4The First Technological Revolution and Its Lessons1965

Aware that we are living in the midst of a technological revolution, we are becoming increasingly concerned with its meaning for the individual and its impact on freedom, on society, and on our political institutions. Side by side with messianic promises of utopia to be ushered in by technology, there are the most dire warnings of man’s enslavement by technology, his alienation from himself and from society, and the destruction of all human and political values.

Tremendous though today’s technological explosion is, it is hardly greater than the first great revolution technology wrought in human life 7,000 years ago when the first great civilization of man, the irrigation civilization, established ...

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