>Q: Your thoughts on the coming year 2000 computer coding debacle. Do
>you see this potential disaster as helping to foment a new
>wellspring of opposition to technology?
>A: As near as I can tell, people regard Y2K as an act of God, not of
>technology, and they understand it no better than the Egyptians
>understood a plague of locusts. If it is as bad as I think it will
>be, people will react as they always do in anger, going after more
>and better rather than rejecting the whole thing: if I hate my wife,
>I want a better, younger woman, not celibacy.
[...]
>Q: What emerging technologies should we be especially concerned about?
>A: The computer, particularly the PC will bring unmitigated
>disaster, simply because it enables the powers of this society to do
>faster and more efficiently the kinds of things it likes to do, with
>resulting social disintegration, economic polarization, and
>environmental devastation.
[...]
>Q: What are some of your upcoming projects?
>A: I am planning to do a book on Robert Fulton and the impact of
>steam technology on the settling and development of America. The
>steamboat, lest we forget, is the harbinger of the industrial
>revolution for America, and is its central symbol, as the steam
>factory was for Britain, and I think it will be salutary for an
>American audience to understand why it has the technologies it has
>and what they have done in shaping the country the way it is. In
>brief, the steamboat opened the way for settlement of the heartland,
>the destruction of nature, the elimination of the native population,
>the development of a cotton/slave economy, and the Civil War.
[...]
>Q: What tendencies give you the most hope for our future?
>A: As you will see in that chapter, I do not feed on the
>mind-numbing carrion of hope. I do not have any confidence that the
>human species will survive for more than another 25 years, and if
>some remnants do, the best I can do is pray that they will have
>learned the lessons of industrial technology and not commit the same
>crimes again.
>