I can’t match my wife, of course. She’s going to the stars. A poem she wrote for the online magazine, Swans.com, is being reprinted on a NASA poster honoring women astronauts.
More modestly, I’m going to the classroom. A high school English teacher in Ontario has asked permission to use an article I wrote for Swans about the ills of technology in his grade 12 class.
The article:
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Man vs Machine
The good news is that we now have machines that make life easier, more comfortable and more exciting for the average individual than it was for the richest and most powerful king in the not-so-distant past.
The bad news is that those same machines threaten our lives, the ecology, our privacy, our jobs, our sense of self, and sometimes our sanity.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," author Arthur Clarke once said." And much of our technology is close to magical. We control the weather in our homes. We travel in what our ancient ancestors would have considered magic carpets, watch events as they happen halfway around the world, talk to people thousands of miles away, eat food grown a continent away, send space ships to the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond.
At the same time, the machines that make all this possible can also spy out our most private secrets, monitor our every move, pollute our air and water, destroy our forests and marshes, obliterate an office building, a city, or even a country — and keep us alive and in pain long after we're ready to die.
Rest at:
http://www.swans.com/library/art8/rdeck012.html