BLACK BOX TRANSPARENT TECHNOLOGY

There is an interesting piece by Edward Tenner in the Opinion section of today’s Washington Post, titled “If Technology's Beyond Us, We Can Pretend It's Not There.”

He notes that in the United States, there was a transition in the 20th century from technologies that were “transparent” and those that were “black box” technologies. The slide rule and abacus are examples of transparent technologies. If you understand logarithms, you can understand exactly what is happening with a slide rule, and an abacus is even easier to understand. The hand calculator, for most children and lots of adults, is Tenner’s prototypical black box technology. It is easy to use and more accurate than the slide rule, but most users don’t understand how the calculator obtains its answers. This is clearly true for the more complex functions.

I suggest that technological innovation was possible for large numbers of people in the days of transparent technologies, but is limited to professional innovators in the days of black-box technologies. You can’t invent things that you can’t understand, but the causal relationship may be more complex.

In the days of Edison and Ford, the institutions supported the little guy inventor. It was relatively easy to get a patent (if not to defend it). It was relatively easy to set up a shop, enter a market, and get financing for a new, transparent invention. Today the institutions are set up to facilitate innovations made by professional innovators working in (large) innovating organizations.

Developing countries are perhaps faced by the need to develop lots of transparent and lots of black box innovations simultaneously. I think it is clear that the road to development is via international competitiveness, and thus via the capacity to innovate in the complex technologies of the 21st century. Developing nations need the professional innovators, their organizations and their supporting institutions.

There is also a need to improve technology for large numbers of people who are still in a transparent technology stage. The “Appropriate Technology” movement has seen better days (say in the 1970’s) but it still has some proponents. (For example, the Honey Bee Network or the ITDG). I think one of its failures in the past may well have been to ignore the institutional issues, and focus too much on the technology.

The issue is how to build the cadre of innovators, and how to build the institutional support for those innovators. Where are the inventors and innovators to be trained? How do they protect their inventions sufficiently to make inventing transparent technologies an economically productive enterprise? How do they finance the development and commercialization of their technologies? How are markets to be created for such inventions.

These may be key issues to poverty reduction, if not to the growth of GNP. It is the very poor who are left out of the modern technological systems, and who need improved transparent technologies to advance themselves.