Development is an objective that all peoples have pursued throughout history. And it has been a common goal for practically all political doctrines that have been concerned with organizing a society. Above all, the ideology of progress, raised by the rationalism of the Enlightenment, became a new religion since the 19th century, when the industrial revolution expanded the productive capacities of national economies exponentially. That is why, throughout the 19th century, economic liberalism, scientific rationalism, and political nationalism came together in ideological symbiosis. Nations were launched into a race of technological development to prosper and outperform other nations. Technological advances became synonymous with progress. Consequently, the inequality of nations appeared on the world scene, whose power was not so much in having large armies and dominating lands, but in having the most technologically destructive armies and imposing their demands on other nations. On the other hand, along with this inequality between nations, another inequality also arose within each country, that created by the control of scientific resources. That is why the States and large companies now appear as the pivots on which advances in scientific knowledge and its technological applications revolve.
In this article, therefore, the most important elements to understand how scientific discoveries and their technological applications have changed, since the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century, the mechanisms of world organization, on the one hand, and of social powers, on the other. other. This will be discussed in the first part. In the second part, an outline of the current problems that are manifested around the inequality of access to new technologies will be made.
Historical stages of the links between technological changes and social changes.
The history of human societies is highly conditioned by the technological capabilities on which they organize their well-being, from the Palaeolithic to today. It is not by chance that we divide prehistory by the domain of one or another technological capacity: Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age…, until we go on to divide history by socio-political stages, but also in these stages it is technology and consequent labor that marks the dividing lines between the slave, feudal and capitalist modes of organization, if we follow the most classic proposals of Marxism (Hacneker, Marta, 1995).
The important thing is to underline that this is not a one-way link. That is, social change is not predetermined by technological change. On the contrary, scientific and technological advances can only be understood if we delve into what social changes entail. It is the social changes that generate the technological demand that drives new knowledge and technological innovation. However, innovations in knowledge and in its technical applications generate social changes. This is confirmed by the three great revolutions that have marked the history of humanity: the agricultural revolution (in the Neolithic centuries), the industrial revolution (since the 18th century) and the telematic, cybernetic and biotechnological revolution of the present.
For this reason, in order to interpret the historical processes of interaction between science, technology and social change, it would be necessary to analyze a multitude of factors that do not correspond to be detailed in this article. Perhaps it is enough to briefly review the links between the two factors. For example, why the historical slowdown of the promising science and technology that existed in the Greek world and was not recovered until the eighteenth century in northwestern Europe? It has been explained by the contempt for industrial work and the mechanical arts, from Greece, Rome and then the Christian Middle Ages. Also because of the suffocation generated by the slave and feudal socioeconomic systems, with societies dominated by unproductive social classes, the opposite of the bourgeoisie that imposes a capitalism forced to innovate to increase profits. They were ruling classes that not only despised work but also exalted leisure or contemplative life.
Now, it is worth clarifying above all the role of the Middle Ages, because from the year 1000 to the fifteenth century there were notable advances in mechanically applying the forces of nature for human uses (White, Lynn, 1990, p. 96) . Thus, the attitude and desire to dominate and channel the energies of nature is forged in those medieval centuries. Then it takes off with a huge force in the 18th century, especially in England.
In any case, it must be remembered that in the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer period it was the stone tools that marked the different stages of human evolution. The first revolution took place when plants and animals were domesticated. This is what is called the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic, which totally changed the relationship between humans and nature. It was also the time when the wheel and the first tools for agricultural work were invented, even if they were made with stone materials. This was the basis and the beginning of the history of industrial technology. In addition, the first fixed settlements of people allowed the social division of labor and trades dedicated only to work in materials such as copper and bronze were born, the start of a decisive industry such as metallurgy (Harari, Yuval Noah, 2014 chap. 2 and 3).
Later, medieval technological innovations also saved labor, served to increase the productivity of the agricultural and textile sectors, which allowed the emergence of new social groups, such as the medieval bourgeoisie in manufacturing, in commerce and well-to-do farmers in certain counties. The aforementioned historian L. White explains how, from the 11th to the 14th century in medieval Europe, a large part of human labor had been replaced by hydraulic and wind power in certain industrial tasks such as tanning or washing fabrics, sawing wood, crush minerals, drive bellows of forge furnaces or wort grinding systems, etc. (White, Lynn, 1990, pp. 101-106).
The authentic technological revolution took place in the United Kingdom, from the end of the 18th century. It was based on the invention of the steam engine that allowed the development of textile industries and iron processes. From that moment on, the invention of new machinery allowed for increased production and technological progress in construction, transportation, and communications. Thus came the second industrial revolution, which involved a rapid development of technology related to chemistry, electricity, oil and steel (Salort i Vives, Salvador, 2010, pp. 305-308). It was the moment when both industrial revolutions made capitalism the form of organization of the most powerful nations. This happened in Europe and the United States, first, and with the imperial expansion of the United Kingdom and France and Germany, after the Berlin Conference of 1885, it also spread to all continents.
It was the first wave of economic globalization in history, in which industrial technology, capitalism and the organization of the power of Western nations (including here the United States) went hand in hand. Very soon Japan joined this bloc of nation-powers. The USSR was added to this bloc after World War II and at the end of the 20th century China and India were added.
In this way, today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the technological powers are the ones that exercise economic, social and cultural power on a planet that is already globalized in all aspects. The ranking of powers is revealing. The United States and China are in first place. They are followed by Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Russia. The seven nations that exercise hegemony over the planet are located there, with more or less tensions between them, alliances or disputes that are not a matter of analyzing them in this article.
In summary, this brief review of the interaction between technological change and social change demonstrates how the fact of having replaced an economy based on manual labor with one dominated by industry and manufacturing has reached the present moment. We are now in a dizzying scientific advance thanks to artificial intelligence and the new information age. Thus, in the 21st century we are increasingly dependent on technology, a factor of inequality not only between nations, but also between social classes. Technological development allows us to broaden knowledge and make leisure time more sophisticated, on the one hand, but creates, on the other, other dependency ties, as well as inequality gaps between social classes, people and countries.
Inequality as a historical constant.
This second part of the article explains not so much the past but the present in which technological changes have created a new culture and a new type of inequalities between countries and social groups. They are the new societies cataloged as post-industrial or also informational, with two categories of countries: the central countries that monopolize the resources of technological invention and also of financial, cultural and information circulation, which could represent the G-7, and those other countries that occupy the place of satellites of the previous ones.
A clear example of this new reality is what happened in the Soviet Union when it had a crisis in the 1980s, among other reasons, due to its technological maladjustment, as Manuel Castells has stated: «the element that triggered the crisis of the Soviet system It was not economic per se, but technological. It is no accident that the fundamental backwardness of the Soviet Union occurred in a decade (1975-1985) in which the full spread of new microelectronic and computer technologies in the world took place. The acceleration of technological progress has spectacularly shown that, as Marx pointed out, social organization can be a decisive brake on the development of the productive forces… For profound reasons, linked above all to the absorption of science and technology in the hole black of the military-industrial complex (…), the Soviet Union accumulated in a few years a decisive portrait in microelectronics, informatics, telecommunications and genetic engineering, that is, in the key fields of the new world technological infrastructure» (Castells, Manuel, 1995, pp. 38-39).
Perhaps it is debatable to attribute such a decisive role in the collapse of the USSR to the technological crisis, but it is true that it should not be ignored as a concurrent factor with many other circumstances. It is also the case in present-day Europe, where, even within the advanced north-western sector, the resulting growth was openly regionalist in character. It is true that, unlike Asia, there is basically a…