In the first novel written by Ernesto Sabato, The tunnel [1], in one of the novel's tangents, there is a twist on the common fairy tale of the knight, the princess, and the dragon. For Sabato, the moment of clarity, of truth, is to realize the princess is the dragon.
The monster, the technological golem foreseen in the works of Lev Shestov, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul and more, is that because our tool-making inclination is both our salvation from nature's whim and our damnation (environmental mayhem and others), the princess is the dragon, we are not able to purify the technological pursuit in order build a bridge between intelligence (how to achieve a goal) and wisdom (why to pursue a goal).
A historical factoid: John von Neumann, whose ideas we exploit every day by turning these very devices on, has a quote "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" [2] Apparently, von Neumann wanted to nuke the Soviets in 1945 or soon after, before they had the nuke themselves, in order to establish dominance. The Soviets collapsed themselves, half a century later, in the meanwhile and in the aftermath torturing and maiming the lifepaths of hundreds of millions of people. Who's to say what course would have been better.
[1] Sabato wrote only two more novels, On Heroes and Tombs and Abaddón, The Exterminator, all three are masterpieces of universal literature.
[2] "The Passing of a Great Mind" by Clay Blair, Jr., in LIFE Magazine (25 February 1957), p. 96.
The parent comment said "[t]he west created the monster". The point is, since our technology is only a means of enhancing intelligence, not wisdom, we are unable to perceive the end-leaf monster of each decision tree.
But sure, we can imagine a political-fiction novel à la Philip K. Dick where Oppenheimer, von Neumann, and Feynman team up and after nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they nuke Moscow and Washington D.C., and form a world government ruled by scientists, a techno-solar punk utopia based roughly on Herman Hesse's Castalia from The Glass Bead Game [1].
The monster, the technological golem foreseen in the works of Lev Shestov, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul and more, is that because our tool-making inclination is both our salvation from nature's whim and our damnation (environmental mayhem and others), the princess is the dragon, we are not able to purify the technological pursuit in order build a bridge between intelligence (how to achieve a goal) and wisdom (why to pursue a goal).
A historical factoid: John von Neumann, whose ideas we exploit every day by turning these very devices on, has a quote "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" [2] Apparently, von Neumann wanted to nuke the Soviets in 1945 or soon after, before they had the nuke themselves, in order to establish dominance. The Soviets collapsed themselves, half a century later, in the meanwhile and in the aftermath torturing and maiming the lifepaths of hundreds of millions of people. Who's to say what course would have been better.
[1] Sabato wrote only two more novels, On Heroes and Tombs and Abaddón, The Exterminator, all three are masterpieces of universal literature.
[2] "The Passing of a Great Mind" by Clay Blair, Jr., in LIFE Magazine (25 February 1957), p. 96.