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The disruption is never where the attention is.
KMK Themenfeld 8 · Abitur 2027–29 · DSP Prague · Grades 11–12

Science &
Technology

Every technology arrives carrying a promise. Every technology changes something else as well. This strand asks what technological change actually does — to knowledge, to labour, to authorship, to the gap between what is known and what is believed.

Four instruments One bridge document Two future encounters One recurring question
The Strand — Three Questions
Political
When technological change creates winners and losers, what does society owe the losers? And who decides whether the trade was worth it?
Historical & Analytical
Where does disruption actually land? Why do we keep looking at the invention and missing the transformation it produces?
Epistemological & Existential
Why does the gap between knowing and believing exist — and who benefits from it staying open? What happens when disruption reaches human capability itself?
The Instruments
Political · Run first
Who Pays for Progress?
Every technological revolution creates winners. What does it owe the losers?

Six disruptions across three centuries — the Luddites, containerisation, deindustrialisation, globalisation, the gig economy, AI. In every case: who gained, who paid, and what society chose to do about it. The question is not whether the gain was real. The question is who it went to.

Luddites · Containerisation · Deindustrialisation · Globalisation · Gig economy · AI · gained by whom / lost by whom
Open →
Historical & Analytical · Run second
Dude, Where's My Hoverboard?
The future always arrives. It just never looks like the posters.

Six technologies, five centuries, one pattern. The printing press looked like a faster way to make books. Smartphones looked like phones with extra features. None of them stayed that way. The disruption is never where the attention is.

Printing press · Photography · Radio · Television · Social media · AI · attention vs disruption · the pattern made portable
Open →
Epistemological · Run third
Why Doesn't Everyone Agree?
The gap between knowing and believing.

If something is true, why would anyone disagree? Six disputes — tobacco, sugar, MMR, climate change, evolution, COVID origins. Not all disagreements are the same. The taxonomy is what makes the difference visible.

Tobacco · Sugar · MMR · Climate · Evolution · COVID · manufactured doubt · values as facts · who benefits from uncertainty
Open →
Existential · Run fourth
What Are You For?
Judgment, trust, and learning in the age of AI.

Capability is not the hardest question. The hardest question is what happens to the value of something when you can no longer be certain who — or what — made it. Six cases across creative writing, medicine, law, art, collaboration, and education.

Authorship · the forgery argument · scar tissue · human-AI collaboration · what remains worth becoming?
Open →
Bridge Document Reading the Future — Eight questions for analysing utopian and dystopian texts. Worked example: 1984 as a novel about epistemology, not politics. The lenses built across the strand applied to literature. →
The Full Sequence
1 · Political
Who Pays for Progress?
Who bears the cost of disruption?
2 · Historical
Dude, Where's My Hoverboard?
How do we recognise disruption?
3 · Epistemological
Why Doesn't Everyone Agree?
Why does the gap between knowing and believing exist?
4 · Existential
What Are You For?
What happens when disruption reaches human capability?
5–6 · Future Encounters
Orientation 2089 · ARIA
Values under pressure · judgment under consequence
What the Instruments Share
Design principle 1
Cases before framework
Students encounter specific, documented, real cases before any analytical framework is named. The framework that emerges from encounter is more durable than the framework that arrives as instruction.
Design principle 2
Gain and loss simultaneously
The gain and loss in every case come from the same change — not as opposites, but as the same event seen from different positions. The instrument holds both without resolving them.
Design principle 3
Gained by whom / lost by whom
The question is not whether progress was beneficial in aggregate. It is who specifically gained and who specifically paid — and whether those are the same people.
Design principle 4
Success is not consensus
Students who leave with more precise, more honest, more complicated versions of the positions they arrived with have had a successful encounter. Students who leave unchanged have not.
Where the framework fails
What the framework misses
The strand's emphasis on structural forces — who gains, who pays, what patterns repeat — can underemphasise contingency. Technological change does not follow a script. The printing press did not inevitably produce the Reformation. The internet did not inevitably produce what it produced. Ask at each instrument: what would the framework miss here?
KMK Themenfeld 8 Alignment
Requirement 1
Scientific and technological progress and its impact on society
Requirement 2
Visions of the future: utopia vs. dystopia

Utopia and dystopia are not treated as opposites. Every case in the strand demonstrates that the same technological change can be utopian and dystopian simultaneously, depending on what you value and where you stand.

Threads across the instruments
Thread 1
The same change, different positions
Thread 2
The pattern that keeps reappearing
Abitur essay questions — Themenfeld 8

To what extent does technological progress benefit society as a whole — or does the question itself obscure what matters?

Why does scientific consensus fail to produce social consensus? What does the gap between knowing and believing tell us about how societies make decisions?

Is it possible to assess a technology's impact before that impact has fully arrived? What are the limits of historical analogy?

What is the difference between a skill made redundant by technology and a human capability diminished by it? Does the distinction matter?

To what extent is manufactured doubt a political problem rather than an epistemological one?

Should societies compensate those who lose from technological disruption? On what grounds — and at what scale?