Posts Tagged ‘unintended consequences’

Climate change Maladaptation

February 13, 2021

This is a summary, expansion of an article on the Resilience web site called “Why avoiding climate change ‘maladaptation’ is vital” which is in turn a summary of an academic article. It is, I think, important, although I suspect would not surprise workers in the field.

I’ve been talking about complex maladaptive systems for a while, and this paper I’m summarising attempts to show some of the ways that maladaptive systems can be made worse as an unintended consequence of climate development actions. In other words, it points out that attempts to provide increased capacity for adaptation to climate change can make some people who are vulnerable to climate change, even more vulnerable. The article does not seem to use ideas of complex systems which could be helpful to it.

However, it is worth looking at what they find are the main causes of increasing maladaption.

Problem of Evaluation

Their first assertion is an obvious consequence of working with complex systems. It is hard to know in advance what a successful adaptation will look like, and hard to measure adaptation, as it is ongoing. Adaptation is dependent on circumstances, and the circumstances are changing, as well as impossible to describe fully. So we may not know in advance if the project will work. We only truly know if an arrangement is adaptive, if it succeeds or fails in the future. Ongoing attention is required.

This is rendered even more complicated as evaluations are interpretations and tend to become political. Who is making the evaluation and what is relevant to them, or irrelevant to them? If the people who evaluate the program are the same people who benefit from it, then they may be likely to ignore the problems it creates for others.

However, this inevitable problem with complex systems, does not mean we cannot predict likely causes of failure.

Increasing Maladaption

First: when adaptation reinforces existing vulnerability.

This seems a largely political issue. Those who are most vulnerable, are often the ones with less access to power and visibility. They tend to be discounted or unseen, for those reasons. Those with power, ‘education’ and training tend to be able to get themselves noticed and set the adaptation agenda, or take advantage of that agenda. In this probably normal case, the intervention is likely to reinforce inequalities and vulnerabilities in the society.

In São Tomé and Príncipe.. an externally funded adaptation intervention – that aimed to increase productivity through agricultural modernisation – was only offered to those who had land, ignoring the landless. The landless are often considered more vulnerable to climate change precisely because their livelihoods are less secure. Therefore, such an approach marginalised them even further [and probably made them relatively more vulnerable, and less capable of supporting themselves in changing circumstances.].

In other words it is often useful to look at the dynamics which have produced both the problems the different levels of vulnerability in the first place. Not looking for these differences will likely reinforce them.

While it may seem that it is a small price to pay to have some small(?) number of people suffer to benefit the (supposed) vast majority, what we should know from complex systems theory is that the small number of people can serve vital functions for the system as a whole, and so there is no guarantee the system will work as well without them. It may become more vulnerable in general, and is unlikely those high in the hierarchy have that knowledge.

In cases studied by colleagues of mine, renewable energy farms in India, can give landholders rent, but deprive the landless of any form of income, because they are now prevented from working the land belonging to the landholders – this will render them malnourished, open to disease, restless or forced into the cities – which may not help the community as a whole. Farming skills, traditions and community bonding rituals will probably decline, also leading to greater vulnerability for the whole community in the long run. In some cases, it appears that fake contracts can be issued and people who think they have leased out their land find they have officially sold it.

Second: adaptation projects can redistribute vulnerability

Perhaps some people who were not that vulnerable are now made vulnerable by the project. We can also expect that these people are probably marginal to the hierarchies, and to the aims of the changes being made.

In Vietnam.. hydroelectric dam and forest protection policies to regulate floods in lowlands at first appeared beneficial for reducing vulnerability to specific hazards there. However… these policies undermined access to land and forest resources for mountain peoples upstream.

Again this kind of result is common outside development projects. For example, with mining. People who could use the land on, or nearby, the mine, no longer can use the land or are poisoned by the mine, becoming intensely vulnerable. Similarly hydroelectric projects can change ecologies and displace people from independent sources of survival. It is important to remember that these kind of ‘unintended’ effects are not unique to climate projects. They are common to all kinds of business and development projects; they are likely common to any kind of process which generates a hierarchy of benefits and disbenefits. The main difference is that people in climate adaptation projects are more likely to be troubled by the consequences.

Third: projects can create new sources of vulnerability and dependency, or intensify old causes of vulnerability should the system fail

The project encourages dangerous behaviour, if the system fails.

irrigation may bring short-term benefits by ensuring farmers a harvest, but if drought frequency is going to increase then the water table will continue to decline. Thus, encouraging reliance on water that is not guaranteed will bring about maladaptation [and probably conflict over water. Few water supplies can be guaranteed in a changing climate. Water supplies are also often important with solar energy, as the panels have to be clean to function at their best – this is shy deserts are not always the best place for solar farms.]

italics added

The investment costs, in time, energy or finance may produce lock-in. It may leave people without energy or money reserves in times of trouble, or when the new system collapses.\

in Bangladesh… construction of levees to protect people from tropical cyclones, storm surges and sea level rise can create a false sense of security and encourage more development in high flood-risk areas.[which increases the likelihood of severe crisis if the levees fail]

I have no idea how you avoid this. Putting in levees to protect those already living there, seems like a good idea, but it will encourage people to move in. I guess if you build the levees you cannot stop maintaining them. So it has to be thought of as a continuing use of resources.

Four: Retrofitting to fit previous developmental work, by the organisation, the community or others

This is undeveloped in the Resilience article, but it is a form of lock-in and seems a normal human trait to try and build on what you have built previously. It is what you know, Powerful people have probably benefited from it and will encourage continuing with it. They will agitate through their friends and associates to continue in a similar line. Previous projects make make certain actions easier, and other actions more difficult. You have to be prepared to admit mistakes, and say that money was wasted. Recognising complex systems means recognising that previous work is perhaps no longer useful, or no longer the way ahead, as it did not work out exactly as expected.

The project changes the situation and traps people into vulnerability, or continuing with a project which would be better abandoned.

Summary

Some main causes of problems can be listed:

  • The projects ignore social diversity of experience, livelihood and risk, and the ways that these are distributed
  • The projects get caught in the social hierarchies (local and non-local) and reinforce existing inequities of risk.
  • Vulnerable people are ignored or not perceived until too late, and the likely and actual effects of the project on them are ignored.
  • The projects reinforce hierarchies of knowledge, because the ‘educated’ know how to deal with bureaucracies. law and form filling, again increasing the possible vulnerabilities of those towards the bottom of the hierarchy.
  • The effectiveness of the project can depend on it being evaluated positively by those high in the hierarchy.
  • The projects support previous development work, or work by the organisation introducing them, rather than adaptation. Lock in of development.
  • The projects take energy, money and attention from other, or related, problems.
  • Short term benefits may increase the risk of long term crash.

Solutions

Rather disappointingly they present very few solutions.

Co-design is good, but if it gets caught in politics, or the organisations ignorance of those people likely to be affected in harmful ways, then nothing changes. I would imagine that workers in the field would already be aware of the problems of political capture.

Focusing on the effectiveness of money that is available is liable to get caught up in neoliberal assumptions (such as generating private profit is good, or the market generates the best result), rather than in functional adaptation and resilience for everyone. Who is to evaluate the effectiveness of the money being used? This gets into the usual problems. Money is not irrelevant, but it cannot be the dominating factor, otherwise there will always be pressure to cut back on expenditure, and deliver a cheap project which may fall down later, when it is someone else’s problem and expense.

I’d suggest that ethnography and surveys be used to find out, who is likely to loose, by working out how the population survives, and has adapted to the local ecology. Who seems likely to be left out, to become more vulnerable? and so on – and that will often require detective work, as vulnerable people may have learnt to avoid “officials.”

All projects should consider the effects of possible changes in the weather. This is not a determinate prediction, but if it seems that water will become scarce then a project which depends upon plentiful water, such as hydro power or coal mines, are probably not a good idea. Conservation of water is more important in that situation. This issue of changing climate should be obvious in climate projects, but it often seems not.

The realisation that unintended consequences of human action are normal and should be expected, leads to the obvious point that people should look for them, and modify their adaptation policies as a result. If you don’t look for them you probably won’t observe them until too late.

Addenda

One of the real problems is the common ‘positive thinking paradigm’, in which you ignore problems, because recognising problems supposedly creates problems, or it would stop you from progressing the only way you know how.

This can be seen in the common idea of complex adaptive systems.. Yes complex systems are evolutionary and adapt, they just don’t have to adapt in the best possible way for humans. Deserts are often the results of adaptation, and are hostile to most city dwelling civilisations, unless they have contacts elsewhere. From the human point of view, complex systems can be maladaptive. If climate resilience projects are needed, then the chances are high that we are dealing with maladaptive systems somewhere.

The same kind of thing occurs with neoliberal markets. The most efficient results of the market does not have to be in the long term interests of humans, or even the interests of players in that market. The interactions which make up ‘the market’ are a mere subset of the interactions in the world’s ecologies. It is the ecology of the planet as a whole that determines what is ‘rational’ and what will flourish, not the market alone.

That is why the idea of maladaptive systems, and the normality of unintended consequences are important.

Clearly I need to read the proper article, and will make changes if necessary.

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Free markets? Praxeology? Individualism?

December 15, 2020

This blog post is an attempted contribution to Mises’ Praxeology, because the questions I’m going to ask in the next blog post, lead to observations which seem to contradict those of Austrian ‘free market’ economics.

Praxeology

Praxeology is the study of what the ‘Austrian’ form of economics considers to be those aspects of human action that can be grasped a priori, or which seem immediately obvious without any further testing or exploration. The idea is that anything we deduce, or derive, from these axioms has as much truth as the original axioms. As we have assumed the original axioms are obviously true then the derivations must also be true.

However, if the axioms are incorrect or incomplete, then propositions which have been derived from them, will (at best) be misleading.

I am extremely dubious that we can simply take apparently obvious axioms about human nature as true, without investigating them. Anthropology repeatedly shows that different societies have different ideas of what is normal human behaviour, so it is probable that what seems normal and obvious to a person is most likely a cultural phenomena, reinforced by their society and not necessarily true for all (culture can be mistaken, biased or limiting). However, to Mises, historical and anthropological research are irrelevant to understanding human dynamics and functioning. He argues that Praxeology’s axioms:

are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts.

Mises 1998 (original 1949) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Mises Institute p 32

I’m not quite sure how any person’s axioms about human nature, can be ‘temporarily antecedent’ to their knowledge and experience. The simple fact would seem to be, that by the time we get to thinking we can deduce everything important about a subject from obvious axioms correctly without error in the deduction process, we have done a lot of learning, and had a lot of enculturation.

That these axioms are not falsifiable, or verifiable, is of course handy for producing dogma, but not as handy for finding truth. Heading towards even relatively accurate understanding takes work and testing. The beginning point of Mises Praxeology simply seems lazy. It is at least likely our learnt knowledge of history and our cultural expectations, lead us to consider some propositions about human nature as being obvious when they are not.

The point seems to be that Austrian economics should not ever be tested, unlike a normal science, where you change the theory if the evidence shows it is not correct. As Austrian Economics is based on a priori truths, then no amount of evidence can ever show it is wrong. It is essentially a dogma. We should probably be skeptical of his assumptions.

We may need to know what histories we are taking as true, to understand what axioms we might take as true.

A theory should be logical or derivable and systematic but, if we want accuracy or truth, we should be able to abandon the theory, if the evidence does not support it, otherwise we are just heading for a beautiful delusion.

He implies that the assumptions of mathematics are a priori as well, independent of our experience of the world. I’m skeptical about that proposition as well. However, we do know that you can get quite interesting results by challenging the apparently obvious axioms of mathematics, and that some of the new mathematics that has resulted is useful for analysing real world situations which were previously resistant to mathematical description. Non obvious, non a priori formulations, such as irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, non-Euclidian geometry and so on, should have been familiar to Mises. Non-obvious multi-valued Logics were being explored in the 1920s and 30s. We can assume he was not inevitably going to be familiar with these, but that does not mean they do not exist, and do not contradict his point. What seems to be obvious can be wrong, or just a special case. We would hope no one would make a similar mistake today, but who knows? It can be easier to make that mistake, or there can be other incentives to make it, because we have already decided what our ‘science’ is aimed at.

Mises states Praxeology‘s:

scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts.

Mises 1998 (original 1949) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Mises Institute p 32

For me, one of the problems with this form of immediately obvious human action, is that it appears to deny interaction, when that seems basic to human action. That is, human action almost automatically involves interaction with something else. I wonder if human action can be extracted from all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances? Surely we act, at least in part, because we are reacting to circumstances and the properties of the environment we find ourselves within? We are nearly always reacting to, or with, other people for one. For instance, in reading Mises, we are reacting to Mises – that is one relevant circumstance. In an economy we are reacting to what is happening elsewhere. It could be argued that we develop our sense of self, or our ego, through our interaction with the world (including people), and through learning the ways the world resists us and the ways it supports us.

Mises proposition takes advantage of the historical Western neglect of environment and interaction. This would seem not to be an a priori truth, but a historical/cultural assumption. Other people do not have to make that assumption.

Mises justifies his approach by what he calls “methodological individualism”.

Praxeology deals with the actions of individual men. It is only in the further course of its inquiries that cognition of human cooperation is attained and social action is treated as a special case of the more universal category of human action as such.

Mises 1998 (original 1949) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Mises Institute p 42.

He recognises there are problems with this, but simply brushes them to one side.

As a thinking and acting being[,] man emerges from his prehuman existence already as a social being. The evolution of reason, language, and cooperation is the outcome of the same process; they were inseparably and necessarily linked together. But this process took place in individuals. It consisted in changes in the behavior of individuals. There is no other substance in which it occurred than the individuals. There is no substratum of society other than the actions of individuals.

Mises 1998 (original 1949) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Mises Institute p 43.

This is an odd conclusion from the obvious recognition that humans emerge from “prehuman existence already as a social being.” If this is correct, which seems to be the case, then methodological individualism seems to be a distortion of reality. It could be an acceptable distortion if it leads to testable results, but it is certainly not a priori not matter how convenient it is.

Evolution does not seem to take place in individuals, but in reproduction, which requires at least two people. Evolution and human action, almost always occur in interactions; with other people, with other animals, with plants, with soils, with water, with climate, with weather, with microbes etc. The child learns from its parents, others and its conditions of life. If its genes and experience give it an advantage, it may flourish and reproduce. If its genes and do not give it an advantage or harm it, then it may not flourish and reproduce. It could be an evolutionary dead end, without some other factor. Perhaps it has helped its group flourish and reproduce, by discovering useful things, and thus its genes may get passed on indirectly. In which case again, evolution is not individual.

It would seem that humans are social and interactive beings, and this is not secondary, or to be dismissed out of hand.

This interactivity, leads to the apparent fact that societies and groups do not have firm boundaries, and that people can belong to intersecting and different groups. This is a probable difficulty, but it is a difficulty which has to be faced, rather than avoided. This issue is, as Mises implies before dismissing the problem, normal for humans. It is as obvious as it gets.

He also asserts that the meaning of a crowd “is always the meaning of individuals” (Human Action p 43). But it is not. A collection of interacting humans may not always have the effects each individual member has attributed to the gathering. Social action, or interaction, often has effects unintended by any of the participants. That is also observable and important to human life. Human action may be absolutely involved with attempts to reduce, or take advantage of, the ongoing production of unintended consequences.

Let us note that people who classify themselves as being similar, often co-operate to advance their individual and group interests, and that this has a potentially large economic effect, and is a normal part of human life.

In other words, despite Mises’ claims, we almost never have isolated individuals. We have functional human individuals who exist because of their previous interactions with, co-operations with, conflicts with, and learning from other people and the world. No one is normally a blank slate of desires and instincts, completely free to act through their own uninfluenced reflection. Indeed, it seems an immediately obvious proposition that humans are social, and learning creatures, and would not survive childhood on their own. There are other axioms which seem equally immediately obvious to me, and worthy of research.

As it is popular, we might instance the South African Zulu or Xhosa phrase “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”, usually abridged as ‘ubuntu’. This is also apparently ‘obvious’. It means something like ‘a person is a person through other people’, or ‘I am a person through other people’ or ‘I am who I am because of who we all are’. Archbishop Desmond Tutu glosses it as “none of us came into the world on our own.” Even if we were abandoned, we came into a social world. He also points out that being alone is a terrible burden for most humans, they ‘shrivel’, and that a lone child will not develop as well as they might.

For many southern African intellectuals, communion or harmony consists of identifying with and exhibiting solidarity towards others, in other words, enjoying a sense of togetherness, cooperating and helping people – out of sympathy and for their own sake.

Tutu sums up his understanding of how to exhibit ubuntu as:

I participate, I share.

Thaddeus Metz What Archbishop Tutu’s ubuntu credo teaches the world about justice and harmony. The Conversation 4 October 2017

We can accept the proposition that people emerge within a web of other people, as an a priori, and even as a realisation which may build virtue and contentment, but also (at the same time) recognise that humans often tend to be conflictual and selfish – we are both co-operative and competitive. In other words the morality could be up to us, but the recognition of interdependence is not up to us, it just is. Like the Buddhist idea that everything in existence exists because other beings exist, and individual being cannot be extracted from those other existence(s). Everything is interconnected, and everything affects everyone, and this is fundamental.

So let us be clear Mises is starting with the axiom that humans are isolated individuals, not necessarily because it is obvious, or a priori, but perhaps because it appears easy and it seems to be a convenient proposition from which to make the arguments he wants to make.

Given this methodological individualism involves an axiom, or procedure, which could seem a priori incorrect or incomplete, then we could expect that statements derived from it will also be incorrect or incomplete.

So this contribution to Praxeology just begins with questions to Austrians, or free market supporters – because I don’t know the answers. The questions are in the next blog post, to make this a bit shorter than usual.

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How to deal with Unintended consequences

January 15, 2020

A simple list of apparently common responses to the unintended consequences of action:

  1. Refusal to accept the unintended consequences as real or significant.
  2. Acceptance that other people’s policies can have unintended consequences but not yours, because your policies are true.
  3. Accepting the unintended consequences, but saying they are irrelevant to what you are doing.
  4. Accepting the unintended consequences, but insisting that they come about because you have not applied your policies stringently enough. Intensifying your efforts and refusing weakness.
  5. Arguing that because the world is complex we cannot be sure these events have anything to do with our actions. We must continue.
  6. Suggesting that the unintended consequences have unpleasant political consequences and are therefore unreal or part of a plot.
  7. Recognising the problems, but claiming the problems are features.
  8. Accepting the unintended consequences but arguing they only affect inferior people without virtue (and we are treating them well enough already).
  9. Accepting the unintended consequences, but blaming evil forces for them.
  10. Refusing to accept the unintended consequences while still blaming evil forces.
  11. Trying to eliminate those who you blame as evil forces, even if they cannot be proven to have anything to do with it, and even if you deny the consequences are real.
  12. Trying to eliminate, or silence, those who are telling you about the unintended consequences.

These common responses make the traps of certainty harder to escape.

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Myths of Climate 04: Prometheus

December 30, 2019

Continues from: Myths of Climate 03: Apocalypse and Millennium

Prometheus brings humans fire which is needed for culture and development, and is chained to a rock by Zeus, with an eagle devouring his liver every day, until he is eventually rescued by Heracles.

The myth of Prometheus encapsulates both the idea that technology can save us, and the counter-position that technology leads to retribution or destruction.

While the two parts of this myth are usually kept separate, it may be useful to bear both in mind simultaneously.

God Like Technology

The ‘technology is always positive’ side of the duality reassures us that technology can save us. Influenced by this myth we tend to be carried away into technological fantasy, into thinking that we have solutions to problems, when we don’t know if those solutions work or not. It often promotes non-existent ‘fantasy’ technology (like clean coal, carbon sequestration, or mirrors in space, portable nuclear power stations, fusion power) as saving us from having to abandon coal fired power stations. Or it may claim potentials for existing technologies that have so far been largely unsuccessful at containing ecological destruction (biofuels, thorium reactors, new hydro power, etc).

Within the myth, we expect technology to arrive to save us, just as part of the natural order of things. Some people even argue that something like this is part of economic fundamentals; if there is enough need, then investment will occur and the technology will be invented and appear. However, this is never guaranteed, and it encourages us to forget the unexpected effects of technology, and to ignore complexity and assume we know all the interconnections in a natural system, which we cannot.

In this mode, human technological endeavour is heroic, even godlike. No radical change is needed and we can retain the status quo; we can continue as normal with a technological add on. Some writers can even move away from climate change acceptance and any tinkering with the corporatised market, by arguing that ecological degradation has nothing to do with climate change or forms of economics, and that it can be fixed by easily deployed technologies.

In the ‘technology is good’ side of the equation we also tend to think that technology is determinate, and indicates degree of advancement and proficiency – this is something of a contradiction to the technology as add on idea, but it is used in different arguments about technological superiority and usually kept separate. We often mark out history by supposedly technological periods which follow in succession, a kind of “technological ladder”: Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic), Bronze Age, Iron Age, Agricultural Age, Age of Print, Age of Sail, Age of Steam, Industrial Age, Atomic Age, Space Age, Computer or Information Age and so on. Each ‘Age’ is supposedly better than the last, rather than just partly the same and partly different.

This allows us to dismiss any wisdom or knowledge possessed by ‘earlier’ ages, and also makes it hard to see the complexities of reality, such as ‘Stone Age’ Australian Aboriginal people appear to have had complex systems of ‘agriculture’ which are completely different in their ways of working to European systems (see Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe) (Some references to the controversy over this).

Harmful Technology

The counterposition makes science the cause of all our problems. Not only does it suggest Prometheus’ punishment is more primary than his success, but it suggests the Tower of Babel with God striking down human technological presumption, or that our technology will escape and take over the world, destroying us, as we can see in many science fiction scenarios. It implies that technological presumption leads to disaster, perhaps even to the end of the world.

The dark side myth can be used to imply technologist and scientists are evil, as with the “climate change ideas only exist because of a world wide socialist conspiracy” trope. All experts can be ignored, if they don’t agree with positions we already hold.

This view can also be used to imply that people ‘down’ the ‘technological ladder’ had generally much greater wisdom and lives than we do today, which may not always be the case.

At best this side of the myth implies that technology alienates us from something essentially human, even though humans always seem to have used technology of some sort. We often hear people arguing that the internet destroys our capacity to think, or to have an inner life, when (if we were loosing our capacity to think etc) there might be many other reasons – like being fed false information for political purposes, or being so busy and nervous at work that we have no time for reflection.

One writer rebuffs the idea of using windmills to generate electricity as they are a medieval technology and make an infernal noise – reference to the sound of hell is not accidental, even if unconscious, and that implies the possibility of punishment from God. Yet I suspect the writer does not object to other noisier technologies like aircraft. But this does not seem clear to him. To be real, and of the future, technology has to look a certain way, a demand shaped by myth, or at least by films of a great future (do we have those any more?). Likewise President Trump seems somehow aware that building windmills can involve pollution, even if he seems unaware of the pollution from coal mining and burning, or he chooses not to emphasise this. Likewise with bird killing.

In this part of the myth new technology becomes seen as corrupting and inherently destructive of the social, or natural, order, and indeed it may well change those orders.

When technology becomes part of the social order, it does so as a complex system within other complex systems, and unintended consequences are routine. At a simple level it can open opportunities for some groups to consolidate or increase their social power and influence. Although this is usually only considered disruptive if people from lower groups get raised. If people from dominating groups increase their power, this may not be portrayed as a problem.

The Conflict/Paradox

What one side hears as the solution sounds to the other like a charter for further destruction. Technology is simultaneously, saviour and destroyer, potentially part of the solution but currently part of the problem. Which position we choose to argue from determines where we end up, and the alarms (intended or otherwise) we raise in other people.

However, both positions have equal possibility of being true. In this case, it is possible that putting the two halves of the myth together may help us deal with problems of transformation/transition.

Some technological breakthroughs could save us, or at least help us. And we may not have to wait for them, we already have renewable sources of energy. However, it is also true that renewables may not be able to save us, if we wish to keep using more energy, or bring everyone in the world to the energy use of the average Australian or US American. A change in lifestyle and life plans may also be required. Some people may loose wealth so as to stabilize the system, some people may gain wealth to stabilized the system. This could be disruptive and it would be easy to make people fear this change, because who knows where it will end up? We also appear to have the capacities to lower pollution and waste production, but it is difficult because it is not profitable, and profit is what counts in our economic and political system. In this case the technology is being disrupted by the maintenance of other systems.

It is also true that new technologies can be disruptive or harmful, and they may well need to be vetted, but this is not easy.

Ultimately a significant part of the problem with technology comes down, not just to the myth, but to our inability to think in terms of complex systems, and, of unintended consequences as being normal.

We have tended to deal with unintended consequences, just by arguing about them afterwards, or generally ignoring them, as with fossil fuels, with the possible exception of the London smogs. These were solved by government action, information work, and regulation. They could have continued to be ignored, there is no reason why the death of ordinary people should impinge on the souls of those seeking profit alone. Probably enough of them lived in London to accept the reforms, or feared the rise of the poisoned working and middle classes and gave in.

As the consequences of technology are often unintended and unexpected we cannot easily predict them, but part of the problem is that we do not try – we often do not seem to consider this at all.

Exploring the dynamics of unintended and unexpected consequences should be a major research project. All policy, corporate or governmental, should consider the likelihood of unintended consequences, and determine how these consequences will be looked for, and taken into account.

Technology does not escape myth.

See also: Problems of Transition 02: Technology as Fantasy

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