6. 高科技和就业
The term high technology is associated with computers, advanced electronics, genetic engineering , and other frontiers of technological change. The term high technology implies:
An extensive degree of technological sophistication embodied in a product
A rapid rate of employment growth associated with an innovative product.
A large research and development effort associated with production.
One implication of this definition is that it includes job-creating process like research and development as well as technologies like computers, which also have created new growth in employment.
Early machine technologies tended to replace human labor power, but high technology tends to reduce the need for human brainpower. Employment in occupations like drafting and industrial drawing in engineering and architecture, for example, is threatened by the accelerating use of computer design and graphics programs.
7. 科技的影响
It should be noted that the effects of new technologies are not always positive. The phrase technological dualism is sometimes used to refer to the fact that technological changes often have both positive and negative effects. The introduction of diesel locomotives, for example, greatly increase the efficiency of railroad operations, but it is also led to decline and eventual abandonment of railroad towns whose economies were based on the servicing of steam locomotives. Another example is the automation of industrial production. Automation has greatly improved manufacturing process in many industries. It has increased the safety of certain production tasks and led to improved product quality in many cases. But it has also replaced thousands of manual workers with machines, and significant numbers of those workers find themselves unemployed and lacking the skills required by the high-tech occupations of postindustrial society.
Technology is dangerous to the real world. (in movie and science fiction) Events like the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear-power plant in 1979; the toxic gas leak that killed more than 2,000 people in Bhopal, India, in 1984; and the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant in the Soviet union in 1986 seem to indicate human beings cannot control technologies they have created.
The result of our dependence on the benefits of complex technologies is an increasingly complex set of organizations and procedures for putting those technologies to work. This requires more human effort and skill, and the chances of error and breakdown are greater. The point is not that technology is out of control but that often there is lag between the introductions of new technologies.
