The Best Part, The Worst Part
There's no doubt that the technological changes of the last decade or so have been overwhelming. I'm sure that our immediate families and distant ancestors said the same. As we were warned by the title of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus," written 200 - two hundred - years ago (1818), you had to look back to the Greek story of Prometheus, a Titan and a god of fire to see how far back the idea of the good side/bad side of technology goes. In the story of Prometheus, he steals fire from the Olympian Gods and give the gift of technology to mankind. As it happens, this fire he has given to humankind has a positive side - warmth, cooking, changes to matter, and so on; and a bad side - weapons, destruction, pain and more. He is punished for his misdeed by being tied to a rock, where an eagle eats his liver, only to have it grow back over night and be eaten again, over and over and over, forever. Shelley's story of Victor Frankenstein and his transg