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thought that the phonograph would primarily be used for dictation and
business applications. The airplane was hailed as a force that would
bring world peace because it would bring people closer together; instead
it found its first major application in war. The telegraph was going to
create new forms of kinship in the United States; instead it made dis–
persion more practical. I recall a few years ago hearing Leo Marx, a his–
torian who has written about technology and culture, talking about how
in the late
1970S
he was on a panel at MIT with computer scientists and
various other technologically oriented thinkers. The challenge was to
imagine applications for future miniaturizations of the mainframe com–
puter. Would there ever be a use, the panel wondered, for a small desk–
top computer? Marx recalled that at this discussion, the various
discussants were unanimous on one point: there would be almost no
real application for a desktop computer. Maybe, they guessed, a few
dozen such machines would find specialized uses, mostly for shut-ins or
people who wouldn't have access to mainframes. Well, of course, within
five years of that discussion, this prediction was proven dismally and
ludicrously wrong. Even more recently, the Internet has taken nearly
everybody by surprise. Various prophecies about its powers to trans–
form human nature were made, but there were, in the early years of the
World Wide Web, no predictions I recall about how central commerce
would be to the success of the Internet.
Why then do we keep making such predictions? Partly because the
impulse to predict-putting aside for a moment the question of whether
or not predictions are right or wrong-the impulse to see where these
inventions will lead, can have, at times, a religious dimension. Even
though we tend to think of technology and engineering as activities that
are rational and a-religious or even anti-religious, there have actually
been close connections between the development of technology and reli–
gious thinking.
In
the Middle Ages monasteries were centers of invention
as well as worship. The mechanical arts were practiced not to displace
religion but to aid in achieving its Edenic goals. Giordano Bruno, who
worked at the edge of modern science, considered machines to be a spur
to spiritual evolution. Newton wrote commentary on Scripture. The
English scientist Robert Boyle wrote a treatise entitled "Some Physico–
Theological Considerations About the Possibility of the Resurrection."
Charles Babbage-widely known as the father of the modern com–
puter-believed that advances in the "mechanical arts " provided "some
of the strongest arguments in favor of religion." And more: the first tele–
graph message was a Biblical quote-"What hath God wrought"–
while its inventor, Samuel
F.
B. Morse, was a generous donor to religious
