Notion anglais LV1 Tmnle idea of progress

                                                IDEA OF PROGRESS

As a famous political figure said, « the tradition is the progress in the past,progress, in the future, it will be the tradition » . Progress is the idea that the world and the society can evolve positively in therms of sciences, technology, modernization or living condition, However, the idea of progress is still debate between those who consider that it’s beneficial and those for whom it’s harmful.

           So we can wonder, what are the advances made in the twentiest century ?

Firstly, we will discover the technological progress with the example of Turing and then , we will talk about the advances of the medicine.

         The technological advances of the last decades have totally changed the world we know today. If we take the example of the arrival of internet and access to computers and smartphones it is easy to see to what extent our lives and our relationships with others have been completely transformed ,we have access to far more information than before, we can easily communicate across borders, be informed about the latest news events, share our opinions about different topics. But if we are here today, we can considered that it is mainly thanks to Alan Turing, usually called « The father of Computing ». The Imitation Game is a 2014 (two thousand and fourteen) American historical movie written by Graham Moore, . This film tells the story of the british emblematic figure : Indeed, Alan Turing was a British scientist and a pioneer in computer science. During World War II, he developed a machine that helped break the German Enigma code. He also laid the groundwork for modern computing and theorized about artificial intelligence. He allowed the end of the war, and saved indirectly many lives. Unabashedly gay, he committed suicide after being convicted of homosexual acts, in a society were being homosexual was prohibited. Turing is considered as the father of computer science. In a time when the first general purpose computers had just been built, Turing was already asking the question 'can computers think'? It was that question that resulted in the Turing Test, which dictates that a computer can only be truly intelligent, or said to 'think', if a human interrogator can not tell it apart, through conversation, from a human being. The Turing test is still considered a benchmark for charting the progression of artificial intelligence. His brilliance was exhibited when he created a chess computer programme for a computer that was yet to exist. The resultant effect of his work on the first computer are too long to list here, but it paved way for the technology that has changed the world and significantly improved the quality of human life. It has also radically changed our lives, we're now reliant on computers to provide us with answers and cure our problems.Today,

computers come in all different sizes and can do things that would've been deemed as magic in Turing's day.

           Scientific progress has had a direct impact on the improvement of human life. Thanks to advances in medicine we can cure illnesses that could never have been cured in the past. Vaccinations protect millions of children from disease. Antibiotics, painkillers and other medical treatments have helped to improve our general state of health and survival rates. Genetic progress are the most important in this century. Since the beginning of stem cells research, it had been about human medicine and how to cure very rare or strong diseases. A lot of money had been injected in that kind of research and sometimes with any results. This is why scientists keep going on with them. It’s their job to find treatments against illness and so they tried to make of our DNA the most fabulous medicine. But medicine babies are now considered as one of the most useful treatments. The principle is to make a tes tube baby without any illness to treat other people. Most of the time those babies         are made to cure their brother or sister if they have like bone marrow cancer or diseases which require the same blood group or the same kind of DNA. As a child they have their own life and they also helped a member of their family to live or survive. Researchers also tried to make designers babies, also called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) . The point is to make the baby as the parents want.They can choose the physical traits of the future baby but the most important is that they can choose to protect him or her from any weakness like alcoholism or drug addiction. Parents can also choose to make their child smart, bold or even both. We can see that kind of choose in the movie « Welcome to Gattaca », an american movie of anticipation made in 1997 (nineteen ninety seven).

...