Technology Prognostication

I recently posted some reflections on the first two chapters of David Nye's book, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. In his third chapter, he asks "is technology predictable", answering his own question that he believes technology is inherently unpredictable.

Nye differentiates among three varieties of prognostication:

• predicting (the unknown)
• forecasting (possibilities) and
• projecting (probabilities)

I am not sure his subdivision of prognostication is widely accepted, and I suspect that there is something circular in saying the prediction relates to the unknown, and deciding that one can not predict technology. On the other hand, the chapter includes a number of examples of technology prognostication, beautifully but briefly described. He clearly makes the case that many business leaders fail to prognosticate technological developments that came to critically impact on their businesses.

I was somewhat disappointed with his treatment of the diffusion of personal computer and Internet technologies. In both cases there was a virtuous cycle. As more and more killer applications appeared for PCs and the Internet, more and more people found the investment worthwhile. As the volume increased and economies of scale were realized, it became less and less expensive to acquire and utilize the technology. As the market expanded, more and more people worked on developing killer apps. Moreover, there were "network economies", such as the increasing value of the Internet to each user as it connected that user to more and more people and information.

Nye is certainly right in his view that experts in technology often provide poor predictions of how their technologies will be used. Nye does not use the example, but consider the people in developing countries who used the early personal computers as status symbols (or doorstops), but did not utilize any of their application software packages.

Nye does not address the prognostication of needs, but that has important technological implications. Thus the prediction of global warming is driving research in energy conservation technology, in renewable energy technologies, in technologies to capture greenhouse gases, and in technologies to ameliorate the negative impacts of global warming when they occur.

Similarly, Nye does not address the prognostication of availability of resources. I suppose that people started to develop coal technologies historically as it the prediction of depletion of forest resources became more obvious. Now, as it seems that oil reserves will eventually be used up, research and development is focusing on alternatives to petroleum.

One might also consider prognostication of the discovery and harnessing of properties. Bell Labs began research on solid state physics based on the prognostication that properties would be found in that research that would allow for the development of good alternatives for vacuum tubes in the communications field. Lee Howard, then Director of the Office of Health at USAID, supported research toward a malaria vaccine on the belief that eventually properties of the human immune system and/or the Plasmodium would be found that would allow immunization against the disease (even though immunization had only been applied successfully to viral and bacterial diseases and malaria is a parasitic disease causedby a more complex organism).  So too IAVI began supporting research on an HIV vaccine based on the prognostication that properties would be found allowing HIV immunization (even though HIV is a highly variable retrovirus that attacks cells in the immune system itself). We don't hear of the prognostications of this type that fail, but those that succeed are very important.

For several decades a part of my job was getting scientific advice for USAID. I think an important part of that function related to prognostications from the S&T community for the bureaucracy. Some successes:

• In the 1970s I chartered an NAS workshop on tropical deforestation helping to draw attention to the rapid rate of environmental degradation that was occurring (and would continue) and the problems that would create for development in the affected areas.
• In 1981 I chartered an NAS workshop on the implications of biotechnology for development, focusing on biomedical, agricultural, and energy technology implications of the field.
• In 1981 I chartered a series of NAS workshops and monographs on the personal computer and the implications of PC technology and its diffusion for developing nations.
• In the mid 1980s I helped organize a seminar at the AAAS Annual Meeting on the AIDS epidemic and its likely impact on social and economic development.
• In 1991 I chartered a workshop on computer networking and the implications of the Internet for developing nations.

In all of these cases, it was not possible to predict in detailed accuracy the future developments under study, but in all of these cases it was possible to identify issues that should have been addressed by policy makers. Unfortunately, those issues were seldom adequately addressed.

The problem may not be with prognostication, but with getting people in leadership positions to attend to those prognostications. We might call this the Casandra principle, after the Greek myth of Casandra, a woman granted with the gift of prophecy, but inflicted with the curse that no one would ever believe those predictions.

Casandra, attacked by Ajax in the Temple of Athena

From a house in Italy (Source)