Science & Technology Profit Vs People
Bappa Sinha · Education & Science
Price: Rs. 14. Science and technology surround us in ways that would have been unimaginable even a generation ago. The mobile phone in your pocket contains computing power that only a few decades back would have required a supercomputer filling an entire room. Social media platforms connect billions in real time, while artificial intelligence tools now translate languages and even generate images and write texts. New medicines, vaccines, and diagnostic devices have altered the way we treat disease. Renewable energy plants, satellites, electric vehicles all of these are no longer science fiction but part of our everyday lives. But the sheer ubiquity of technology creates a danger: that we come to see it as something neutral, automatic, or outside politics. We are told that "technology is just progress" or that "science is always good," and that our role is only to consume passively. Others, reacting to the harms of technology, fall into fear and despair: blaming machines for unemployment, blaming the internet for social decay, or condemning all new inventions as threats to humanity. These are two sides of the same mistake. Both techno-fetishism (seeing technology as an unquestionable saviour) and Luddism (rejecting technology altogether) miss the essential truth: science and technology are products of human society, and they always serve the interests of classes in struggle.