Technological Progress: Has it made us safer or at higher risk?

Chapter 9 of Technology Matters: Questions to Live With by David Nye is titled "More Security, or Escalating Danger." While the chapter did provoke my thinking, I did not find it well reasoned. (This is in distinction to the previous chapters, all of which I have found to be useful.)

The obvious answer is that technological progress has made us safer. Life expectancy has increased rapidly for a century or more. Generally, the more technologically advanced a region, the healthier the inhabitants and the longer they live.

More basically, advanced technology has harnessed more power and more information to achieve its purposes more effectively. Technological systems are more complex, but more modern technologies are safer to use. Medical technology has advanced in its ability to prevent, detect and treat diseases. Transportation technology has advanced to more people faster, cheaper and safer. Information technology has advanced to obtain and process more information more rapidly and more affordably. Military technology has also advanced to make it possible to kill more people, faster.

The man falling from the top of the Empire State building was heard to say, as he fell past the 3rd floor, "so far, so good".

The question of course, is whether our technological systems, our population, and our societies are evolving in such a way as to create risks of later crashes. This has happened to many societies in the past, as Jarad Diamond has demonstrated in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and it is not clear that we are exempt from that risk.

This is one of a series of postings I have made on David Nye's Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Here are links to the previous postings:
Chapter 8 of David Nye's book, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, is titled "Should 'the Market' Select Technologies". The chapter, like the others discussed so far, is a fairly easy read, referring to scores of items from the literature on technology with references to their sources. As such it can serve as an introduction to the subject.

The chapter mentions American experience with patents and the history of the Office of Technology Assessment. It may have focused a bit too much on poor technology choices by government (suggesting that Congressional support for the Federal Highway system was badly planned and contributed to energy overuse, and suggesting that Swedish and Danish legislative decisions on nuclear energy were better than those of the U.S. Congress.) The Congress funded the first telegraph lines and subsidized the first railroads in the United States, and government bodies supported the development of canals, potable water supplies and sewerage -- all of which seem to have been good decisions.

It might have been useful to point out that decisions on public goods (rather than private goods) have to be made by governments. The issue for these decisions may not be whether they should be made by the public sector, but rather how they should best be made by the public sector. It makes a big difference if the decision is made by legislative bodies, by executive bodies, or by judicial bodies. (The resolution of tort cases might, I suppose, be in effect a social choice for a country, as for example strongly encouraging auto manufacturers to produce safer autos.) In all there cases, it matters whether the actual decision makers are provided with good advice rendered through a good process. I personally favor peer review at the micro level when choosing which technology development projects to subsidize.  Science and technology advisory bodies are found in all three branches of government. While these may be composed entirely of experts in technology, they may also include experts from the social sciences to help predict technology impacts, ethicists to deal with ethical advice, and members of the community to deal with cultural values.

We seem to feel that public safety issues often require government oversight. Thus we have drug licensing laws and building codes. In part this is a recognition that the people affected by the technological choice often do not have the knowledge and skill to make such decisions well, nor would it be efficient to require all members of the public to make these decisions from scratch. Think about each commuter making an individual decision as to whether a bridge was safe enough to traverse that day, or an airplane safe enough to ride. Incidentally, the Federal Aviation Administration seems to be the very model of a government agency which has helped society make technological choices to assure public safety, as the safety record of commercial airlines attests.

In the area of medicine, American culture holds that individual choices of drugs and procedures be informed by consultation with physicians. Physicians are licensed, and bodies such as The Cochrane Collaboration (in Civil Society) and the FDA seek to assure that physicians have adequate information to provide good advice. The profession is self regulating, with certification involving proof of continuing education, as well as regulated by government. I belong to an HMO, and the HMO also has bodies which review developments in medical technology, defining norms and standards informing the physician members of the organization. Of course, pharmaceutical manufacturing company executives are making technological choices that affect future health care decisions, as are officials in government agencies such as NIH and officials in foundations funding biomedical research. In short, the choice of technology in the health care field is quite complex, and a dichotomy between Market and Government does not do justice to how choices are made. Still, Nye's discussion raises further questions as to how society should make longer range decisions such as how much to spend subsidizing health care or whether to seek drugs to enhance mental performance. The Bush administration's decision process with respect to stem cell research might have been adduced as an example of what not to do in such decision making.

I was surprised that Nye did not address the literature on diffusion of innovations. It focuses on how decisions are made by large numbers of people who are potential users of a technology. The prototypical study in this field is how the spread of new cultivars spreads in farming communities. Each farmer decides which seed he/she will use, but studies indicate that the decision is made communally through a system in which early adopters try out a new variety, and if it is successful, the use spreads to other farmers in the community.

Note, however, that the new varieties once developed through traditional practice, later were developed by governmental agricultural research stations, and more recently are increasingly developed by the private sector. The switch from public to private agricultural research was in part due to the development of hybrid varieties that did not breed true, allowing private sector seed companies to protect their investments in new varieties.

Technological advice to farmers can be provided by government, as in the case of agriculture extension services. It can also be provided by the private sector, as in the case of seed stores and retailers of fertilizers, pesticides and farm machinery. The private sector providers may not only provide advice related directly to the products they sell, but may provide more general information as a sales promotion vehicle.

In India, there are networks of community Internet providers which allow for farmers to ask technical questions of farmers in other connected communities. As I mentioned in a previous posting on this book, decisions on building new irrigation facilities, on the allocation of irrigation water, and even on irrigation schedules are made in the rice fields of Bali by water temple priests.

Again, the ways in which technological decisions are made in agriculture are very complicated. Another example comes to mind. The dust bowl phenomenon in the United States was caused by millions of farmers making individual decisions which left large areas of soil poorly protected. Government intervened with a number of programs, from providing soil conservation advice via agricultural extension to developing a soil bank program.

Nye perhaps did not do justice to technology decision making in industry. In a previous chapter he mentioned the mistakes made by manufactures in failing to respond early and strongly to technological change, as when IBM failed to recognize the shift from main frame to mine and then micro computers. When IBM was making those decisions it held a dominant position in the computer market. Even more to the case were the decisions made by AT&T when it held a monopoly position if telecoms as to handset design. In such cases the dominant technological decision maker is a large bureaucratic organization. As Henry Ford famously said, "let them buy any color car they want, as long as it is black".

I would note that today Intel, Cisco, Boeing and other firms seem to be making very good technological decisions, holding large market shares and advancing the technologies in which they hold major positions. The U.S. military system seems to be making good enough technological decisions that U.S. forces have held a technological advantage in recent engagements. Bureaucratic technological decision making, like that in other sectors, can be effective or ineffective.

This one of a series of postings on Technology Matters: Questions to Live With:

• A thought on reading Technology Matters
• How does an organization learn
• Technology Prognostication
• A Technology and Culture Case Study
• More on "Technology Matters"
• Thoughts on Reading Nye on Technology and Cultural Diversity
• Sustainable Abundance, or Ecological Crisis
• "Work: More, or Less, Better, or Worse"
• Technology Choice