Technology and values: problems and options

Science, technology and industry have come to form a positive feedback system of accelerating change, greatly extending the political choice and load carried by the democratic process, and having a potentially massive impact on culture and values. Three possible options are considered for dealing with this situation: limiting research, limiting dissemination, and reforming social institutions and culture. Only one aspect of the third option is considered, ie, the development of an appropriate epistemology to deal with the interaction of science, technology and values. The expansionist claim that science itself is developing to explain the sources of ethics, and will increasingly subsume the traditional areas of social science and the humanities has its problems. The views of the scientific restrictionist, Sir Geoffrey Vickers, a member of the Futures Advisory Board who died recently, deserve wider attention.