As a precocious young lad in the late 1960s I was mightily influenced by a book called Facing the Atomic Future by Sir Ernest William Titterton, a veteran of the Manhattan Project and the foundation chair of Nuclear Physics at the Australian National University.

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Sir Ernest, like many of his contemporaries, was what we would now call a "techno-optimist". He, like many of the scientists and engineers involved in the space program, the burgeoning nuclear industry, and at the forefront of advances in medicine, agriculture and many other fields, believed humanity was on the threshold of a new golden age that would be ushered in by an enlightened technocracy.

This mindset was popularised during the golden age of science fiction by writers such as Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke who wrote about their future worlds so convincingly one could almost believe they had been there.

The general consensus was that if humanity were granted infinite energy and unlimited resources world peace and prosperity would automatically follow. While he acknowledged that instead of harnessing the atom for a global utopia humanity could bomb itself back into the stone age, Sir Ernest firmly believed human rationality would prevail.

What techno-optimistics did not take into account was that human factors - economics, tribalism, hatred and greed - dictate how new technologies are deployed. Technology is a force multiplier; it is not a saviour in and of itself.

While, as I noted in last Wednesday's essay, humanity has dodged a lot of bullets over the past 60 years the future has not unfolded the way Sir Ernest, his Panglossian fellows, and I had hoped.

As a species we have fallen well short of what we were told was our potential. Instead of interstellar travel, colonies on the moon and Mars, boundless energy, universal peace and love, and asteroid mining we have a world where the ability to desalinate water and eradicate disease exists alongside millions of preventable deaths a year, endless wars and deeply entrenched poverty.

Low earth orbit has been appropriated by a handful of tech billionaires. Social media algorithms whose sole purpose is to make their obscenely rich creators even richer sow division and manufacture outrage by the bushel. This is not the earthly paradise I was expecting.

The reason our grasp has fallen so short of our reach is because, like every utopian vision since Plato penned The Republic, the techno-optimists assumed humanity is perfectible.

Unfortunately almost every attempt to build "a better man" has created a hell on earth; whether it be the subordination of the individual to the 1000 year Reich or attempts to forge the perfect citizen of the collectivist state in Russia under Stalin, China under Mao or Cambodia under Pol Pot.

In all of those cases, with Cambodia arguably the most extreme example, when the messy, contradictory human clay wouldn't fit the mold the architects........

© Canberra Times