ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the continuing debate on alternative strategies for dealing meaningfully with the badly skewed distribution of the world's problem-solving capacities based on modern science and advanced technology. Technology is a lever, which in conjunction with other initiatives can lead to a more autonomous, less dependent role for communities, social groups, or whole nations dominated by others in the present economic and political system. The vulnerability of developing countries is likely to grow in the 1980s as the trend toward automation of production technology and related technological changes in the industrialized countries accelerates. Transnational corporations, the principal carriers of industrial technology to the Third World, are concerned not only with maximizing profit but also with minimizing risk. Technology becomes an important carrier of economic and political relationships within and among societies. When technology is acquired externally, an effort will be made to maximize the arms-length character of the acquisition.
