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.Here, then, is a pressing intellectual agenda for the social and physical sciences.Wehave taught ourselves to create and combine the most powerful of technologies.We have nottaken pains to learn about their consequences.Today these consequences threaten to destroyus.We must learn, and learn fast.A TECHNOLOGY OMBUDSMANThe challenge, however, is not solely intellectual; it is political as well.In addition todesigning new research tools new ways to understand our environment we must alsodesign creative new political institutions for guaranteeing that these questions are, in fact,investigated; and for promoting or discouraging (perhaps even banning) certain proposedtechnologies.We need, in effect, a machinery for screening machines.A key political task of the next decade will be to create this machinery.We must stopbeing afraid to exert systematic social control over technology.Responsibility for doing somust be shared by public agencies and the corporations and laboratories in whichtechnological innovations are hatched.Any suggestion for control over technology immediately raises scientific eyebrows.The specter of ham-handed governmental interference is invoked.Yet controls overtechnology need not imply limitations on the freedom to conduct research.What is at issue isnot discovery but diffusion, not invention but application.Ironically, as sociologist AmitaiEtzioni points out, "many liberals who have fully accepted Keynesian economic controls takea laissez-faire view of technology.Theirs are the arguments once used to defend laissez-faireeconomics: that any attempt to control technology would stifle innovation and initiative."Warnings about overcontrol ought not be lightly ignored.Yet the consequences of lackof control may be far worse.In point of fact, science and technology are never free in anyabsolute sense.Inventions and the rate at which they are applied are both influenced by thevalues and institutions of the society that gives rise to them.Every society, in effect, doespre-screen technical innovations before putting them to widespread use.The haphazard way in which this is done today, however, and the criteria on whichselection is based, need to be changed.In the West, the basic criterion for filtering out certaintechnical innovations and applying others remains economic profitability.In communistcountries, the ultimate tests have to do with whether the innovation will contribute to overalleconomic growth and national power.In the former, decisions are private and pluralisticallydecentralized.In the latter, they are public and tightly centralized.Both systems are now obsolete incapable of dealing with the complexity of super-industrial society.Both tend to ignore all but the most immediate and obvious consequencesof technology.Yet, increasingly, it is these non-immediate and non-obvious impacts thatmust concern us."Society must so organize itself that a proportion of the very ablest andmost imaginative of scientists are continually concerned with trying to foresee the long-termeffects of new technology," writes O.M.Solandt, chairman of the Science Council ofCanada."Our present method of depending on the alertness of individuals to foresee dangerand to form pressure groups that try to correct mistakes will not do for the future."One step in the right direction would be to create a technological ombudsman apublic agency charged with receiving, investigating, and acting on complaints having to dowith the irresponsible application of technology.Who should be responsible for correcting the adverse effects of technology? The rapiddiffusion of detergents used in home washing machines and dishwashers intensified waterpurification problems all over the United States.The decisions to launch detergents on thesociety were privately taken, but the side effects have resulted in costs borne by the taxpayerand (in the form of lower water quality) by the consumer at large [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]