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Will Technology Leave Readers Behind? Not if Writers Can Help It!
It’s pretty much an accepted fact that ethics will always trail technology. It’s inevitable: you can’t ask questions of something that doesn’t yet exist; and, by and large, the people pushing the boundaries of the possible in science and technology aren’t necessarily the people who will look at the breakthrough and ask the questions. They only want to know if something can be done; it’s only later that someone else arrives on the scene and asks whether it should be done. And by then it’s far too late.
If you cannot imagine something, you can’t determine its benefits and problems. No one worried about the consequences of cloning until Dolly the Sheep was a reality.
Authors have some of the same problems. I think that by and large science-fiction authors do an excellent job of positing new technologies — and then showing their drawbacks. Prescient imaginations from Leonardo da Vinci (who said that one day humanity would travel to the moon in a spaceship launched from Florida) to George Orwell, explored possible future achievements and — in the case of Orwell and Ray Bradbury, for example — how those achievements could change human culture.
As an author myself, I’ve never been able to do that. For one thing, I’m not smart enough to posit new worlds with new technologies. For another, I…
