Technology Processes of Assessment and Choice (1969) / Chapter Skim
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Chapter I
Chapter I
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Whether rightly or wrongly, the belief is now widely held that the continuation of certain technological trends would pose grave dangers for the future of man and indeed that the ill-considered ex ploitation of technology has already contributed to some of the most urgent of our contemporary problems: the specter of thermonuclear destruction; the tensions of .congested cities; the hazards of a polluted and despoiled biosphere; the expanding arsenal of techniques for the surveillance and manipulation of private thought and behavior; the alienation of those who feel excluded from power in an increasingly technical civilization. Even among those who readily concede that tech nological advance has, on the whole, been a great boon to mankind, there has emerged a deep strain of skepticism toward proposals and projects that, in an earlier day, might have been hailed as the very symbols of human progress.
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They recog nize that the quality of life has been greatly improved by technological advance and would deteriorate rapidly in a period of technological stagnation; that a technological culture, already adopted by one third of the human race and eagerly sought by much of the remaining two thirds, could be abandoned only at the cost of relegating hun dreds of millions of human beings to suffering and death. The choice, from this perspective, is not between the abandonment of technology as a tool of human aspira2 Digitized by Goog Ie
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From page 3... ...
The contents and focus of the notion vary with the vital interests and perspectives of its many proponents. To some, concerned primarily with the preservation and enhancement of environmental quality, technology assessment suggests the evaluation of technical changes or applica tions from the perspective of their likely impact on various environmental goals and resources-or the ex ploration of how particular environmental objectives might be affected, beneficially or adverse\y, by the growth and spread of various technologies.
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, to focus public and political attention on the longer-range environmental conse quences of technological decisions. To others, concerned with the measurement of social change as a step toward the achievement of broad national goals, technology assessment connotes the use of new tools to monitor the impacts on society of technical changes (among others)
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and have heard increased discussion of "early warning systems" to alert planners and the general public to the potentialities and dangers of incipient technological developments and of alternative possibil ities. This collection of proposals focuses attention on particular technologies and on foreseeing the variety of social and environmental consequences that might follow from their widespread application.
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. We have wit nessed proposals designed to enhance the capacity of Congress to evaluate the technical components of legisla tive issues as they relate to broad national objectives (75)
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The report, which we view as but one step in what must become a continuing process, represents the culmination of ·nearly a year of discussions by the Technology Assessment Panel, a group created by the Academy's Committee on Science and Public Policy to consider the need for an improved assessment capacity and the possible ways of achieving 7 Digitized by Goog Ie
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Although we have given thought to the many over lapping proposals discussed above, all of which bear some relation to technology assessment, we have recognized an obligation to select a particular unifying theme from among the many that are available. In particular, we have focused on technology assessment as the exploration of trends in technological development, working outward toward the effects on society, the environment, and the individual effects of such trends.
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Recognizing that the assessment of technological prospects and perils has become a pervasive activity in a wide variety of private and public in stitutional settings, we have undertaken to identify what seem to us the most critical deficiencies in existing processes of assess ment and decision-maki."lg with respect to the evolution of technology in our society. As they consider the possibility of exploiting or oppos ing a technological opportunity or development, in dividuals, corporations, and public institutions attempt to project the gains and losses to themselves of alterna tive courses of action, and seek a course designed to maximize the gains while minimizing· the losses.
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A wide variety of what economists call external costs and benefits thus falls "between the stools of innumerable individual decisions to develop individual technologies for individual purposes without explicit attention to what all these decisions add up to for society as a whole and for people as human beings" (22)
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At the same time, advances in science and technology have brought advances in our ability to anticipate the secondary and tertiary conse quences of contemplated technological developments and to select those technological paths best suited to the achievement of broad combinations of objectives. The tremendous growth of science and technology during the last two decades has indeed created a situation in which there exist many more technically feasible options than we can possibly choose to pursue, coupled with the sophisticated methods of analysis and forecasting needed 11 oi9,tized by Google
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Nor can this opportunity be foregone without incur ring a considerable risk of grave injury to mankind. For the new power, rapidity, and momentum of technological development ; the diminishing lead-time between initial innovation and widespread application ; the expanding radii of technological effects in space and tim e ; the increasing size, density, and affluence of the popula tions in which such effects are felt ; and the fact that the environment is rapidly approaching its maxi mum capacity to assimilate waste-these circumstances have created a situation in which the cumulative and interacting deleterious consequences of many technolog ical developments and decisions might ultimately out weigh their primary benefits.
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For by the time such consequences have become so obvious as to generate intense political concern, we may find that the psychological and financial commitments of various in dividuals or groups to technological paths and institu tional arrangements already selected will have made any significant change of direction very costly if not alto gether impossible. Thus, we may freeze ourselves into technological patterns whose far-reaching consequences not even their originators would deliberately have chosen .
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From page 14... ...
That sort of Luddite response would, of course, be tragic, but it may eventuate unless we can take constructive first steps in the general direction discussed here. As this report explores the need for such steps, it will inevitably emphasize mistakes that have been made in the past-instances when technological developments chosen for exploitation now seem to have been needlessly injurious to some set of social or environmental interests; instances when alternative technologies could have achieved comparable objectives at significantly reduced social cost; instances when technological developments were accompanied by inadequate or inappropriate systems of supporting institutions and technological or legal safeguards.
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From page 15... ...
Any negative emphasis in this report is thus no more than an inevitable corollary of pursuing our assignment. The current concern with the undesirable secondary c onsequences of technology reflects not so much the fact that technology is more threatening today than it has been in the past as the fact that we have perceived our actions to have wider consequences than we earlier con templated, have learned how to use science and tech nology to explore and control such consequences, and have become willing to assume responsibility for those consequences "over wider stretches of space and time.
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The automobile and the highway network comprise a technology or a tech nological system ; rules of accident law, automobile in surance schemes, and traffic policemen are components of the corresponding supporting system. The panel believes that in some cases an inj ection of the broadened criteria urged here might have led, or might in the future lead, to the selection or encouragemen t of different technologies or at least modified ones functional alternatives with lower "social costs" (though not necessarily lower total costs)
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Few would question the primary benefits-indeed, the absolute necessity of this "green revolution, in Asia and elsewhere, but it is likely to raise massive problems of economic disloca tion, social unrest, and political upheaval-unless the developed nations, in cooperation with the third world, plan very carefully (26)
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From page 18... ...
might require changing the legal rules constraining or facilitating conduct ; or the incen tives, positive or negative, indirectly molding it ; or the general attitudes that condition patterns of thought and action. For virtually every deleterious environmental effect, one could undoubtedly identify many experts who warned us, but for one reason or anothe r their warnings were not heeded.
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From page 19... ...
· Whatever any process of assessment might reveal� choices between alternative technologies or supporting systems are essentially economic and political in char acter ; responses to assessment almost always require that decisions be made between competing and conflicting interests and values. Although one might imagine an authoritative assessment structure designed to circum vent market and political modes of accommodating and resolving such conflicts, the price of such a structure, in terms of its impact upon the basic institutional fabric of our society, would be intolerably high.
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