From Les Higgins
Back in the mid-1970s (yes, I am that old) I was involved with some iconoclastic engineers and scientists. One of the issues much discussed was an impending technological dark age caused by the disparity between focusing on “application” and “knowledge” about a technology – electronics, for example.
How many “computer” scientists or engineers, or indeed anyone else, have the knowledge to even begin to build a semiconductor technology from scratch? Oh, there’s lots of information around but, in today’s context (and extrapolating over the next decade or two), what happens when the world’s last CD drive fails? Look at the immense effort it took to “reconstruct” the Voyager space probe data in recent years.
Now, more than ever, we live in a market economy where science and technology are concerned.
As a result we are even more vulnerable to loss of knowledge than your article on the myth of technological progress suggests (29 September, p 30).
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Swindon, Wiltshire, UK
