The benefits of technology

Science and technology are getting a bad press these days. Increasingly scornful of the materialism of our culture, some people speak about returning to a simpler, pre-industrial, pre-scientific day. They fail to realize that the “good old days” 1 were actually horribly bad old days of ignorance, disease, slavery, and death. They I fancy themselves in Athens, talking to Socrates or watching the latest play by Sophocles but never as a slave brutalized in the Athenian silver mines. They imagine themselves as medieval knights on armoured chargers but never as starving peasants. They also ignore the fact that, before modern technology, the full I flower of art and human intellect was reserved for the few. It was the technical advances that brought many of the marvels of mankind to even the poorest.