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From: mandel@well.UUCP (Tom Mandel)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: The Impact of Inventions
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Date: Sun, 21-Jun-87 19:15:05 EDT
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Posted: Sun Jun 21 19:15:05 1987
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Harrington's call for "social impact assessments" of new technologies
is nothing new.  There was a flurry of interest in an area of analysis
called "technology impact assessment" in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
This interest resulted in the formation of the U.S. Office of Technology
Assessment, a small group that is attached to the U.S. Congress.  OTA,
which got off to a shaky start, is currently doing rather well, and the
quality of its reports -- mainly impact assessments -- is rather highly
regarded these days.

Critics are correct in noting that there is no "science" capable of
rigorously analyzing the future impacts on society of a new and
poorly understood technology.  For that matter, many analysts are
still arguing about the various impacts (first, second, and third
order) of the automobile on American society.  And that technology,
one of the two or three most important of the entire century, has
been around for roughly 70 years.

	Nevertheless, there are many tools for forecasting the penetration,
applications, evolution, and impacts (consequences) of technologies.
There is a fairly specialized literature on the subject (for example,
the excellent journal _Technological Forecasting and Social Change_),
and there are many specific analytical tools for addressing questions
of this sort.  Most of these tools attempt to account for the inherent
problems of predicting social change by employing scenarios and related
approaches for dealing with complexity (of society) and uncertainty.

	There is a growing literature, both speculative and analytical,
popular and academic, addressing questions of the future impacts of
new technologies.  And there is a small cadre of professional
futurists who struggle with these issues on a regular basis.

	However, Harrington's suggestion raises much deeper
questions than simple -- I mean, hard -- analyses.  Given the
inherent uncertainties in such analyses, how should we manage such
new technologies.  OTA's role, for instance, is to provide relevant
policy analyses to the Congress on request.  It is up to the Congress
to do something about it.  Bluntly, there are no mechanisms in a
political system such as ours to *control* technology in general.
Nor should there be.

	In practice, trying to stop the implementation of a particular
new technology because an analysis shows that it *might* have some
deleterious effects on the position of this or that group in society --
a debatable conclusion in most instances -- is tantamount to blocking
the development of a technology entirely.  This is, in my view, a
for of neo-Ludditism.

	Harrington's position, while perhaps morally and ethically
admirable, assumes much more knowledge than is possible or practical.
But the study of such impacts ought to be encouraged as guides to
politicians and policymakers and to the public.

--Tom Mandel	mandel@well.UUCP	mandel@kl.sri.com