Do no harm: Technology, ethics and responsibility

The focus of this article is on issues related to personal and collective responsibility in an increasingly complex technological society. A context for discussing questions that relate to the use of technical means and the long-term secondary and tertiary benefits, impacts and consequences is established with respect to ethics and responsibility. It is proposed that there is a basic ethic for professionals in policy making roles in various fields of endeavor such as technology transfer. It is also proposed that there is a larger context within which this ethic must be grounded. The larger context concerns the question of what it means to be truly human. Many thoughtful citizens of the world, including Vaclav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia, and George Ellis, South African Cosmologist, have addressed this question, often when involved in extremely difficult circumstances. They propose that the answer can be found through a search for meaning in the universe and by freeing ourselves from self-centeredness.