Can technology make us safer?  What are the tradeoffs?  Is technology the best approach?

It is all about tradeoffs

• where are we willing to give up some safety for what technology can do for us
• are you willing to pay more for a higher level of safety
  

Current safety issues

• too much safety regulation
• we manage more things with medications, what are the dangers of those medications
• antibiotic resistance
• war and killing come to seem too much like a game--technology distances us from what's real
  

Example: increased security screening in airports

• backscatter xray machines are a technology to improve security
• we need to do everything we can (if the technology exists then we should use it)
• what does this say about our ideas about privacy?
• how do we balance freedom and security
• is this the best way to reduce the risk of a terrorist attack?
  
• alternative Israeli model
• domestic passport--travel card, all holders are investigated
• the backscatter machines are an example of a technological fix--technology isn't the only way to improve security
  

Safer:

• airbags and other safety technology, security locks
  
• security technology--fingerprint sensors, id card locks, hidden cameras...
• medicine
• better building materials
• technology often protects us from the dangers of the world around us
• how much safety technology is too much?
  

Less safe:

• automobiles mean we travel fast enough that accidents are very dangerous
• risk of having information stored in computers--possibility of theft
• loss of privacy makes our information more available to people who might do harm
  
• military technology can do more and more
• nuclear weapons could wipe out all life on earth
• systems to do harm at a distance
  
• we are increasingly dependent on big complex systems
• the more complex a system the more likely there are to be errors
• a problem with a big system does more harm
  

Football helmets:

• football players hit harder and harder--result of better training
• new scientific research is showing that even less than a concussion can cause cumulative long-term brain issues
• change the rules on how to hit
• make better helmets
• cost is an issue particularly for high school programs
• if a helmet that absorbs shock better is bigger/heavier does that have risks?
• if you have better helmets will people hit with their head more
• it isn't as easy as it would seem to use technology to make us safer
  

Nye considers two kinds of examples, accidents and military technology.  He has a political view you may not agree with on military technology, but you need to understand the arguments he is making whether you agree or not.

Is a technology safe?  This turns out to be a complicated question

• very complex technology bring special risk issues because there are so many things that can go wrong that you have to think about risk differently
  
• for many big technologies research goes into trying to predict the risk of an accident
• you can never get to a risk of zero
  
• should a manned spacecraft be 99.9% safe (likely to complete a mission without harming the people) or 99.99% safe?
• "Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1.5 million systems, subsystems and assemblies. With 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects."  Jerome Lederer, Director of Manned Space Flight Safety
  
• how much are we willing to pay for safety?
• reduce risk by redundancy--have duplicate systems--have greater safety at increased cost
• redundancy doesn't work in all situations
  
• that depends--do people choose to take the risk, how much do we think the technology should be trustable...
• what tradeoff do we make between risk and cost?
  
• different kinds of risks are taken more or less seriously

Why do we react strongly to technological disasters? (maybe less so than 30 years ago)

• we pay a lot more attention to one big accident than many small ones
• our perceptions of safety aren't necessarily accurate
• we are more frightened of big accidents--more in the news
• small probabilities aren't intuitive
• a big car feels safer, but a small car may better be able to avoid an accident
  
• bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2008

• people want to assume the systems we use everyday are safe
• there have been bridge collapses caused by bad design (Takoma Narrows)
• some are caused by shoddy construction
• this one was caused by maintenance issues (and weak design)
  
• we wonder where else are there similar risks
• they get a lot of news coverage
  

• because whatever trust we feel in our government tends to carry over particularly to the technologies the government develops to increase public safety
• because we don't like being out of control--if something is going to go wrong we want to feel we could do something to prevent the situation or escape.  Therefore our tendency when faced with a disaster is to find someone to blame
• we don't like to think that accidents are inevitable--any complex system will break down sometimes
  
• because disasters attract readers/viewers so they are played up by the news media, in oversimplified form
  

Disasters usually have complex causes

• maintenance may intersect with design issues
  
• sometimes what we do to prevent problems in one place increases problems somewhere else--if you prevent floods in one part of a river by bulding levees the water is channeled downstream and may cause worse flooding there
• sometimes the problem is the harmful consequences of a technology that no one knew about in advance (or the people who saw the problem developing were ignored)
• sometimes accidents are caused by human error (this is what is usually said about the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident).  But could the system have been better designed to prevent human error, or the operators better trained?
• we had a speaker in spring 2006 who had worked on a risk study of Oconee nuclear station in the 1970s--he particularly remembered a valve with a label on the wall next to it that said "this valve turns the wrong way"
• how much can and should we do to save people  from their own stupidity
  
• sometimes accidents happen because there are known risks but they were small enough to have been ignored
• the risk of damage caused by loose insulation that caused the space shuttle Columbia accident was known, but it was one of a list of over 100 critical risks--it would have been too expensive to fix them all
• The case of the Challenger accident--they knew that cold weather could cause components to fail and chose to launch anyway
  
• an engineer tried to warn NASA of the risk
• they decided to launch anyway--the evidence of the risk wasn't very clear
• it would have looked bad to delay the launch

As our world becomes more technological, risks increase

• the more complex a system is the harder it is to reduce risks
• technological systems tend to become bigger and more interconnected
  
• we grow more dependent on technology
• we can also use technology to reduce risk
• we live safer lives
• but the safety systems are complicated as well and we become dependent on them
• when we feel safer we take more risks
  

As technologies become more complex and more interwoven into large systems it becomes harder to anticipate all possible accidents.

• blackouts are often caused by a small problem in one place that resonates through the system in unexpected ways
• critics for the originally plan for the strategic defense initiative (sometimes called Star Wars) saw this as a key issue
  

• the idea was we could develop a system to protect us from a nuclear missile attack
• before that the strategy was "mutually assured destruction"
  
• to do this well you need to shoot down missiles from satellites, and you only have a few minutes to do it
• the targeting is going to have to be done by a computer program
  
• some scientists at the time said it would be impossible to debug the necessary computer program, which would involve millions of lines of code and which could not be fully tested until it was needed
• at any given level of technology there are systems that are so complex that we can't make them reliable
  

All of these problems can apply to military technologies, but in addition military technologies have gotten us into the pattern of believing that greater destructive power makes us safer.  Nye questions this.  The more weapons we have the safer we are--is this true?
Consider the arms race of the Cold War--let me try to tell the story more neutrally than Nye does:

• the U.S. built missiles armed with nuclear weapons because they had two advantages over long range bombers--they were impossible to defend against and they were cheaper
• the Soviets started building their own nuclear weapons and missiles sooner than we expected
• the competition became which country could deliver the most bombs (one missile carrying many separately targeted warheads was a key technological innovation)
  
• the official military strategy became mutually assured destruction--if the other side strikes first you want to be able to retaliate and cause unacceptable damage to the other side.  Submarine launched missiles were particularly valuable to this because they were unlikely to be destroyed by a first strike.  Also if the  Soviet Union attacked we wanted to be able to launch our counterattack before their missiles landed
  
• this worked--neither side dared start a nuclear war--but it was expensive and risky
  
• Reagan's idea of a defense against unclear missiles, what became the strategic defense initiative, threatened to destabilize that--if one side developed a way of defensing against retaliation it would theoretically be in their interest to launch a first strike immediately while they had that advantage
• the Soviet Union collapsed for political reasons, but some people believe that not being able to keep up in the expanded arms race Reagan created contributed to its fall

People have often made the argument that increasingly destructive military technology would make war so horrible that governments would no longer dare start wars

If anything the opposite has happened, at least for small wars: the U.S. uses technology to reduce the number of American soldiers killed, which makes war more politically acceptable