IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022 - 4

President's Message
1948, China concludes a civil war, with the communists
sweeping to power in 1949, and apartheid
becomes official policy in South Africa in 1949.
Basic human decency seems to have gone missing.
Orwell [10] uses fiction to anticipate what happens
when a totalitarian regime gains access to powerful
and omnipresent technologies. Churchill reads
and praises Orwell's book, and Orwell politely
reciprocates [11].
While motivated by Soviet-style communism and
Nazi fascism, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains salient
as we discover technologically fueled authoritarian
potentials in every political system. In a letter
to Orwell, Huxley [12] writes-one pessimist critiquing
another-that " the ruling oligarchy will find
less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and
of satisfying its lust for power " by pursuing seductive
and psychological tools as imagined by Huxley
rather than " boot-on-the-face " policies as imagined
by Orwell. Unfortunately, in reality, both continue in
widespread use.
Where do these historical debates take us?
Their political and economic contexts are similar
to ours, and even the list of technological issues is
familiar. Many decades later, institutions still feel
shaky, economies remain inequitable, geopolitics
are increasingly multipolar, and societies are
riven by technological change. Telecommuting,
synthetic food, robots, genetic editing, commodity
energy, and nuclear weapons are here. Behavioral
nudges, manipulative social media, and state-sanctioned
violence are here. If Churchill, Huxley, and
Orwell are right about the inefficacy of human institutions,
we can expect problems associated with
technological disruption to persist throughout the
next 50 years.
But is there any way in which Wells' old-fashioned
optimism could still contribute, perhaps by asking us
to identify more constructive roles for " middle-class
scientists and engineers? " What can our technical
community do to enhance human decency and
humane institutions?
churchIll, The pragmaTIc historian, recommends
that we should study history primarily to
understand our contingencies and to anticipate
the future we should simply extrapolate from
current conditions [13]. He observes that successful
coping comes from developing " an absolutely
new comprehension of the dominant facts
4
of the situation at the time, and all the forces at
work " [14]. Extrapolating forward from today,
I can imagine members of the SSIT community
doing just that, by working to comprehend new
problems at the interface of technology and society
as they emerge, and by reinforcing our common
humanity. Let us invigorate today's debates
with clear-eyed optimism.

 References
[1] H. G. Wells, Men Like Gods. London, U.K.: Cassell,
1923, ch. 5, sec. 6, p. 32.
[2] M. Cowley, " Outline of Wells's history,'' The New
Republic, vol. 81, no. 1041, pp. 22-23, Nov. 1934.
[3] W. S. Churchill, " Fifty years hence,'' Maclean's Mag.,
Nov. 15, 1931, pp. 65-67.
[4] A. Huxley, Brave New World. Garden City, NY, USA:
Garden City Publishing Company, 1932.
[5] A. Huxley, " Letter to Ms. Kethevan Roberts,'' in Letters
of Aldous Huxley, G. Smith, Ed. New York, NY, USA:
Harper & Row, 1969, p. 348.
[6] W. W. Wagar, H. G. Wells: Traversing Time. Middletown,
CT, USA: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2004, p. 209.
[7] R. B. Schmerl, " Aldous Huxley's social criticism, "
Chicago Rev., vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 37-58,
1959, doi: 10.2307/25293502.
[8] G. K. Chesterton, " Our notebook: The age of utopias, "
The Illustrated London News, May 4, 1935, p. 766.
[9] G. Orwell, " Wells, Hitler and the world state, " Horizon,
Rev. Literature Art, vol. 4, pp. 133-138, Aug. 1941.
Accessed: Apr. 20, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://
orwell.ru/library/reviews/wells/english/e_whws
[10] G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. London, U.K.: Secker
& Warburg, 1949.
[11] R. Pilpel, " Churchill and Orwell, " Finest Hour, vol. 142,
May 2013. Accessed: Apr. 17, 2022. [Online]. Available:
https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/
finest-hour-142/churchill-and-orwell/
[12] A. Huxley, Letter to George Orwell (Letters of Note),
S. Usher, Ed. London, U.K.: Canongate, 2013.
Accessed: Apr. 17, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://
lettersofnote.com/2012/03/06/1984-v-brave-new-world/
[13] P. Alkon, " Churchill proceedings-Future shock?
The contingency of what lies ahead/Churchill's
'fifty years hence' (1931), " Finest Hour, May 2013.
Accessed: Apr. 17, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://
winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finesthour-149/churchill-proceedings-future-shock-thecontingency-of-what-lies-ahead-churchills-fifty-yearshence-1931/
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022

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