It would be asinine for someone to claim that they knew the consequence of every action they have ever made or will make. In this world of uncertainty, unintended consequences are one of few certainties. With every technoscientific advance there are consequences, positive and negative, known and unknown. After identifying an unintended consequence and evaluating its impact, engineers, scientists, businesses and lawmakers need to decide how they will deal with the effect.
How do unintended consequences come about? Why aren’t these things seen in advance? While ideally the engineering process looks at a problem from all perspectives, sometimes it’s hard to foresee a negative outcome when a person is so focused on creating a positive one. Woodhouse writes that, “Whereas it is easy to observe that a product works fairly well for the intended purpose, it is more difficult to learn about the products’ unintended secondary and tertiary consequences.” (pg 29) In Carr’s article, “All Can Be Lost,” he focuses on automation in the workplace and how increased automation, especially in areas where special human skills were once used, has caused the dulling, even loss, of those skills. Automation itself is a decidedly positive innovation, for quality of work and worker safety. However, it wasn’t thought that automation, “can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it.” When automation began to grow it was to save limbs and fingers from the mechanical looms in Salem and not to fly planes and calculate risk for investors. Automation though, has crept into every corner of the workplace and many people wouldn’t be able to do their jobs without it.
Technologies like automation become normalized into everyday life, so the unintended consequences that come with them, seem unavoidable as well. David Banks in his article, “The New Normal,” pins this phenomenon on peoples’ willingness to accept a routine; “it doesn’t really matter if it’s an endless war on terror, drugs, or poverty, people can accept new normals so long as their day-to-day lives are predictable; if they can recognize some semblance of cause and effect.” Using school shootings as an example, Banks is asserting that humans are willing to put the blinders on to an unintended consequence. Industrial disasters have been happening with alarming frequency and while “companies know that trains will derail and holding tanks will leak,” these unintended consequences are naturalized into everyday life. Similarly, in Woodhouse’s text, the idea is floated that the “general public engages in consumer daydreams rather than in information gathering, debate, and decision making.” (33) I believe that consumers are too quick to accept these types of negative byproducts of technoscientific progress and not willing to hold anyone accountable.
If unintended consequences are going to be addressed, then who will it be that tackles them? The prompt suggests, “scientists, engineers, social scientists and policymakers,” cooperate to reduce the frequency and severity of unintended consequences. A system could be implemented that holds companies and innovators accountable for the consequences of their progress. Perhaps a board of people from varied fields and viewpoints preside over the issue of unintended consequences. However, in my mind, the onus falls on the consumer, to be informed and not endorse a product or technology that has negative unintended consequences. That can’t always be the case as sometimes things are out of the control of consumers. Regardless, I join Woodhouse in asking why there is not more “inquiry and demand for change.” (pg 32)
Citations
Carr, N. (2013, October 23). All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines. Retrieved February 6, 2015, fromhttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/
Cyborgology. (n.d.). Retrieved February 6, 2015, from http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2014/02/24/the-new-normal-school-shootings-as-industrial-disaster/
Woodhouse, E. (n.d.). Science Technology and Society (Vol. N). University Reader.
