The idea of progress: : is progress necessarily perceived as a positive change?

The idea of progress is very important in our everyday life. Progress could be change, but so it means change for a better world, a better life. Change could be medical progress, technological improvement or in communication think of internet for example, and also social improvement. So in relation with the notion the idea of progress my presentation will deal with the following question: is progress necessarily perceived as a positive change? focusing on scientific progress

y of all i will speak about the theory of evolution, then i will speak about artificial intelligence and finally i will speak about genetically engineered babies.

For this i will use the documents we worked on in class.

Theories on science have always evolved in history. A theory is considered true until a better one is created and the new improved one replaces the other.

Charles Darwin was a naturalist who developed the theory of evolution which followed the theory of creationism that defended God’s divine creation. The monkey Trial document shows in some way the process of this new theory acceptance. It explains the court case in which John Scopes a biology teacher on Dayton Tennessee was accused of not respecting the law by teaching Darwin’s theory which denied the theory of divine creation. This was a big scandal and was the first trial to be defused on such a large scale. it even appeared on the radio and all around the news. So we can see this progress was not only perceived in a good way by society.

The next progress im going to talk about is artificial intelligence. As we could learn on the document what is artificial intelligence by bbc news, artificial intelligence is about creating a computer mind that can think as a human. Some people, for example Stephen Hawkins are against it since it could be dangerous creating a robot that thinks like a human, they don’t have feelings and they could even get to the point were their intelligence is superior to ours so we must be aware of the dangers this creation could have. On the other hand, Garry Kasparov a world chess champion doesn't fear machines, he says he actually works with them and says we have to compete with machines because that will make humans progress.

Finally i will talk about genetically engineered babys using the GATTACA movie extract. We can clearly see here eugenics brought to an extreme. You can basically chose everything about your baby and that is not necessarily good because you are inventing a pre-made baby and not letting him come as nature made him. And this risk that maybe in some years all the babies will be the same an have all he same qualities and maybe even be created in factories. But a great thing is this n prevent from diseases.

We see scientific progress is not always seen in a great way and it could even lead to a lost of humanity. But if people are conscious and they control progress we can still believe in positive progress.

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