Social and cultural questions are not slighted. We get a capsule history of the American university since World War II, leading up to some speculation on how the new sciences of complexity will fit into existing institutions - or how they might create new ones. If the computer really does turn out to rank with the telescope and the microscope, major academic adjustments will definitely be needed. But there has already been an institutional realignment that Pagels oddly neglects to mention. Very few advanced degrees are granted in telescope studies or microscopy, but dozens of universities have departments of computer science.
People look through the telescope and the microscope, but they look at the computer.
How right he was. But his remark leaves open the question of whether we possess the wisdom to exercise that power, and whether we who possess it are ready to extend it to the billions who are powerless. Sometimes I wonder if it will be the poverty of the poor or greed of the rich that will be our undoing. Yet I remain an optimist and believe that the liberating capacity of our knowledge, along with a little wisdom, will affirm the power of life over death. I continue to believe that the distant day will come when the order of human affairs is not entirely established by domination.