Technology:
	I dream that one day everyone will have the power to destroy the Universe,
	and the wisdom to leave it untouched.

This one's a bit Taoist, which is probably good for a haiku.

What is technology? At heart, technology is learning how to influence
the world around us. You may think of lasers and iPods, but things
like cooking food and wearing clothes are technology, too; just
technology that's so old and familiar that we take it for granted.

But when you look at nuclear weapons, addictive drugs, factories that
spew pollution, and machines that destroy lives by letting one person
do the job of ten, it's easy to form a bad impression of technology.

But the problem is people. Don't blame the technology. If a terrorist,
driven by hate to forget the value of life, had access to nuclear
weapons, they might well use them to cause great harm. So there is
clearly an argument to restrict access to some of the products of
technology.

And yet, it's easy to restrict too much. There are plenty of people
who fear change. And you can see their point - the invention of
factory machinery caused a lot of grief in the day. Careers that had
lasted for generations were undercut, and people weren't prepared for
that. We've since learnt to live in a world where careers aren't for
life, and so we expect redundancy and changes of career... but at the
time, it was a widespread belief that if somebody was a weaver, that
was all they were, and all they would ever be. And so machines that
could tirelessly weave 24/7 and require a fraction of the attention of
a small team of engineers and labourers were terrifying.

So you can understand why the Internet is still heavily regulated in
many countries - it brings in subversive Western ideas that challenge
traditional values, with the danger if leading the impressionable
young into moral decline.

This sounds funny to us, but not that many years ago, such ideas would
not have been out of place in the UK. I think variants on them are
still current in parts of the US, if hearsay is anything to go by.

So I sincerely hope that humanity will grow beyond this stage; that,
one day, we won't need to restrict access to technology - because
humanity will be mature enough to use it sensibly.

Besides, I want to play with nukes. Who doesn't want to play with
nukes?  They're awesome.