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
Less safe:
automobiles mean we travel fast enough that accidents are
very dangerous
risk of having information stored in computers--possibility
of theft
military technology can do more and more
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
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
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?
how much are we willing to pay for safety
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 so strongly to technological disasters?
we pay a lot more attention to one big accident than many
small ones
bridge collapse in Minneapolis
people want to assume the systems we use everyday are safe
there have been bridge collapses caused by bad design
(Takoma Narrows)
som 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 disaters 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 turnes 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 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)
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 mke them reliable
All of these problems can apply to military technologies, but in
addition miltary technologies have gotten us into the pattern of
believing that greater destrucive 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 imporssible
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 intitiative, 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\