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• W4383343386 abstract "COMMENT: IS TECHNOLOGY PREDICTABLE? PETER F. DRUCKER Three cheers for the Harvard Program on Technology and Society. And three cheers for its director, Emmanuel G. Mesthene. It is good news that a large number of scholars—economists, for instance, or soci­ ologists—are taking a close look at technology, its dynamics and its im­ pacts. It is good news, for instance, that an economist finally tries to re­ late technological development to economic theory, as Anne P. Carter is doing in one of the studies under the program. Or that another econo­ mist (Raymond Vernon) is trying to relate technological development to international trade and investment. It is good news that a prominent philosopher (Morton White) tries to relate technology to the main cur­ rents of American philosophical thought. And it is, above all, good news that technology is being seen by nontechnologists as part and parcel of human activity and society, instead of, as has been so com­ mon in our universities, as something “outside” and “nonhuman.” But above all there is reason for thanks for the courage which Mes­ thene himself displays and for his willingness to give us, in this fourth report on the program, his first conclusions. Mesthene dares to define technology. And while his definition, “knowledge applied to practical purposes,” is clearly too broad (does a fox who has learned not to cross the Trans-Canada Highway during daytime hours, as most of them have, apply technology?), it is at least a break out of the straitjacket of the traditional definition of technology as machines. Mesthene has the courage to see technology as a human activity rather than as a “force.” And he has the courage to speculate and to generalize. The fundamental insight that underlies Mesthene’s essay is invaluable. He is the first writer, to my knowledge, to realize the pointlessness of arguing whether technology is “good” or “bad.” The problem of tech­ nology is that it may become too much of a good thing. The problem, in other words, is one of “trade-offs” between countervailing impacts: the balance between the need for more crops in a hungry world and the protection of life and health against the toxic effects of insecticides, the Dr. Drucker, professor of management at New York University’s Graduate School of Business, is the author of many books, including The Future of Industrial Man and the recently published The Age of Discontinuity. He is a former presi­ dent of the Society for the History of Technology. 522 Is Technology Predictable? 523 boon of making more babies survive the first two years and the threat of a “population explosion,” the desire of the great majority for more access roads into the national parks and the desire of a small, a very small, minority to hike, to camp, and to enjoy solitude. The impacts of technology are essentially a problem of value choices: between imme­ diate benefits and long-range dislocations, between the interests of one group and the interests of others, between individual welfare, or even comfort, and the greatest good for the greatest number. They are, in other words, political choices of great complexity. This means, above all, that there are no “villains.” It is a habit of the human mind to believe that somebody must be “responsible” when something goes wrong. The underlying assumption of liberal optimism has always been that, left to themselves, things will go right. They can only go wrong if somebody does something culpable. Nowhere has this facile oversimplification done more harm than in the discussion of tech­ nology. It is the great virtue of Mesthene’s essay that he brings out clearly that the problem is not to find out “who is guilty.” The problem is to find out at what point benefits, public or private, threaten to cost more than they are worth, at what point the “trade-off” should take place. But having reached this central insight, Mesthene loses courage. Or rather he takes refuge in the same self-delusions of traditional rhetoric that his own analysis brilliantly explodes. Having demonstrated that the impacts of technology force on us social and moral value choices, he falls back into assigning..." @default.
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• W4383343386 date "1969-10-01" @default.
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• W4383343386 title "Comment: Is Technology Predictable?" @default.
• W4383343386 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.1969.a892397" @default.
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