What should be left to private industry and where should the government intervene?
Economists ask this as a question about the market
- Capitalism says in most cases a free market should make the best decisions (the invisible hand of the market)
- in what situations does the market fail to make good decisions
- when there are factors that are not priced, where the people involved in the market don't have to pay the cost (such as pollution that affects others)
- government regulation is then the best answer
- gov't can require all companies to cut carbon production by some percent
- gov't can put a tax on carbon release
- cap and trade--permits to release carbon are bought and
sold. Government regulation creates a cost for doing something
that has negative effects and so creates a market mechanism
Can we rely on the market to give us all the technology we want and don't want?
Or should the government step in to make adjustments where we don't think the market is working well?
Nye gives three examples:
- new drugs are heavily regulated by the government
- homeowners need to get permission and pass inspection to
make major renovations on their homes (building codes)
- a company was offering to clone your pet--there is no regulation of that
- the company closed--only 2 people paid the full $32,000
- here's
what their web site looked like when they were open and specifics on cat
cloning
- why does the government be involved in deciding the
direction of technology?
- how does private industry decide what technologies to develop and how effective is this system?
image
sourcewhat has shaped the history of regulation?
- The traditional belief was that ordinary people could and should watch out for themselves (buyer beware), but as consumer goods came to be made far away instead of locally and technology became more complex that didn't work so well any more.
- employees had no right to compensation for accidents from their employers because of a legal principle called "fellow servant"
- The progressive movement around 1900 led to the first regulations. Anti-trust regulations around 1900 and the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906). Workers compensation started in the 1910s.
- Concern about the environment in the 1960s and 1970s led to a new set of regulations, primarily to control pollution
- Businesses are also regulated, in effect, by what the courts hold them responsible for. Product liability has grown to be more of an issue because of changing social values (the decisions of juries). But don't jump to use the lawsuit about hot coffee at McDonalds as an example.
- red tape makes it harder to do things, but automotive engineers say how much fun they had when the government mandated increased fuel efficiency and so the manufacturers were willing to invest in more innovation
- how do you draw the line of how safe is safe enough?
- as technology becomes more complex we can't protect ourselves
- some areas of harm (eg. pollution) cause costs that the businesses that do harm wouldn't have to pay
- regulation prevents the situation where the businesses that try to act more responsibility go bankrupt because they can't compete with the ones willing to cut corners.
- liability, not regulation, is the problem area. Tort law has a life of its own--negligence no longer has to be proved
Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory ( Henry Ford Museum )
Industrial research laboratories--example of General Electric: ( GE Research Lab History )
- Edison claimed he didn't need science, but he did have almost an industrial research lab where he hired inventors and mathematicians to work out the details of his ideas.
- General Electric started to look towards more systematic research as Edison's patents expired--the basic one in 1894. GE's carbon filament faced competition from Nernst's ceramic filament, which Westinghouse had the American patent on. The company was following a strategy of buying patents from inventors, but that was costing a lot.
- In 1900 General Electric's chief consulting engineer, Charles Steinmetz, proposed the establishment of a laboratory for original research entirely separate from the factory and immediate production problems. "We all agreed it was to be a real scientific laboratory." Modeled on experiments already underway in Germany to bring scientists into corporations.
- Headed by Willis R. Whitney, a professor of physical chemistry at MIT with a Ph.D. from Leipzig (under Wilhelm Ostwald). Whitney was tired of low salaries, slow promotions, and lack of facilities, and interested in industrial problems. GE was a disappointment at first--he found himself temporarily housed in a barn at GE because of space problems. He solved that problem by burning down the barn.
- Lab went from 8 people in 1901 to 102 in 1906--30 to 40% of the staff had scientific training. Whitney believed that the way to develop new products was to do exploratory scientific research--GE was willing to buy that idea because Whitney kept clear that the goal was new products. University gave social prestige, research freedom, and professionalism. Lab offered money and time to work on research without demands for teaching and theory.
- Whitney's staff got to work on light bulbs and found a way to improve the carbon bulb 25% by baking the filament.
- But all that was rendered obsolete by the invention in Germany of more efficient lamps with filaments made of rare metals such as tungsten and tantalum (by Carl Auer von Welsbach, Walther Nernst and Werner von Bolton). In 1906 GE had to buy patents at a cost of $300,000--a great defeat for the lab. William Coolidge said: "These were the expenses that the Laboratory had been founded with the purpose of preventing." Even then there were tremendous problems with putting the new technology into use, and the laboratory worked on those without much success (see T. P. Hughes American Genesis p. 167). Whitney suffered a breakdown, partly mental and partly untreated appendicitis. He eventually returned to the lab as a manager, not as a researcher.
- His replacement as leader of research was William D. Coolidge, a Ph.D. from Leipzig, also a physical chemist. He was hired in 1905 at a salary of $2400--50% more than he was making at MIT. His 1913 patent on a process for making an improved tungsten filament saved the lab. But this was still an improvement of an existing product, not something radically new.
Irving
Langmuir was the first to break that barrier. Had a Ph.D.
from Gottingen where he had studied under Walther Nernst (discoverer of
the 3rd law of thermodynamics) and a commitment to pure science, but he
had little time for research at his job at Stevens Tech.
Attracted to GE by the idea of spending full time on research and by
better equipment. What were the limits? Company owned
patents, required reports of research and daily notebook.
Langmuir studied chemical reactions a low pressures (inside a light
bulb) and published a stream of papers in physics and chemistry
(averaged 5 papers a year from 1912 on) and also a steady stream of
patents. - In 1916 Langmuir invented the gas-filled bulb--gave GE market domination (96% of American incandescent-lamp sales in 1928). He won the Nobel prize for his work in surface chemical reactions (the work that had led to the lamp) in 1932.
- The lab had proved itself at GE, but the secret was that to get radically new products or new approaches you had to let scientists do fairly open-ended scientific research, rather than telling them what to work on. Scientists had to prove themselves first, but then the top scientists were allowed to pick their own research projects.
Industrial research allows corporations to control innovation
- Key features of industrial research lab:
- freedom from operational responsibility--if lab employees have to solve factory problems they won't get to researching new products
- hiring Ph.D. scientists--because a Ph.D. teaches you original research
- allowing scientific publication--because that is a reward system scientists care about
- defensive and offensive patenting--patent things your competitors need, not just things you need
- Attracted scientists who were inventive and practical-minded but had no taste for the entrepreneurial activity and the financial risk taking in which the independent inventors had had to involve themselves.
Nye's basic question in this chapter is whether it is ok to let corporations control technological innovation, or whether there should be regulation of new technologies--both prohibiting the development of some technologies and encouraging the development of others
If you think the government should be intervening in what technologies get developed, how do you do that? What mechanism will lead to the best possible decisions
- should the government simply go by public opinion?
- the Office of Technology Assessment provided some evaluation of technologies, but only when the federal government was involved in paying for the research and development
- some people oppose new technologies such as genetically engineered foods or methods of research such as animal experimentation
- the government can lead us in the wrong technological direction either by regulating technologies (is regulation of stem cell research political posturing slowing down valuable science?) or by subsidizing and giving tax breaks to the wrong technology (in Nye's opinion nuclear power and funding highways but not public transportation)
- technology can be seen as the easy solution to problems that
come from deeper sources:
- technology isn't going to solve all our problems for us
- for example, if automobiles cause unacceptable pollution, add more technology to the automobile to reduce the pollution (instead of substitution public transportation).
- can technology solve the problems of the
ghettos? Solve the problems
of war?
- Do we solve a problem like water shortages by persuading people not to water their lawns or not have lawns or by increasingly expensive technological systems to bring water from someplace else? (Techno-Utopia we seek may be mere illusion)
- Henry Ford: "We shall solve the city problems by leaving the city."
- "Americans in particular have often seen technological progress as the surest basis for progress in general, and have tended to believe that technological solutions to problems are less painful than solutions that require political or social changes." (Rudi Volti, Society and Technological Change, 3rd edition, p. 16)
New York
- Social problems are much more complex and harder to solve than technological ones. Yet technological fixes sometimes work, at least partially.
- The traditional solution to social problems is to try to get people to behave more rationally (or to act for the good of society rather than in their own self-interest).
- Goals are less clear for social problems, eg. stop crime. Human behavior is hard to change
- technological solutions to social problems tend to be incomplete and to replace one social problem with another.
- how do engineers deal with the social aspects of a problem when they are trained to solve technological problems, not social ones? (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility)
- is this also an issue for other professions?
What do we miss when we are focused on progress?
Does technological change always hurts someone?
- can we do anything about it or is that just the price of progress?
- Bill Joy Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
- Luddites: What's a Luddite?
- Lessons from the Luddites
- Technology, Productivity, and Psychological Needs
- Frank Beacham on technology (a New York City-based writer, a native of Honea Path and the grandson of Dan Beacham, the man who ran Chiquola Mill during the shooting of 1934)
If you think government should have a role then the next question is:
How could the public participate more effectively in decision-making for science and technology? Nye believes that many decisions about what direction we want to go in in the future are too important to be left to corporations thinking only about profit
- is it appropriate to develop artifical red blood cells that can carry more oxygen (think what athletes could do then)?
- should drugs that allow us to get by with less sleep be developed and marketed? You know that would be profitable, and the military has developed some good possibilities
- should parents be able to change the genetic features of their children?
- should we develop robots to care for old people? Japan is quite far along with this
- is it desirable to have people live for 1,000 years--some scientists think this is possible
One issue is the role of the media, which has itself been changed by technology. Consider the example of TV:
- does watching violence on TV cause people to be more violent? Why would it have that effect more than books or magazines?
- how does TV change politics? What is it about the technology that causes it to have that effect?
- is the cause of these effects the technology or the programming?
- people make the programming decisions but what the
technology can do may encourage particular kinds of material
The War in Vietnam
- we are much more aware of the world
- News coverage--the "global village"
- people see TV as their prime source of national and international news, but they also read newspapers (much influenced by satellites and computers) and news magazines.
- News coverage--the "global village"
- Seeing makes it seem realer--television coverage of the war in Vietnam was a major factor in the development of public feelings against the war
- Newspaper reporting is impersonal (and usually includes background information), while TV reporting is more like storytelling, often presented as much as entertainment as as information. Volti quotes a study that says 20% of people who watched a newscast remembered nothing an hour later and the average viewer retained 20% of the information presented. The potential of news via internet is not very clear yet.
- who controls the news? Is it politically
biassed? does that actually change public opinion?
- The real answer isn't liberals, but the urban educated establishment, which happens to be somewhat liberal ( an argument that TV tends to favor conservative ideas )
- has cable tv (public access and Christian channels) reduced this effect by reducing the cost of access?
- does the technology have anything to do with why the press gives people less and less privacy?
Politics--current ( excellent links on this topic )
- candidates spend millions (in the case of presidential candidates tens of millions) of dollars on television advertising--something like 1/3 of the campaign budget. ( dissect an ad )
- candidates need to raise more money because TV advertising is expensive, so they end up more beholden to special interests.
- television advertising is based on impact, and doesn't give you much sense of the candidate's policy views ( ad examples )
- You add this to a system where voters have less loyalty than they used to to political parties and you get people voting on the basis of sound bites.
- on the other hand, more is decided by the people and less by party bosses in smoke-filled rooms.
- Volti says the greatest threat to our political process may come from the trivialization of the political process by television
Politics--future:
- would you want to have a system where people made more decisions directly--the electronic town meeting? Town meeting form of government still works pretty well in New England towns.
- we have the technology now to go back to a purer form of democracy
- tendency already visible towards putting more decisions directly in the hands of the public through referendums.
- can the public be educated?
- public opinion makes a big difference--eg. nuclear power
- can you educate public opinion on complex technology (Florman ch. 11)? Lewis Thomas's view as a patient: "Don't explain it to me. Go ahead and fix it." In the end we mostly decide which experts to trust.
- There are so many complex technological issues that our society much face that it seems hopeless to educate the public on each one, plus you have the problem that the ones that come to the public are the controversial ones, and people just end up confused by the conflicting opinions of different experts.
- Florman: "I do not fear the coming of a sinister technocratic cabal, mainly because on consequential issues the technicians invariably give conflicting advice, and the politicians end up making the decisions whether they want to or not."
- other models of public participation, eg. science court
- rebellion against regulation, such as pirate radio
discussion: how television changes politics
- televison makes the public more knowledgeable (eg. debates)
- commercials just talk about the negative aspects,
- makes appearance more important than reality
- people are more independent, listen less to political parties
- tv commercials are misleading if not inaccurate--personal attacks and oversimplified policy issues
- ads only deal with certain subjects
- television encourages drama, visual impressions rather than facts, sound bites rather than detailed information
- the public is turned off by nasty commercials
- twist the facts, tell them out of context
- ads are by definition biassed
- TV news is biassed, picks stories that will appeal to voters, doesn't give much detail, emphasizes news not background
does television change our way of thinking?
- Marshall McLuhan--less linear, less abstract ways of thinking
- children develop their imagination less
- students expect to be entertained.
- the potential for distance learning.
- When MTV televised a song by jazz singer Gil Scott-Heron it changed a critical word. The line had read "The revolution will not be televised." MTV changed that to "The revolution will be televised." ( more on "the revolution will not be televised" )
Does the internet change this fundamentally?