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Chapter IV
Pages 43-71

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From page 43...
... CoNCEPTUAL CoNSTRAINTs SHORTCOMING S OF MODE S OF ANALYSIS As the discussion in Chapter III suggests, much work is needed to refine our ways of th.inking about the central theoretical problems in technology assessment : how to evaluate and balance conflicting interests ; how to ascribe semi-quantitative worth to such elusive goals as the preservation of future choice ; how to allocate, between the innovator and his opponents, the burdens of uncertainty with respect to harmful effects ; how to divide, between the beneficiaries of an innovation and the rest of the public, the costs of evaluating and over­ coming such effects ; how to assess and strengthen the adequacy of the representation accorded potentially af­ fected individuals and groups while assuring that inadequate or incomplete technical information, or misperceptions of the situation by affected groups, do not unduly influence final outcomes ; how to measure and enhance the consistency with which technology 43 Digitized by GoogIe
From page 44...
... FAILURE S OF IMAGINATION Technology assessment, like every intellectual enter­ prise, tends to be bounded by contemporary assumptions, habitual patterns of thought, and the difficulty of making more than first-order extrapolations. Particularly when an emerging technology appears to represent a merely incremental advance over its antecedents, as was the case .
From page 45...
... Thus, even if influential individuals could have known some decades ago precisely how these technologies would converge-and how they would interact with tech­ nological trends in agriculture and in transportation, con­ tributing to the migration of the rural poor to the cities­ they could hardly have responded with remedies directed at the contributing technological trends themselves. But they might at least have recognized sooner than they did the prospects of a major population shift.
From page 46...
... Such problem'\ aside, failure to imagine the scale of use can wholly preclude adequate perception of social and environmental consequences. The history of asbestos, for example, demonstrates the effects of scale in one of its most insidious forms (32)
From page 47...
... A frequent and closely related problem has resulted from failure to imagine the supporting systems new technologies would demand. Witness, for example, the surface-traffic problems associated with airports, or the vast judicial backlogs resulting from the litigation of automobile-accident claims (33)
From page 48...
... Third, whatever one's theoretical resolution of the trade-off between premature and tardy interven­ tion, our political system simply cannot address itself intelligently and vigorously to problems that are essen­ tially speculative and remote in time. Given a political process that responds only to relatively proximate and demonstrable difficulties, any effort to design a truly anticipatory assessment structure would almost surely fail to provide a realistic link between such a structure and the making of policy.
From page 49...
... And even if one could predict adequately without such under­ standing, one might not be able to demonstrate the reliability of such predictions to the satisfaction of laymen and public officials. Causal relationships will often conv�ce when statistical correlations do not ; public acceptance of warnings against smoking, for example, would almost surely have been greater if the specific causal connection between smoking and various diseases could have been established .
From page 50...
... How, for ex­ ample, might the many parameters influencing such development be expected to reflect various changes in administrative practice or regulatory policy? A number of economists have urged that taxes be levied on auto exhaust and industrial stack emissions in order to induce behavior leading to acceptable levels of air pollution.
From page 51...
... DE FICIENCIE S IN THE DATA BASE In addition to major gaps in data with respect to the actual operation of alternative modes of assessment and control, there have often been grave inadequacies in accessible information with respect to the specific con­ sequences of particular technological developments, espe­ cially when such consequences have been diffuse and have not yet attracted widespread public interest. It seems clear that our theoretical understanding will never be so complete as to obviate the need to install and maintain comprehensive and sensitive monitoring sys­ tems, necessarily global in scope for the many technol­ ogies that generate effects over great distances, to detect low-level perturbations and thereby to make possible reliable early warnings of potentially deleterious trends, biomedical or environmental or societal, which our basic research did not enable us to anticipate.
From page 52...
... . I N STITUTIONAL CON STRAINTS CONSTRAINTS UPON THE SCOPE OF INDIVIDUAL INTERESTS We have already seen that each of the many decision­ makers whose choices collectively determine the direc­ tion of technological development typically selects from among available alternatives according to criteria that tend to underemphasize potential deleterious impacts 52 Digitized b y Goog Ie
From page 53...
... Inadequacies of this sort seem to arise from several basic sources : Market Externalities The price system often accounts inadequately for benefits enjoyed or costs suffered by those who are not parties to a transaction. Such non-parties become particularly important for our purposes because the primary beneficiaries of technological change are seldom the same as-or at most are only a small portion of­ those who suffer from its deleterious secondary con­ sequences.
From page 54...
... Proposals to internalize external costs and benefits have taken several forms : tax and subsidy schemes whereby activities are charged to the extent of their uncompensated net social costs or subsidized to the ex­ tent of their unremunerated net social benefits ; expansion of the size of decision-making units, so that all otherwise external costs and benefits accrue within the unit and are thus included in its profit-maximizing calculations ; varying degrees and kinds of government appropriation and regulation ; or various other redefinitions of legal rights. Indeed, there is a sense in which all legally es­ tablished subsidies may be regarded as mechanisms for internalizing "external benefits," while all legal restraints may be viewed as mechanisms for dealing with the "ex­ ternal costs" that individuals may inflict upon one another.
From page 55...
... , the legal mechanisms now available tend to break down. Measures to improve these mechanisms in order to internalize external costs or benefits require both scientific research, to provide objective assessments of cause and reliable quantifications of damage, and political action to compel decision-makers to bear the costs they cause.
From page 56...
... For even if we could design a legal and economic environment in which supersonic aircraft, for example, were charged the full costs that their operations would impose upon society, executives with a professional stake in the flight of an American SST, engineers with a career commitment to supersonic­ transport technology, economists worried about the future balance of payments, and politicians concerned with national prestige, might well turn pre-deafened ears to the sonic boom. Such tendencies, which can be over­ come, if at all, only by important changes in the values and aspirations of policy-makers and .technologists, generate their own externalities, whatever the price structure and the legal setting may seem to dictate.
From page 57...
... It is true that th� Atomic Energy Commission ultimately came to recognize the dangers of fa\lloUJt from atmospheric nuclear testing, but it did so only after heavy and sustained public pressure. With respect to the environmental dangers of underground nuclear ex­ plosions-including radiation leakage, seismic shock, and water contamination-the objectivity and thoroughness of the Commission's assessments have recently been brought into serious question (39)
From page 58...
... It should be repeated that the negative effects of com­ petitive behavior in this broad sense are not unique properties of the business-enterprise system or of profit­ making organizations. Any human society in which human groupings with human aims are in competition with each other for social rewards or prestige and in58 Digitized b y Goog Ie
From page 59...
... Any human institution has tendencies that, unless counteracted, will over time cause it increasingly to be run for the benefit of people inside the organization and for those special outsiders with whom they have found it easiest to identify themselves. In part� such tendencies follow from ra ther simple failings ; a lofty mandate is no guarantee against the triple danger of self-serving, habit, and subservience.
From page 60...
... Three institutional patterns are particularly vulnerable to the dangers outlined here. The first entails the linking of evaluative and promotional responsibilities, as in the Atomic Enet gy Commission, the Public Health Service, or the Federal Aviation Agency.
From page 61...
... The Public Health Service, for example, is responsible for much of the monitoring and evaluation of the effect� of underground nuclear testing, but funds for its work come from the Atomic Energy Commission itself, creating, as one observer delicately put it, "some­ thing of a self-policing situation" (41)
From page 62...
... This circumstance suggests a clear need for a source of assessment funds independent o the f institutions or agencies whose interests will be affected �Y the outcome of the assessment. Jurisdictional Limitations When governmental entities exercise powers pertaining to the promotion andjor regulation of technological applications, the scope of their legitimate concern may be jurisdictionally confined in ways that conflict with the objective of broadening the interests that each decision­ maker is encouraged to treat as his own.
From page 63...
... The Atomic Energy Commission, for example, recently granted a provisional construction permit for a nuclear power reactor on the Connecticut River. The states of New Hampshire, Vermont, a nd Massachusetts had attempted to introduce, at public hearings before an atomic safety and licensing board, evidence that operation of the contemplated facility would harm the river through inj ection of heated water.
From page 64...
... The present legal structure clearly fails to assure attainment of this obj ective. In another recent case, a federal district court ruled that the Corps of Engineers and the Secretary of the Army had acted beyond their statutory authority when they denied the owners of dry land in Florida a permit to dredge a nd fill navigable waters to create an artificial island in an adj oining bay.
From page 65...
... If every potentially affected group accurately perceived its interests and were appropriately represented at a suitable point in the process, constraints upon the individual interests of each decision-maker-because of market externalities or basic attitudes or other considerations­ would present no serious problem. Such constraints are troublesome only when the process as a whole fails to assure adequate .
From page 66...
... Far from being the inevitable and autonomous process often pictured, technological innovation often depends on a delicate balance of in­ fluences that are not afways on the side of beneficial change. Both to avoid cumbersome delays and to assure the representation of inarticulate interests or diffuse public concerns such as the preservation of future options, it may be necessary to create surrogate representatives­ public intervenors-to speak on behalf of such interests and values.
From page 67...
... These considerations imply that broad public partici­ pation in the assessment process ought to be encouraged, and public apathy overcome, in the early stages of maj or technological developments, at least in those instances in which such stages can be identified in advance . Ac­ cordingly, although the panel does not believe it either practical or desirable to open the whole process of tech­ nological assessment and decision-making to public view, we do believe it important to assure that the evi­ dence and arguments on which maj or decisions are based will be open to public scrutiny and will be subject to timely review in appropriate public hearings.
From page 68...
... Just as the President' s Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program and the relevant congressional committees had given no consideration whatever, in recommending the ori­ ginal Federal Highway Act of 1 956, to the kinds of environmental deterioration that might result from the proliferation of highways and the g,rowth of automotive traffic, so too the relevant agencies and committees ignored environmental concerns in assessing the 1 968 legislation . The President' s Advisory Committee in its 1 955 study had attempted to justify its failure to consider alterna­ tive modes of transportation by noting that "other Government agencies and special committees" were concerned with other transportation media (45)
From page 69...
... Without such a picture, one is tempted either to pass the buck-to assume that somebody, someplace, has asked or will ask the right questions-or to dissipate one's efforts in as "comprehensive" an evaluation as one can imagine, while paying the inevitable price of duplicated effort and, worse still, superficial analysis. The natural tendency is to err on the side of buck-passing, and the inevitable result is that incremental decisions, such as periodic increases in truck size and weight, may accu­ mulate so much momentum and consolidate so many interests that continuing technological development may pass beyond any effective control even by those who ap­ propriate the funds that fuel its progress.
From page 70...
... Nor will it suffice to bring the myriad activities of fragmented assessment systems into intellectual and in­ formational focus. I t must be recalled that our diffi­ culties with respect to the ma nagement of technological change derive less from inadequate perception tha n from defective response.
From page 71...
... We have merely a spate of proposals in Congress, an occasional note of alarm from the Executive , and a few sporadic lawsuits brought by aroused citizens. Only when the energies represented by these diverse sources are orchestrated creatively and channeled continuously toward the tasks at hand will there be real hope of eventual progress.


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