Chapter 11: Nye's "Not Just One Future"

David E. Nye uses many complex terms and provides a great amount of benificial information about why technology matters to the world. His extreme detail and true life statistical information puts the idea that technology is a good thing down in the gutter. In similarity to Vicente and Vonneguts influences on the views of technology, both “The Human Factor” and “Cat’s Cradle” are smaller ideas of Nye’s bigger ideas on technology. Both Vicente and Vonnegut chose smaller things to talk about involving technology and chose to educate the reader in different ways than Nye. All, in which, were great ideas because it did indeed educate the reader, however, Nye really seems to get down to the facts of technology and really plants new ideas in the reader’s heads. That’s atleast what he did for me.
In chapter 11, “Not Just One Future,” Nye discusses many bad things that are going to come out of technology in our near futures if we continue to let depend on it as much as we do. Nye talks about a situation that had happened from technology involving the safety of technology itself to the people using it, a similar situation to Vicente’s opening senerio in “The Human Factor” involving an unexpected explosion due to technological safety failure.
“The inability to understand or fix many modern machines is also linked to issues of safety. Even if each divice functions perpatibilities that can cause malfunctions, accidents, or even disasters. Although each individual machine can be improved and made safer, the overarching system of machines may contain dangerous inconsistencies that manifest themselves only in extreme or unusual circumstances” (Nye: 221).
This information is more straight forward and to the point kind of information, as most of Nye’s information is all throughout thebook. Vicente’s information about the issues of safety of technology. However, Vicente breaks down the information into more simple terms and provides a senerio to the reader so they get a better understanding of what is meant by the issues in the safety of technologyand national disasters.
“The first violent explision unleashed a power spike one hundred time greater than anything the reactor was designed to produce under normal operating conditions. It hoisted the thousand-ton steel and congrete plate covering the reactor, exposing the 1,680 nuclear fuel rods in the reactor core and spewing deadly radioactivity into the atmosphere… The problem was that the plant designers hadn’t paid enough attention to the human factor – the operators were trained but the complexity of the reactor and the control panels nevertheless outstripped their ability to grasp what they were seeing” (Vicente: 11).
Clearly, this is a more detailed quote from Vicente introducing the idea that technology is very dangerous and that it can cause a great majority of problems if you don’t know how to use it or what the possible effects it can bring to our lives. As you can see from the second half of the quote, we may be knowledgable to the technology we are using but not as knowledgable as we need to be. In addition, I think that Vicente and Nye are trying to point out that even the highest of our knowledge couldn’t prevent things like this to happen. Disasters happen all the time whether it involves technology or other things, and we can never be completely knowledgable or prepared for whats to come from these new technologies. In stating this, this information is very valuable because it tells us what can come out of technology in the future, and if the path we are going down with technological uses is the right path for our futures.