The idea of progress : should we or shouldn't we fear progress ?

Theme : « The idea of progress »

Issue : Should or shouldn’t we fear progress ?

During the last two centuries but in an even more strinking way during the 21st century, progress, which can be defined as an improvement, a development, a technical, scientific or social advance which contributes to making the world a better place started playing a more and more crucial part in the modern everyday life. Progress is often considered as a good thing because it’s in most of people’s mind, assimilated to an improvement of living conditions. For exemple, scientific progress such as medical advances, cures for illnesses, we can also talk about technological progress, like hybrid cars, wind turbines, solar panels, biofuel for exemple have been huge betterment for science.  Science could be defined as the ​careful ​study of the ​structure and ​behaviour of the ​physical ​world, ​especially by ​watching, ​measuring, and doing ​experiments, and the ​development of ​theories to ​describe the ​results of these ​activities. We are now going to try answering the folowing question : « Should we fear progress ? » To start with, we are going to show that science might sometimes be going too far, and then we will show that it plays a major role in everyone’s well-being.

1. Major role

It is true that science and all te progresses coming along are really important in some people’s lives, in some really specific cases. Indeed, we saww a video of a man named Hugh Herr. He used to climb a lot when he was young, but he lost his legs in a climbing accident so now he has robotic legs and I think it’s awesome to see how science saved his life, now he can walk, he can run, he can even jump which is incredible for soeone who’s lost both his legs. He said he was living an almost normal life and that if he had to chose between having his legs back and keeping his robotic legs, he would keep his new ones. So science can be a good thing when it comes to medical advances.    

1. Science might sometimes be going too far

But on another hand and in my opinion, science is sometimes going too far. For example, in the movie Gattaca, directed by Andrew Nicole which is about a couple who wants to resort to genetic selection in order to choose the traits of their future baby. In the movie they can choose the colour of the hair, the eyes, if the baby’s goig to be tall or smart, and even to make that the baby is going to be unsuscetible to diseases among other things. We also heard an interview of a geneticist who was sayinng that he could help the parents to chose the gender of their future baby, and that he has already helped more than a 1 000 couples to make this decision and he used a thrilled expression that fits really well with my opinion, the « geneticly perfect », which describes exactly the risk that science could bring : a world of perfect clones, so all the beauty out of everyone’s imperfections will be gone. We also also heard an interview of a man who created a robot named Jules, and even though I’m impressed to see how far science can go, I was really scared to see that such things could be created and it makes me think that humans could  live in a more or less close future in a robotic world.

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