COURSE DESCRIPTION
Understanding the history of technology and its evolving social consequences - cultural, economic, and political - is of paramount importance in a world in which technologies have come to dominate almost every aspect of life, determining not just the character of our lives, but also the quality of our lives. The course will explore this history over a span of the last 3.5 million years, tracing its initial slow pace from its ancient roots in Africa to the invention of agriculture, manufacturing, writing and mathematics, printing, mechanical devices, industrial production, war machinery, computers, medicine, genetics, and space travel. The growth of technologies since the invention of printing has been exponential, but since the invention of digital computing the rate has gone off the scale, requiring an order of adaptation on the part of humans that is unprecedented. We are also faced with the consequences of our success as a technological society, consequences that have serious implications for the future including diminishing fossil fuels, global warming, population pressures, the consumption of finite resources, and waste and pollution.
