Scientific and technological progress, science, literature and art at the turn of the 21st century
The first form of the internet, ARPANET, appeared in 1969, and in 1991 the World Wide Web was opened to the public; later search engines (Google), social networks and smartphones changed daily life. In artificial intelligence, the computer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Kasparov in 1997, the program AlphaGo defeated a strong Go player in 2016, and in 2022 text-generating systems such as ChatGPT became widespread; they are useful but can make mistakes and raise questions of data privacy and copyright. In medicine the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, and the CRISPR gene-editing method was introduced in 2012. In physics the Higgs boson was found in 2012, LIGO detected gravitational waves in 2015, and the James Webb Space Telescope was launched on 25 December 2021. The world’s population reached 8 billion in 2022. In culture there is a debate about mass culture: some say it opens the way to knowledge and creativity, others fear shallowness and uniformity. Books by authors such as Khaled Hosseini and J. K. Rowling have been translated into many languages.
Choose two technologies that have appeared since 1991: write their benefits and risks in your daily life in a two-column table, then draw up three rules for using them safely.