical discovery can be used to cure or to kill... Thirdly, because the most perfect technology, being applied by specific people to variable situations, enters the dynamism of the contingent and "suffers" in the face of difficult-to-foresee factors.

Some aircraft accidents with an "excellent" electronic program have highlighted these fragilities of technology in one of the most advanced areas: computer programming. 
So we can find the surprising paradox that there are very safe technologies that ultimately kill and cause damage, sometimes with uncontrollable force, as when a nuclear reactor explodes...

The Promethean dream of dominating the world, of eliminating evils on earth, of advancing through technology towards happiness and wealth, collides again and again with facts, some of which reveal a profound evil that affects everything human. 

Only when we put aside the mirage of the Myth of progress, which imagines a perfect planet thanks to scientific studies and the most advanced technologies, we will clearly see the dangers that are part of our human condition.

Because, whether we want it or not, technology is always subject to human decisions, always characterized by an indeterminate opening to the bad (when we choose selfishness and arrogance) or to the good (when we opt for what leads us to the Love of God and others).

Share on Google+

Inappropriate ads? |

Another one window