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COMPUTER USER: "1,000 years o' techno trouble" "What were the worst technologies of the last 1,000 years?" That's the question my editor asked
me, on the occasion of Computer User's True Millennium issue. That thing we did
last year was not the true millennium. But you knew that. I had no quick answer for him. What, after all, is a "worst
technology"? Is it one that just plain doesn’t work (cold fusion)? The
dumbest technology (Maginot Line)? One that works all too well (pesticides)? Is
it one that is hailed as the next big thing, even though everyone with plural
brain cells knows it will never be (high definition television)? One whose side
effects outweigh its intended benefit (hairspray? catalytic converter)? Or one that
is immutably and irreconcilably evil (the people-inscribing torture device in
Kafka's "The Penal Colony")? Oh, you can go galloping off in any
of those directions, and still run into problems of definition. Like, the worst
according to whom? The Luddites would have said the worst invention was the
mechanical loom of the 18th century. The monastic class, which owned bookmaking
until the 15th century, decried the invention of moveable type as unholy and
improvident, that it put sacred things in the hands of scumwad merchants.
Today's Amish, some of them, hold that all of modernity, from the Industrial
revolution on, is suspect. One fellow's antibiotic is another
fellow's superbug incubator. Good technology or bad? Depends on whose ox is
getting gored. Looked at another way, it is a
debate between the glass being half empty and the glass being half-full. The
classic example is nuclear power. Cheap to produce and in clean in conventional
ways, it is the miracle of the mid-century. But doggone it, it turned out
nuclear power has drawbacks, too -- like that bit about the radioactive half
life of spent fuel being 25,000 years, and the capacity for the same stuff, in
the wrong hands (and sometimes, alas, even in the right hands) to blow up major
seaboards. And yet, if I put nuclear power on
my list, to save the world from nuclear winter, am I condemning it to black
lung form coal pollution? Oh, bother, as a bear of modest brain might say. Then there is politics.
Environmentalists will say that the internal combustion engine is responsible
for more deaths, pollution, and global degradation than any other invention in
the last 1,000 years. But their case against cars must be weighed against the
facts that they have been an economic boon to billions of people, that they
take us to grandma's house and our jobs and the circus, and other places that
aren’t coming immediately to mind, and we all really like having them. Who's right? Both sides, probably
-- which further muddles the problem for a basically wishy-washy person like
myself to name the millennium's worst offenders. One way to evaluate technologies is
by evaluating them as standards. A dominant technology is usually the one that
becomes the de facto standard. This doesn’t always means it's better.
Beta supposedly was lots better than VHS -- but VHS carried the day. Likewise,
Thomas Edison's alternating current (AC) over Nicola Tesla's Direct Current
(DC), transportation via auto over transportation via streetcar, or the QWERTY
keyboard over the Dvorak layout. Indeed, a standard that remains a
standard for too long becomes a logjam to change -- look no further than
Microsoft having to lash future Windows versions to backward compatibility with
their first product 17 years ago. Then there is the possibility, which
I myself find attractive, of finding a moment in the development of a
technology when vast cross-cultural change immediately ensued, like day
following night. The invention of the sextant or astrolabe in the 15th century
is such a moment. This simple tool for measuring the angle of the stars in the
night sky made it possible for sailors to be out after dark and far from land.
You could, if you were of a mind, conceivably blame the devastation and
genocide of global colonialism on the development of this simple dangling
protractor -- and reap the occasional ooh and ahh on the side. The cotton gin has been tabbed as a
contributing factor in diametrically opposite trends. When Eli Whitney patented
it, it was his vision that the machine would make slavery in the cotton fields
unnecessary, because it reduced the manpower requirement for milling cotton.
But the law of unintended consequences took over, because cotton plantations
added slaves by the hundreds to turn the crank on the engines. Same thing happened with dynamite.
By bonding volatile nitroglycerin into a relatively stable form, Alfred Nobel
believed he had invented a tool so horrible it would make war intolerable.
Thus, if you have ever wondered, was a peace prize named for a weaponmaker.
Instead, wars simply incorporated high explosives and tolerated the
"collateral damage," much as we tolerate the splatter of mayflies on
our windshields in June. War was less tolerable, thanks to Nobel, but no less
frequent. You could pin suburban sprawl on
Goodyear's invention of vulcanized rubber, which freed wheels from steel
tracks. You could even attribute deep-space exploration to the discovery of
radio waves. Radio may be a 19th century technology on earth, but it continues
to guide our satellites millions of miles in space two centuries later. Now, if some unpleasant alien
civilization picks up on our radio signals and comes on down to pummel our
planetary butt, we have Marconi to blame. Or you could pin everything on the
adding machine. Yep, the old mechanical cranker that came along around the time
of the Civil War and put the original computers, who were people, like Ebenezer
Scrooge, out of work. But that was just the beginning.
Under the regime of human computing, a business could not grow larger than its
ability to comprehend its own activities. That effectively limited
multifunctional companies to a size of 250 employees. Organizations that tried
being bigger, like the armed forces or government offices, paid the price of
stumbling around blind to their own whereabouts. Those were the good old days. The adding machine changed all
that. It allowed the new scribes and scriveners, now called accountants, to
tally immensely long lists of numbers. It thus allowed organizations to grow,
and passably competent bureaucracies to flower. The adding machine,
foreshadowing its progeny, the mainframe computer, allowed governments and
businesses to centralize functions, command and control from one location, and
create great databases that consolidated their power. When the telephone was invented in
the 1870s, it swept the world because there was already a business
infrastructure ready for it. Existing telegraph lines were less important than
the machines that could put all this gabbing and yakking into some kind of order. Which leads us to the present technology-rich era. I suppose we must make some final solonic judgment about information technology -- computers, networks, the whole digital and digitizable realm. Thumbs up or thumbs down? I know people who can make a list showing ten different ways in which computer technology is bad news. It splits the world into techno haves and have-nots. It levels everyone, and shears away defining distinctions between groups. It imposes standards that crimp thought and cramp expression. It is a seething hotbed for every bugaboo from carpal tunnel syndrome to illiteracy to a kind of psychological autism among the young to an across-the-board de-empowering of society and the effective gutting of centuries of culture and literature. Still and all, I like it. Because none of those things has happened to me, and the only real way to rate a technology good to bad, it finally seems to me, is by looking in the mirror. 
Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies,
by Lloyd J. Dumas
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