单选题 The economic effects are easy to see. Since 1978, some 43 billion jobs have been lost, largely to forms of technology—either to robotics directly or to computers that are doing what they are supposed to be doing, being labor-saving devices. Today, there is no such thing as a lifetime job; there is no such thing as a career for most people anymore. The jobs that are not done away with are being deskilled, or they are disposable jobs. Even for those jobs that many of you may feel secure with, there are people who are working on what are called "expert systems" to be able to take jobs away from doctors and judges and lawyers. The machine is capable of shredding these jobs as well.
But it"s not just the jobs. The economy of jobs and services is trivial compared to the "Nintendo capitalism" that now operates in the world. Four trillion dollars a day is shuffled around the earth as wealth created there. The inevitable result of a Nintendo economy—pulling itself apart, losing jobs, insecure—is the shriveling of the society in which it exists. What we have is an apartheid society, with growing gaps between the rich and poor, and the rich spending a lot of time cocooning themselves from the effects of the poor.
A further result of information technology—something that nobody seems to wish to pay much attention to—is the shredding everywhere of the natural world. Forget about the amount of toxins that go into producing these computers, and the resources that go into producing them, such that 40,000 pounds of resources are necessary for a four-pound laptop. That"s trivial compared to the direct effect that computers and the industrial system as a result have on the atmosphere and climate, the pollution of air and water.
The development in technology does not always bring human beings goods; there is bad news too. But most people are ignorant of the drawback of the new technology at first. In this century, however, the development in science and technology really aroused people"s attention of the weak points. But the techno-logy has an even darker effect, because it is enabling us to conquer nature. Industrial society is waging a war of the technosphere against the biosphere. That is the Third World War. The bad news is that we are winning that war.