10. Lošinjski dani bioetike - Hrvatsko filozofsko društvo

BRANKO KATALINIĆ
Vienna University of Technology, Austria /
Tehničko sveučilište u Beču, Austrija
New Engineers for the Future:
Action Balanced between
Intelligence, Wisdom and Ethics
Our civilisation is a technology based civilisation. Without technology
our civilisation could not be developed to be a global phenomenon. The
security and welfare of individuals and groups of individuals (e.g., nations,
states, companies, etc.) are typical classical short term aims of the use of
technology. Modern society is interested in getting maximal benefit from
the possibilities of modern technology. Technology is permanently changing;
accordingly, society must also continuously both change and adapt to
the possibilities of actual technology. This change of technology is well
described by Alvin Toffler: “Each new machine or technique, in a sense,
changes all existing machines and techniques, by permitting us to put them
together into new combinations. The number of possible combinations
rises exponentially as the number of new machines or techniques rises arithmetically.
Indeed, each new combination may, itself, be regarded as a
new super-machine.” The power and possibilities of technology are permanently
increasing on the one hand, while the area of its application is our
planet which has limited resources and a sensitive and fragile balance on
the other. The global problems of our planet are the result of a combination
of egoism and large-scale misuse of technology. The ten key problems of
the world today are the consequence of: 1) our focus on short-term solutions;
2) the development target model applied to the planet as a whole is
called the “developed world”; 3) the large-scale misuse of technology; 4)
the unlimited right to make money; 5) egoism and the “animalisation” of
human beings, whereby we have been increasingly presented as bodies
and decreasingly as thinking beings – or our focus on the body and not
the mind; 6) the paradigm of continuous and permanent growth; 7) engineers
without ethics – a recipe for disaster; 8) an increase in the complexity
of technology; 9) the specialisation of science; 10) the dominance of “to
have” over “to be”.
The modern world is also the result of the work of engineers in the
past. Their actions were based on classical ethics for engineers, which
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