Comment: Managing technological risks

27-July-2007: Recent comments by former United nations secretary General Kofi Annan over the role of genetically modified sed in african agriculture have reopened debate over the risks posed by new technologies.

And this is the point I want to make.

Technological risks to society and the environment have become an integral part of global public policy. Managing these risks and responding to public perceptions of them are necessary if engineering are to be effectively deployed to meet development needs.

New technologies have been credited with creating new industrial opportunities but also with destroying the status quo. In fact, maintaining the status quo comes with its risks as well. In some cases the risks of doing nothing may outweigh the challenges associated with investing in new responses to social challenges.

In the past, technological risks were confined to countries in which new technologies emerged or even to the sectors in which they were applied. Concerns two decades ago over the use of microprocessors in industry were restricted to their possible impact on employment displacement in the manufacturing sector.

Workers and labor organizations around the world protested the use of this emerging technology. Today echoes of these debates are still heard in discussions of the “deskilling” of workers.

Although interest in the impact of microelectronics on employment was expressed in many parts of the world, it did not become a mass movement involving a wide range of social groups, for at least two reasons.

First, the possibility of job displacement was weighed against the benefits of raising industrial productivity. Second, the global economy was not as integrated as it is today, and many debates were localized. Globalization gives technological risk a wider meaning and turns local debates over certain products into mass movements.

This is itself a source of new risks.

Risk perceptions vary considerably across technologies, and this defines the scale of social mobilization. Attempts in the 1980s to promote the adoption of renewable energy technologies were bedeviled with social opposition.

Sporadic opposition was recorded in many parts of the world, but it did not translate into mass movements. Risk perceptions of pharmaceutical products are not a major challenge to the use of new medicines, partly because of the limited range of options available to consumers in life-threatening situations.

Fear of genetic engineering, for example, stems from scientific, technical, economic, cultural, and ethical concerns. Opposition is differentiated along product lines (transgenic crops, fish, trees, cattle). Many people oppose genetic engineering because of corporate control of the industry, which they perceive as a social risk.

A focus on technological risks can overshadow the possible benefits of an emerging technology, which are often difficult to predict. At the time of their invention, computers were envisioned as able to perform nothing more than rapid calculation in scientific research and data processing. The rise of the Internet as a global phenomenon could not have been predicted based on the early uses of information technology.

Technological risks have to be weighed against the risks of existing technologies as well as the risks of not having access to new technologies. The risks of not having access to the Internet may outweigh the risks of employment displacement that shaped many of the attitudes toward information technology in its earlier years.

The concerns over employment displacement were genuine, but the risks were often projected to whole industries or sectors. The debate is dominated by concerns over job displacement rather than the potential contributions of the new technologies to economic productivity.

There are also numerous cases in which society has underestimated the risks posed by new technologies or adopted them without adequate knowledge about their dangers. Managing technological uncertainty will require greater investment in innovative activities at the scientific and institutional levels.

At the technical level, technological diversity is essential to ensuring that society is able to respond to emerging challenges with the knowledge at its disposal. Technological diversity demands greater investment in scientific enterprises as well as the creation of measures to facilitate access to available technical options.

It also requires flexibility in institutional arrangements, to enable society to respond swiftly to technological failure. Such flexibility can be built into the design of technological systems themselves. Diversification of energy sources, for example, is an institutional response to the risks posed by dependence on centralized fossil fuel power plants. Similar diversification principles apply to information storage, especially as the world community moves into the information age.

Trends in industry suggest that a combination of incentives and regulations can shift technological change to meet environmental goals. Already enterprises are responding to the growing environmental consciousness among consumers and starting to adopt new environmental standards in fields such as emissions and energy use.

Efforts to focus on risk in the absence of actual technology will remain hollow exhortations and a distraction from genuine development efforts. Using emerging technologies without considering their risks is likely to elicit social pressures that can undermine technological development. The challenge is to maximize the benefits of new technologies while reducing their risks.

Calestous Juma teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government where he directs the Science, Technology and Globalization Project.