Sub: What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. –Sigmund Freud
Five hundred years ago, most of the people reading this article now would have been poor, illiterate and with very little hope for their future. Things had been this way for thousands of years, and there was no reason to believe they would change. The goal was to raise food and to survive long enough to produce children who did the same.
What changed?
In a word: progress. Since those dark ages of the distant past, there have been revolutions of progress in human history: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution and the Technological Revolution.
As their names imply, these were times of change and upheaval, and during virtually every one, most people were fearful of the changes as they occurred. Society lashed out at these changes with persecutions and wars from the Inquisition to World War II.
Our era is no different. We live in a time of some of the greatest changes that have ever occurred in the history of humanity. In just 150 years, we have gone from farming and riding horses to Super Walmart and men on the moon. The future promises even more changes that from today’s perspective seem uncertain and sometimes scary.
Yet, if we look back over the history of change, especially in the past millennium or century, we see that most of change works out for the best. Not too many people would sincerely give up air conditioning or transcontinental airplane travel for working through the blazing heat of summer or taking a covered wagon to California.
In the same way, advances in robotics, cybernetics and nanotechnology will fail to fulfill most of the fear people view them with. Certainly, these advances will not happen perfectly and there will be mistakes that happen along the way, but we cannot let fear get the best of us and make the mistakes worse.
Progress is a force we cannot stop, and we probably do not want to if we think about it. And, as long as we are thinking, there is not much room for fear.