I was invited to talk to a high school Technology & Ethics class last week, at St. Paul's Open School. Since technology and ethics is pretty much my beat, I planned on hitting a home run. In the end I settled for a ground rule double.

I made the cardinal error of waiting until I was talking to figure out what I was going to say. My thoughts came together for the most part, but there were some bare patches in between where no flowers grew.

The kids expected me to talk about supermodel egg auctions. But I decided to use my standard poodle Beau as a running metaphor. Kids like dogs, and Beau is very funny in person. And he is a kind of living, breathing technology -- bred by scientists centuries ago to have lupine (wolflike) DNA, but to be very un-lupine in his demeanor. He has hair instead of fur. He's curly. And he's blue -- really, his skin is a bright chemical blue.

I thought it was fortunate that the teacher was allergic to dogs. "I'll bring him in, and you'll see," I told her. "My whole family is allergic to dogs. But Beau's not a normal dog."

But she couldn't risk me being wrong, and her having an all-out allergy attack in the middle of class. So I began my talk glancing fitfully out the window, looking across the parking lot to my parked car, where Beau sat like an Egyptian cat at the driver's wheel, staring morosely forward.

It's not the healthiest relationship.

"Assuming a dog can be a technology," I said, "where do the ethics come in?"

And I told how that very morning, I took Beau to Pike Island, where Zebulon Pike (of Pike's Peak fame) garrisoned his troops in the 1820s. It is a wild place, uninhabited by people, especially at that hour.

The park had erected a new sign, saying dogs must be kept on leash. This dismayed me, as I love watching Beau run free. He not only can run 50 miles per hour, but he needs to, from time to time, to keep his engine healthy.

"There are reasons for leashing dogs," I explained. "They can get into fights. They can get lost. They can scare other park users, who don't know if poodles are maneaters or not."

And here's one I had not thought of -- they harass wildlife. A captive population of forty deer and a couple hundred rabbits and raccoons, subjected to fifty loose dogs per day, is soon a very stressed-out population. It's like that statistic -- or guess -- that roaming housecats kill 200 million songbirds annually.

"So," I asked the kids, "what should I do?"

We talked about it. Technology makes us superbeings, we decided. Where our great grandfathers could plow two acres a day with a horse, we are a thousand times more powerful, having machines and computers and sensors and databases working around the clock to achieve our goals.

With this power comes terrific opportunities for fulfillment -- like running in the park -- but also onerous responsibilities. If we all do what we want, without limits, the world is screwed.

Here is where I digressed a bit. My notes contained half-thoughts about quantum physics and yoga and nihilism. I thought them when I was out walking the dog, and they made a giddy kind of sense to me in the fresh morning air. But in the classroom, I found myself wondering, as the kids must surely have, as well, what I was talking about.

So let me try again. I was trying to say that ancient cultures understood responsibility better than modern America's. The Buddhist ethic of ahimsa is the promise to cause no harm. Science leads us to think the old wisdom is debunked ("How does a Buddhist sidestep microscopic creatures?"), but it is not.

Indeed, the discoveries of quantum physicists, far from discrediting the mystics of old, seem to confirm many ideas. The yogic concept of pranayama is remarkably consonant with the universe of subatomic particles.

Though we are more powerful than our great grandfathers, I said, we must hew to the same laws. "Freedom" does not exempt us from this, and to insist otherwise is to invoke the greatest deception, the greatest sin of all -- nihilism ("I can do whatever I like because nothing matters anyway.")

And that was my ethical puzzle, I told the kids in the classroom. "As I stood in the mist by the Mississippi, I let slip Beau's leash and let him cavort. Because gosh darn it, I wanted what I wanted.

I watched Beau dash like a cheetah into a clearing. And I wondered: Was I a nihilist, a guru, or a fool?

Nature served up the answer for me, as Beau returned to me a few minutes later. No longer a superbeing, or a mutant wolf, or a mad despoiler of nature.

Instead, his tail was between his legs, and his eyes blinked asymmetrically, as he knelt humbly before me, and begged me to help him with the huge, brown, dry burrs that were stuck to him everywhere -- to his face, to his ears, all the way back to his tail.

America's Best-Loved Futurist(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.