Page 54 - The Drucker Lectures

The First Technological Revolution and Its Lessons [ 35

between the first technological revolution and the technological
revolution that got underway 200 years ago and has still clearly
not run its course.
We, therefore, face a big task of identifying the areas in
which social and political innovations are needed. We face a big
task in developing the institutions for the new tasks, institutions
adequate to the new needs and to the new capacities which tech-
nological change is casting up. And, finally, we face the biggest
task of them all—the task of ensuring that the new institutions
embody the values we believe in, aspire to the purposes we con-
sider right, and serve human freedom, human dignity, and hu-
man ends.
If an educated man of those days of the first technological
revolution—an educated Sumerian, perhaps, or an educated an-
cient Chinese—looked at us today, he would certainly be totally
stumped by our technology. But he would, I am sure, find our
existing social and political institutions reasonably familiar. They
are, after all, by and large not fundamentally different from the
institutions he and his contemporaries first fashioned.
And, I am quite certain, he would have nothing but a wry
smile for both those among us who predict a technological
heaven and those who predict a technological hell of “alien-
ation,” of “technological unemployment,” and so on. He might
well mutter to himself, “This is where I came in.” But to us he
might well say, “A time such as was mine and such as is yours, a
time of true technological revolution, is not a time for exultation.
It is not a time for despair, either. It is a time for work and for
responsibility.”

From the presidential address to the Society for the History of Technology,
presented in San Francisco.