Реферат: Influences On Society Essay Research Paper Influences

other societies that are not as developed as the West is. For example,

India’s society has just recently been greatly influenced by

technology in the form of cable television and consumer durables, such

as washing and dryer machines. Their society now has machines that can

do the work of what many had to pay someone else to do or do

themselves. The idea of a machine doing the work of a human scares

many societies and causes a backlash against technology. This leads to

the influence of societies’ moral and cultural standards upon the

pursuit of technological growth. Unemployment due to machines has been

the greatest fear of many societies. Since the beginning of the

Industrial Revolution, people have predicted that machines would

destroy their jobs and their lives as well. The book, Frankenstein was

the result of a technology gone astray. The author wrote the story to

keep people from inventing all these new technologies. Karl Marx

himself said that, by investing in machinery, factory owners would

create a vast army of the unemployed. In the late 1940s, Nobert

Weiner, a pioneer of computing, forecast that this new technology

would destroy enough jobs to make the depression of the 1930s looks

like a picnic. With all the negative publicity of new technologies,

many societies choose not to invest in some technology and without a

demand or the ideas for technology, progress is slowed. Unemployment

is not the only driving force behind the influence of society on

technology. There are many groups against technological progress.

These g! roups help stop a technology by petition, debating, and by

any means necessary (as did farmers with burning the cotton gins in

1840s). Technology can not progress unless there is someone that

thinks up an idea, but that idea can be stopped very quickly by a

societies’ view of that idea. John F. Kennedy was quoted as saying:

“If men have the talent to invent new machines that put people out of