Children of Prometheus

Technology and the Good Life

Technology has become too important to be left to technologists. As its changes keep increasing in both rate and scope, leaders of all spheres and levels of society need a critical and constructive view of technology. Such a view is best developed by grounding our understanding in the origins of the technological ideal and considering the ways technology has developed or diverged from its ideals over the course of history, as well as the way technological ideals relate to wider human concepts of the good life.

Children of Prometheus offers a series of readings, ancient and contemporary, that raise the seminal and enduring questions about the extraordinary advancements that many technologies have given the world; the origins of technology; the triumph of technique over substance in the modern world; the benefits we are now enjoying and the prices we are now paying; and our hopes, dreams, and plans for a rehumanized technology. In short, we join a dialogue among some of the great thinkers about what it means for humans to have technological dominion over creation, what we are making of that creation, and what we are making of ourselves.

“You’ve gotta be careful when you get good with a hammer. All of your problems start to look like a nail.”

folk saying, sometimes attributed to Abraham Maslow

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

Roy Amara, The Institute for the Future

“All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

Henry David Thoreau

“A sophisticated perspective on technological change includes one’s being skeptical of Utopian and Messianic visions drawn by those who have no sense of history or of the precarious balances on which culture depends.”

Neil Postman

“Don’t hide behind the hypocrisy of neutral science: you are educated enough to be able to evaluate whether from the egg you are hatching will issue a dove or a cobra or a chimera or perhaps nothing at all.”

Primo Levi, “Hatching the Cobra”

“If we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous—then we might understand what we can and should relinquish.”

Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”

This curriculum is available for Trinity Forum events and sponsored events only.

Edited by Dan Russ with Peter Edman