Chris Rasmussen
Technology is more than gears and sprockets, transistors and microchips; it also functions as a vision of the future, one that provides the physical means of translating that vision into reality. And because implicit in every technological innovation is a program for improving society, technological change has often inspired Americans to engage in prophecy. Utopians place their faith in the unfolding of technological progress, insisting that it will liberate humanity from drudgery and poverty, make information freely accessible to all, and, one day, usher in the era of Ray Kurzweil’s great, millennial “Singularity”—the melding of humanity and technology. Modern-day Jeremiahs In September 1913, Woodrow Wilson pushed a button in the White House, sending an electric pulse that detonated the Gamboa Dike, some two thousand miles to the southwest in the Panama Canal Zone. The dam’s collapse sent water rushing from Gatun Lake into the canal, the culmination of a mammoth, decade-long construction project.