There has been a lot of comment on technology and how it will shape our future life. Whenever we talk futuristic, the two books that stand out are BRAVE NEW WORLD and 1984- Classics not only of our time, but of all times.

One of the better analysis of these two is by Francis Fukuyama in his 'Our Posthuman Futire' Relevant passsages from this are verbatim reproduced below. Happy reading, blogging, discussions and thinking :)

The future and its terrifying possibilities were defined by two books, George Orwell’s 1984 (first published in 1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (published in 1932).

The two books were far more prescient than anyone realized at the time, because they were centered on two different technologies that would in fact emerge and shape the world over the next two generations.  The novel 1984 was about what we now call information technology: central to the success of the vast, totalitarian empire that had been set up over Oceania was a device called the telescreen, a wall sized flat-panel display that could simultaneously send and receive images from each individual household to a hovering Big Brother.  The telescreen was what permitted the vast centralization of social life under the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love, for it allowed the government to banish privacy by monitoring every word and deed over a massive network of wires.

Brave New World, by contrast, was about the other big technological revolution about to take place, that of biotechnology.  Bokanovskification, the hatching of people not in wombs but, as we now say, in vitro; the drug soma, which gave people instant happiness; the Feelies, in which sensation was simulated by implanted electrodes; and the modification of behavior through constant subliminal repetition and, when that didn’t work, through the administration of various artificial hormones were what gave this book its particularly creepy ambiance.   

The political prescience of the other great dystopia, Brave New World, remains to be seen.  Many of the technologies that Huxley envisioned like in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, psychotropic drugs, and genetic engineering for the manufacture of children, are already here or just over the horizon.  But this revolution has only just begun; the daily avalanche of announcements of new breakthroughs in biomedical technology and achievements such as the completion of the Human Genome Project in the year 2000 portend much more serious changes to come.

In Brave New World the evil is not so obvious because no one is hurt; indeed, this is a world in which everyone gets what they want.  As one of the characters notes, “The Controllers realized that force was no good,” and that people would have to be seduced rather than compelled to live in an orderly society.  In this world, disease and social conflict have been abolished, there is no depression, madness loneliness, or emotional distress, sex is good and readily available.  There is even a government ministry to ensure that the length of time between the appearance of a desire and its satisfaction is kept to a minimum.  No one takes religion seriously any longer, no one is introspective or has unrequited longings, the biological family has been abolished, no one reads Shakespeare.  But no one (save John the Savage, the book’s protagonist) misses these things, either, since they are happy and healthy.

Since the novel’s publication, there have probably been several million high school essays written in answer to the question, “What’s wrong with this picture?” The answer given (on papers that get A’s, at any rate) usually runs something like this: the people in Brave New World may be healthy and happy, but they have ceased to be human beings.  They no longer struggle, aspire, love feel pain, make difficult moral choices, have families, or do any of the things that we traditionally associate with being human.  They no longer have the characteristics that give us human dignity.  Indeed, there is no such thing as the human race any longer, since they have been bred by the Controllers into separate castes of Alphas, Betas, Epsilons, and Gammas who are as distant from each other as humans are from animals.  Their world has become unnatural in the most profound sense imaginable, because human nature has been altered.  In the words of bioethicist Leon Kass, “Unlike the man reduced by disease or slavery, the people dehumanized à la Brave New World are not miserable, don’t know that they are dehumanized and, what is worse, would not care if they knew.  They are, indeed, happy slaves with a slavish happiness.”