The Difficult Decision of Change

Blog #11

Maria Kozdroy

10-4-14

The Difficult Decision of Change

            “Do you believe that rapid technoscientific change can be governed adequately by the political systems now existent?” asks Woodhouse at the end of Chapter 9.  I believe some form of political change is needed to keep up with technoscientific change, yet it will be very difficult to change due to legacy thinking.   Indeed elected officials should have a clear understanding of new innovations and their effects on the citizens, yet this would create more of a hassle for the government to fulfill training them successfully.  Not only will there need to be more government funded organizations for educating purposes, yet time will continue to pass and more innovations will become apparent, making it challenging to keep up with.  Technoscientific change is happening very quickly and forcing the democracy in the U.S. to be questioned by many, including Woodhouse himself.  I strongly believe legacy thinking is very dominant today and will continue to be, unless innovation comes to a complete halt, which seems highly unlikely.  As time passes new generations of children will be brought up by parents who have learned to share and agree with the same thoughts their parents passed on to them, greatly influencing their decisions.  Although technocratic thinking will continually expand over time, legacy thinking will always be existent, making it difficult to overrule. 

            One form of democracy Woodhouse suggests the U.S. government can possibly lean into becoming is a workplace democracy, one in which the workers select their bosses.  This form of democracy sounds very interesting yet legacy thinking will prevail.  The boss or CEO of a corporation will most likely always make more money than the workers below them, yet this way has been around for years.  Sooner or later, there may just be less workers than there are now due to machines that have been designed in such a way that no problems can evolve.  Yes, problems due tend to just come out of nowhere, however, the optimistic side shall be explored here that machines can do satisfactory work of humans entirely. I am not too fond of this idea of machines taking over but it just might happen.  If it does happen it will make Woodhouse’s idea of training government officials the basics of innovation entirely unneeded, if the innovations themselves are trusted.

            Many interesting ideas bestow from the machines overruling suggestion above.  Rapid technoscientific innovation is becoming difficult to keep up to date with, while on the other hand the U.S. democracy is in a standby deciding whether to proceed with the increasing change, and if so, how change should be handled.  Woodhouse has proposed many ideas throughout the text and has suggested how they do seem impossible at the time, and how over time can hopefully be accustomed to.  However, I believe legacy thinking will always have a say over all political and economic decisions made.  

Sources: Chapter 9 of Woodhouse STS Text