Social Control of Technology

Collingridge Dilemma

• From the Preface to the book

This book considers one of the most pressing problems of our time - 'can we control our technology — can we get it to do what we want and can we avoid its unwelcome consequences?' The root of the manifest difficulties with which the control of technology are beset is that our technical competence vastly exceeds our understanding of the social effects which follow from its exercise. For this reason, the social consequences of a technology cannot be predicted early in the life of the technology. By the time undesirable consequences are discovered, however, the technology is often so much part of the whole economic and social fabric that its control is extremely difficult. This is the dilemma of control. When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult and time consuming.

The customary response to this is to search for better ways of forecasting the social impact of technologies, but efforts in this direction are wasted. It is just impossible to foresee complex interactions between a technology and society over the time span required with sufficient certainty to justify controlling the technology now, when control may be very costly and disruptive. This work proposes a new way of dealing with the dilemma of control. If a technology can be known to have unwanted social effects only when these effects are actually felt, what is needed is some way of retaining the ability to exercise control over a technology even though it may be well developed and extensively used. What we need to understand, on this view, is the origin of the notorious resistance to control which technologies achieve as they become mature. If this can be understood and countered in various ways, then the quality of our decision making about technology would be greatly improved, as the degree of control we are able to exert over it is enhanced. If a technology is found to have some unwanted social consequence, then this would not not have to be suffered for the technology could be changed easily and quickly