Can We Survive Technology
Can We Survive Technology is an article by John von Neumann, published in Fortune Magazine in 1955.
Overview[edit | edit source]
In this article, published in the popular magazine Fortune and aimed at the general public, von Neumann tackles the question whether humanity will survive the "crisis" brought about by increasingly powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons.
After reviewing several developments he concludes that there is no way to ask in advance for a "complete recipe" and that humanitiy' survival will depend on whether we can demonstrate the qualities of "patience, flexibility, intelligence."
Technologies discussed[edit | edit source]
- nuclear weapons
- nuclear energy: von Neumann predicted that energy might soon be "essentially free"
- transmutation of matter
- control of weather
Principles for Managing the Risks of Technology[edit | edit source]
The most useful technologies are also the most dangerous:
the very techniques that create the dangers and the instabilities are in themselves useful, or closely related to the useful. In fact, the more useful they could be, the more unstabilizing their effects can also be. It is not a particular perverse destructiveness of one particular invention that creates danger. Technological power, technological efficiency as such, is an ambivalent achievement. Its danger is intrinsic.
We Can't Separate The Lions From the Lambs[edit | edit source]
Van Neumann argues, via negativa, that what will not work is to try to limit or eliminate one particular branch of technology. We can't "separate the lions from the lambs", i.e., we cannot manage technology risk by inhibiting particular technologies:
The crisis will not be re solved by inhibiting this or that apparently particularly obnoxious form of technology. For one thing, the parts of technology, as well as of the underlying sciences, are so intertwined that in the long run nothing less than a total elimination of all technological progress would suffice for inhibition. Also, on a more pedestrian and immediate basis, useful and harmful techniques lie everywhere so close together that it is never possible to separate the lions from the lambs.