In 1624, Sir Francis Bacon’s “The New Atlantis” envisioned a time when fantastic technology, including powered ships and flying machines, would contribute to a perfect human society.

A couple of centuries later, Mary Shelley published “Frankenstein” in 1818, an archetypal warning from the dawn of the Industrial Age of what can happen when science runs amok.

Competing visions of technology have vied for the popular imagination for ages, but lately Mary Shelley’s vision appears to be trumping Francis Bacon’s. The disasters created by out-of-control technology - whether intricate computer trading schemes on Wall Street or deep-water drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico - make Dr. Frankenstein look innocent.

Timothy Egan, writing in The Times, compared the helplessness that people feel watching the neverending videos of leaking underwater oil with the film “Apollo 13.” That chronicle of a nearly disastrous 1970 flight to the moon showed how a team of astronauts and scientists came up with creative solutions to vexing, lifethreatening problems.

“In the real flight, as in the movie,” Mr. Egan wrote, “our boys juryrigged a lifeline to their lunar module, and then used what little power they had on a precision shot to get their tiny craft back home.”

Watching the disaster in the gulf, he added, “I wondered what happened to American ingenuity.”

But faith in technology contributed to the calamity in the gulf. As Elizabeth Rosenthal wrote in The Times, the oil industry’s “can-do” attitude led to a belief that technology could solve any problem, even pumping oil from kilometers deep in the ocean.

Some scientists fear an even darker, dystopian future will be brought on by technology. Intelligent machines, they predict, will either enslave their human creators or wipe us out in a disastrous war.

Others postulate about a “post-human era.” That sounds pretty bleak. But wait, they are the optimists, in the grand tradition of Francis Bacon.

As Ashlee Vance wrote in The Times, forward thinkers in Silicon Valley are preparing for The Singularity, the point where machines become conscious and humans meld into them, resulting in a techno-utopia.

“Human beings and machines,” Mr. Vance wrote of The Singularity, “will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will be things of the past.”

A thousand years into the future? Try a few decades. Adherents of the theory, including the inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, believe that innovation in this century will accelerate to the point that life as we know it, with all of its trials, challenges and nasty oil spills, will fade away.

But then, whenever techno-utopians dream, the ghost of Mary Shelley is never far off. As Mr. Vance wrote, other experts envision The Singularity as a future where “humans break off into two species: the Haves, who have superior intelligence and can live for hundreds of years, and the Have- Nots, who are hampered by their antiquated, corporeal forms and beliefs.”

Or as Andrew Orlowski, a British journalist who writes about technology, told Mr. Vance: “The Singularity is not the great vision for society that Lenin had or Milton Friedman might have. It is rich people building a life boat and getting off the ship.”


KEVIN DELANEY