The notion of progress : to what extent should we fear progress, or whether should we be reassured by technological advances?

The notion of progress

To begin with, I would like to give a personal definition of progress: it’s an evolution, a change towards betterment. It can either be social, technical, or scientific, and contributes towards making the world a better place. These sequences are often the subject of concern as to it possible consequences.

In relation with the notion, the subject of my presentation will be “technological advances from fiction from reality”. To what extent: should we fear progress, or whether should we be reassured by technological advances?

To answer this question I will present two documents “Men VS Machine” and “O brave world”

First scientific techniques go further and further and sometimes even go beyond fiction. Indeed in this article of the Huffington Post dating from February 17, 2011? It speaks of a computer called Watson. He participated in a game called TV show called “Jeopardy”. At the time of his invention, he could only do simple calculations of mathematics. Then he quickly evolved, beating champions of chess, until becoming Watson, a TV player like no other! He is described as a real feat by experts in the field of technology. But there are things that Watson can't do, unlike humans. For example, he can't "decide to create" (l.22), this is an essential point since it is dependent on man. He cannot feel either pride (l.35) or empathy, or even fear or adrenaline (l.37). But Watson is not just a "trivia whiz", he's "changing the way people think about artificial intelligence" (l.61). Watson's victory was hailed as a fantastic breakthrough into the field of artificial intelligence as nobody expected a machine to outwit very cleaver human players.

The fact that computers become smarter can be quite scary... If computers keep getting smarter, there might come a moment when they are capable of competing with human intelligence, and getting beyond our control. From another point of view, if we manage to control this technology, the power available will allow us to progress in so many different fields, and solve many of the world's problems

In a second step, we will speak of a text entitled "O brave new world". The story takes place in London's Hatchery and Conditioning center, in 2495. Unlike the previous text, this one is a fiction, a projection into a probable future. In this scene, the director visits the hatchery to students. Here, human eggs are incubated, then forced to divide and multiply, and finally grow into embryos. Normally, human egg produces one embryo which produces one adult, it's the "adult-normality". But with the "Bokanovsky process", one egg produces eight to ninety-six buds which produce eight to ninety-six adults. Therefore, for the director, progress is being able to create ninety-six humans, so being able to clone human beings. He calls the normal development of the human race "the old viviparous days" (l.25), women's eggs could accidentally produce twins or even triplets but nothing more. But why want he so many identical individuals? Because they can to work on eighteen identical machines. The doctor concludes that if we could "bokanovskify" indefinitely, the whole problem would be solved. The words "social stability" are repeated three

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