In his account of the three waves of the Industrial Revolution, Professor Budil shows how the advent of new technologies transformed Western society. Steam engines created the nation (and the traditional family, Hampl adds). The internal combustion engine and electricity created the middle class. Computers and nuclear power created nothing. The third wave of the Industrial Revolution failed.
I suggest looking at the matter from the opposite direction. It may help us understand more. Technology makes all kinds of change possible, but it provides only the potential. There must also be strong pressure within society for change, and that change must make use of the technology. Without the technology, the change would be far more difficult. But technology by itself cannot transform society. It merely enables something people would want even without it.
By pressure for change, I mean that there is a fairly clear idea of a fundamental change that ought to take place, and that this idea is shared by enough influential people and groups—including, perhaps, an organized working class—that it can realistically be put into effect.
The steam engine dates to the late eighteenth century. Yet the social transformation came only with the formation of nations—and comparable reforms in Great Britain—from the second third of the nineteenth century onward. Technology played a crucial role, but it had to wait two generations for the social demand to emerge.
The same applies to automobiles, airplanes, and electricity. They were available from the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was only the establishment of the postwar model of national capitalism that allowed them to play a role in transforming Western societies.
Computers and nuclear power arrived at a time when society was moving in the opposite direction: toward the dismantling of the nation-state, the destruction of the middle class, and the abandonment of all the ideas and institutions associated with them. It is therefore not entirely true, as Ivo Budil argues, that they brought no fundamental change. They brought change for the worse.
But that is merely a discussion of the past. The truly important question is what the fourth wave of the Industrial Revolution—artificial intelligence and humanoid robots—will bring. Unlike in the 1980s, the Western world is no longer captivated by ideas about the benefits of liberalization and deregulation. No one argues that social programs are immoral—and if anyone does, he is not taken seriously. No one says it is unjust that the rich pay too much in taxes or that social inequalities are too small. Yes, that was precisely the foundation of the intellectual debate of the 1970s and 1980s. Fortunately, it is now behind us. Few people bother to conceal the fact that the present form of market capitalism has simply failed. Yet there is no compelling vision of what fundamentally ought to change, much less any serious pressure to bring such a change about.
So we have the technology, but we lack the ability to think beyond the confines of the existing model without lapsing into some wild utopia. And that is precisely the paradox. Despite the enormous shift from the natural and technical sciences toward the humanities, we have the technology but do not know what to do with society.
Or is it because of that shift?