Volume 64, 2018
Philosophy of Technology
Elba Del Carmen Riera
Pages 119-123
Technology and Cultural Change
For a long time it was thought that the universe was a deterministic machine, that we could predicted their behavior and formulate its exact and predictable laws; however from the mid twentieth century have happened extraordinary discoveries of science, such as the systems theory, information theory, cybernetics, dissipative structures, molecular biology, chaos, fractals, nonclassical logics and other advances have given us a new view of reality that can be described as complex. All of this has destabilized the unconditional faith in science and technology as guarantor for its predictability and exactitude, and it has been accompanied by a cultural change that incorporates other attitudes such as “risk”, “precaution questioning”, “humility”, against the overwhelming and unpredictable development of technology that requires a new behavior on the part of thinkers in theory and practice, they have the responsibility of guiding the uncertainty created by this new culture. Against this situation, there are reflections from Philosophy trying to orient, ethically, the behaviors who have the responsibility to make decisions against this cultural change.