Who’s in Control Here?

November, 2002

BY PROFESSOR HAROLD J. LEAVITT

Organizations, especially for-profit organizations, now play a curiously dual role in promoting the unfettered acceleration of technology. They are technology’s most powerful driver and also its hogtied prisoner. That combination generates more and more acceleration, with potentially disastrous downside effects.

The resultant maelstrom of technological products and processes is beginning to look like a runaway locomotive, or worse—more like a whole horde of runaway locomotives hurtling ahead along multidirectional, multidimensional, ever-changing networks of tangled tracks. Now and again one runs out of fuel, but by then a host of newcomers has already begun to roll. And most of us, both individually and organizationally, as well as the media, seem so caught up in this technological tsunami that we mentally push aside any small prodromes of impending, down-the-road dangers. Science and technology (S/T) have hastened globalization, shortened many organizations’ life spans, and revolutionized the notion of what constitutes an individual’s career. Yet, even as it drives organizations to distraction, S/T also empowers them. The potent “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower warned against in 1960 has given way to the even more potent “technology-industrial” complex of the 21st century.

TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATIONS have always been important to one another, but until recently, organizational change was at least as much a matter of managerial choice as of pressing necessity imposed by science/technology. And the serious entry of organizational money onto the S/T scene has caused a shakeup in S/T’s internal culture. Technologists, traditionally lower in the pecking order than “real” scientists, are now approaching status parity. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are almost as much cultural emperors as Nobel laureates are cultural aristocrats.

Technology’s rising status also signals a shift in the thought-to-action ratio. Science has traditionally been mostly about thinking. But it is technology that carries the ball from thinking to doing, from learning to building, from solving the problem to implementing its solution. Ideas, in and of themselves, have certainly triggered revolutions, but technology builds the cars, makes the pills, and puts together the navigational systems. From the printing press to the light bulb to time and motion study to the pc, cheap, transferable technology has always been a major propellant of societal change.

Pure, unadulterated human curiosity was the initial motivator for much of both science and technology. Scientists and technologists, by training and by inclination, were intrinsically driven to search and explore. Their work provided its own reward. They liked money too, but gold was not the prime motivator. Indeed, the whole notion of grubbing for money was antithetical to the ethos of science. Yet perhaps it should have been obvious that greed would eventually become a camp follower of exploding technology. The money magnet attracts us all, but its pull is especially strong on financial types, marketers, and MBAs. Even Silicon Valley’s fabled young crusaders have been infiltrated by people with more “pragmatic” priorities. We are thus becoming doubly entrapped. Our limitless curiosity has coupled with our equally limitless avarice.

The effect of both has been to push technology ahead of science, while also blurring the distinction between the two. Would any private organization today build the equivalent of the old science-driven Bell Labs? That institution had a five-year moat of safety from the incursions of at&t’s marketers and finance folks. Yet that magnificent scientific resource gave way, more and more, to “directed” research, largely a euphemism (as scientists complained in Bell Labs’ declining days) for the demand that they devote themselves to designing Mickey Mouse telephones. While that shift at Bell and other corporate labs began somewhat earlier, the Japanese manufacturing challenge of the 1980s sped up the process. So did the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which streamlined and encouraged technology transfer from federally funded university research to industry.

ALL OF WHICH BRINGS US to these questions: Where are some of the danger spots? What else can and should we do about technology’s surging speed and spread? What shall we worry about? Here are a few items:

Until now, when new technology was blamed for some real or imagined downstream trouble, it got itself off the hook by offering a standard medication: large doses of even newer technology. Are high-powered cars on overcrowded highways killing too many of us? Invent seat belts and air bags! Are “rogue” states threatening us with nuclear missiles? Develop Star Wars antimissile technology!
That nostrum is still being peddled. For example, many private companies, long hostile to efforts to control the greenhouse gases that their factories emit, have recently reversed their position. They now see an opportunity for profit by developing new technologies to control the negative impact of their own earlier technologies.
Such technological cures for technologically generated ills are no longer the panacea they once were. S/T must live in the interconnected global village it has helped create. Deep social and political anxieties are growing around S/T’s perimeter, and many are becoming technology-resistant. The “digital divide” between the have and the have-not segments of the world may be growing, but the have-nots have enough technology to be quite aware of how much more the haves have. Indeed, several have-nots already have enough technical know-how to build horrendous nuclear and chemical weapons. That great segment of humanity will not stand passively by while our S/T rushes blithely onward. They will want more, and they may have the population power to get it.
Consider some recent projections by knowledgeable S/T people about what lies ahead: a now widely cited article in Wired by S/T insider Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, and a 1999 book by Ray Kurzweil on soon-to-arrive “spiritual machines.” They assert—and they should know (or should they?)—that machines will soon be able to do almost everything humans can, but more and better. They may be overstating both the case and the timetable, but can we blandly discount their informed judgments.
As S/T continues to proliferate and accelerate, the interactions among its parts will become more and more complex, perhaps exponentially. So what have been called “normal accidents”—like the Challenger, Bhopal, and Chernobyl disasters—will become more probable and more frequent.
More “control” of S/T is being taken by a shrinking number of enlarging organizations. A century ago we tried, with only moderate success, to cope with excessive concentrations of economic power via antitrust laws and such. Can we handle increasing concentrations of S/T power with the equivalents of antitrust?
The sweeping tide of technology threatens the independence of science’s traditional home, the university. As S/T accelerates, that academic birthing ground requires more resources. Corporations are willing to contribute, but almost always in exchange for partial control over universities’ research programs. A more intimate relationship is bound to have negative impact on the autonomy and, of course, the tenure of academic scientists and engineers.

It’s appropriate to end this set of worries on a more positive note: Somehow, over the years, we humans have managed to survive most technological dangers, although sometimes—as in the Cuban Missile Crisis—only by a hair’s breadth. Maybe, if we use our collective heads, we can continue to muddle through, despite S/T’s acceleration.

WHEN I SHOWED AN EARLY DRAFT of this piece to a few technologists, executives, and academics, some wanted to debate the issues, others raised further problems, but all asked the same what-to-do-about-it question: “Simply asserting that technology’s acceleration is inevitable doesn’t really help,” some said. “It just scares people.” “Where,” as one colleague put it, “are the ‘deliverables’ in your essay? If the S/T flood is about to wash us away, what do you recommend that we do about it?”

I admit to feeling a little irritated by that request. Isn’t identifying a problem a first step toward its solution? Our world really is in for changes that will rock our souls. But I can think of only one modest “deliverable” that might help dampen the shock: Let’s learn to look—with a very wide-angle lens—farther ahead and faster, at the possible second- and third-order effects of new technologies, before those down-the-road effects clobber us.

We haven’t, in the past, done a very good job of such forecasting. Consider the Internet. It opens vast new worlds cheaply and fast. Hooray! Then porn becomes the biggest business on it, our privacy is violated, and hackers endanger our personal and even our national security. Were those effects impossible to predict? And even if we had foreseen that surge of porn, could we have prevented it? Probably not, but couldn’t we—and wouldn’t we—have been able, from the start, to build in some more sensible ways of dealing with it?

To do a better job we need dialogue, and not just dialogue among scientists and technologists. When Bell Labs, decades ago, was designing pay telephones, they would sometimes assign an “enemy” technical team to test the physical limits of the proposed new product. The team’s task was to invent ways to gum up, break, or steal from those tentative designs. A sensible idea! They didn’t, however, also put nontechnical teams to work trying to project the possible longer-term social impact of alternative designs. Maybe that would have been a good idea, too.

Perhaps, as the noise level increases, we are even beginning to do a little more of such forward thinking. On June 26, 2000, a complete map of the human genome was announced. Now we await the transition from this achievement to its forthcoming implementation, the shift from mostly science to mostly technology.

All during that memorable day, television’s talking heads went on at length about three issues: First, they touted the biotech wonders that lie ahead: a cure for Alzheimer’s, individually tailored therapies for cancer patients, etc. Second, the airwaves were full of the rather tense debate between the publicly sponsored genome project and a fast-moving, privately held biotech company. Would this new knowledge, consistent with the cultural tradition of S/T, become public property, open freely to all? Or would that technology-yet-to-come, with all its enormous implications, be owned by private, for-profit organizations? Third, on that very same day, questions of privacy, religion, and ethics began to be aired, and since then they have been aired more and more loudly. “Should we clone human beings?” “Is human embryonic stem cell research moral?”

One hopes the sound and fury around such issues signify that we are learning, even in the realm of S/T, that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Or does it only mean that genetic tech is different from most other forms of S/T because it immediately and deeply touches some of our most sensitive spots—our religions, our politics, and our fears of disease and death?

That all those issues are being debated vigorously sends a positive but inchoate signal. S/T has become far too important to be left to scientists/technologists, politicians, and business executives. We may need, as one colleague suggested, something more formal. He pushed the look-ahead idea further, proposing that the time has now come for government to create one or more national— perhaps international—commissions to consider the likely consequences of new technologies—commissions composed of academic and industrial scientists and technologists, plus social scientists, humanists, ethicists, theologians, business executives, and others. Their charge would be, first, to identify—as early in the developmental process as possible—the most likely social, educational, psychological, moral, and other probable fallouts of emerging technologies, and, second, to propose ways of coping with them.

Even those questions, however, do not lie at the heart of the matter, nor do questions of haves vs. have-nots. The heart of the matter, we suggest, is the process in which S/T has been caught up, a process that is responsible for its headlong, onward acceleration. If one had to place a bet on the future of, for example, stem cell research, my bet would be—despite our president’s effort to tread a compromising tightrope, and despite many other obstacles—that it will barrel ahead. Religious, political, and other pressures may temporarily slow it down, but do any of us believe—in this diverse world—that we can really keep that train from picking up steam?

MANY MAY DISMISS THIS ESSAY as just another plaint that the sky is falling. Those folks may be right and, indeed, one hopes they are. But it would be ironic, wouldn’t it, if human-kind were to get itself into serious trouble—not because it can’t stop making war, nor because it can’t stop making love, nor because of its wildly irrational emotionality, nor even out of sheer stupidity—as a result of an attribute we prize and hold to be morally and intellectually good, our insatiable curiosity. Has that great quality now gone astray, shacking up with the black sheep of the human family, greed?

Perhaps those optimists can help reassure us worrywarts by focusing their creative curiosity on points farther down the road. Perhaps real scientists and technologists might even join forces with social scientists and technologists to think, early on, about likely longer-term consequences of S/T’s next great idea. That could conceivably help us avoid a few of the horrendous traps that must surely be waiting out there.

There is no facile, happy ending to this essay. The conjunction of human curiosity, a burgeoning library of accumulated knowledge, S/T’s still more or less democratic, open culture, and the competitive rapacity of free market organizations, taken ensemble, appear certain to fuel science and technology’s continued roiling acceleration. We humans are the responsible parties. We could not keep ourselves from creating our ever-more-frenetic world, nor are we likely to prevent ourselves from rushing onward to expand and extend it. Is it really possible that we will go on until we have painted ourselves out of the picture? Or, by using our innate curiosity, might we identify more sensible ways to cope with S/T’s great leaps forward? And might we design, and occasionally apply, appropriate brakes? Mae West once opined that too much of a good thing is simply wonderful. Not always!

Harold J. Leavitt is the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology, Emeritus.