Unintended consequences Edward Tenner

I didn’t always love unintended

consequences but I really learned to

appreciate them I’ve learned that

they’re really the essence of what makes

for progress even when they seem to be

terrible and I’d like to review just how

unintended consequences play the part

that they do let’s go to 40,000 years

before the present to the time of the

cultural explosion when music art

technology so many of the things that

we’re enjoying today so many of the

things that are being demonstrated at

Ted were born and the anthropologist

Randall White has made a very

interesting observation that if our

ancestors forty thousand years ago had

been able to see what they had done they

wouldn’t have really understood it they

were responding to immediate concerns

they were making it possible for us to

do what they do and yet they didn’t

really understand how they did it

now let’s advance to 10,000 years before

the present and this is when it really

gets interesting what about the

domestication of grains what about the

origins of Agriculture

what would our ancestors 10,000 years

ago have said if they really had

technology assessment and I can just

imagine the committee’s reporting back

to them on where agriculture was going

to take humanity at least in the next

few hundred years it was really bad news

first of all worse nutrition maybe

shorter lifespans it was simply awful

for women the skeletal remains from that

period have shown that they were

grinding grain morning noon and night

and politically it was awful it was the

beginning of a much higher degree of

inequality among people if there had

been rational

technology assessment then I think they

very well might have said let’s call the

whole thing off even now our choices are

having unintended effects historically

for example chopsticks according to one

Japanese anthropologist who wrote a

dissertation about it at the University

of Michigan resulted in long-term

changes in the dentition in the teeth of

the Japanese public and we are also

changing our teeth right now there there

is evidence that the human mouth and

teeth are growing smaller all the time

that’s not necessarily a bad unintended

consequences but I think from the point

of view of a Neanderthal there would

have been a lot of disapproval of the

wimpish choppers that we now have so

these things are kind of relative to

where you’re you or your your ancestors

happen to stand in the ancient world

there was a lot of respect for

unintended consequences there was a very

healthy sense of caution reflected in

the tree of knowledge in Pandora’s Box

and especially in the myth of Prometheus

that’s been so important in recent

metaphors about technology and that’s

all very true the physicians of the

ancient world especially the Egyptians

who started medicine as we know it were

very conscious of what they could and

couldn’t treat and the translations of

the surviving text say this I will not

treat this I cannot treat they were very

conscious so were the followers of

Hippocrates the Hippocratic manuscripts

also repeatedly according to recent

studies so how important it is not to do

harm

more recently Harvey Cushing who really

developed neurosurgery as we know it who

changed it from a field of medicine that

had a majority of deaths resulting from

surgery to one in which there was a

hopeful outlook he was very conscious

that he was not always going to do the

right thing but he did his best and he

kept meticulous records that let him

transform

that branch of medicine now if we look

forward a bit

to the 19th century we find a new style

of technology what we find is no longer

simple tools but systems we find more

and more complex arrangements of

machines that make it harder and harder

to diagnose what’s going on and the

first people who saw that were the

telegraphers of the mid 19th century who

were the original hackers Thomas Edison

would have been very very comfortable in

the atmosphere of a software firm today

and these hackers have a word for those

mysterious bugs and telegraph systems

that they called bugs that was the

origin of the word bug this

consciousness though was a little slow

to seep through the general population

even people who were very very

well-informed Samuel Clemens Mark Twain

was a big investor in the most complex

machine of all times at least until 1918

registered with the US Patent Office

that was the page typesetter the page

type setter had 18,000 parts the patent

had 64 pages of text and 271 figures it

was such a beautiful machine because it

did everything that a human being did

and setting type including returning the

type to its place which was a very

difficult thing and Mark Twain who knew

all about typesetting really was was

smitten by this machine unfortunately he

was smitten in more ways than one

because it made him bankrupt and he had

to tour the world speaking to to recoup

his money and this was an important

thing about 19th century technology that

all these relationships among parts

could make the most brilliant idea fall

apart even when judged by the most

expert people now there was something

else though in the early 20th century

that made things even more complicated

and that was that safety technology

itself could be a source of danger the

lesson of the Titanic for

the contemporaries was that you must

have enough lifeboats for everyone on

the ship and this was the result of the

tragic loss of lives of people who could

not get into them however there was

another pace the Eastland a ship that

capsized in Chicago Harbor in 1915 and

it killed 841 people that was 14 more

than the passenger toll of the Titanic

the reason for it in part was the extra

lifeboats that were added that made this

already unstable ship even more unstable

and that again proves that when you’re

talking about unintended consequences

it’s not that easy to know the right

lessons to draw it’s it’s really a

question of the system how the ship was

loaded the ballast and many other things

so the 20th century then saw how much

more complex reality was but it also saw

a positive side it saw that invention

could actually benefit from emergencies

it could it could benefit from tragedies

and my favorite example of that which is

not really widely known as a

technological miracle but it may be one

of the greatest of all times was the

scaling up of penicillin in the Second

World War penicillin was discovered in

1928 but even by 1940 no commercially

and medically useful quantities of it

were being produced a number of

pharmaceutical companies were working on

it

they were working on it independently

and they weren’t getting anywhere and

the government Research Bureau brought

representatives together and told them

that this is something that has to be

done and not only did they do it but

within two years they scaled up

penicillin from preparation in 1-litre

flasks to ten thousand gallon vats that

was how quickly penicillin was produced

and became one of the greatest medical

advance

of all time in the Second World War to

the existence of solar radiation was

demonstrated by studies of interference

that was detected by the radar stations

of Great Britain so there were benefits

in calamities benefits to pure science

as well as to applied science and

medicine now when we come to the period

after the Second World War

unintended consequences get even more

interesting and my favorite example of

that occurred beginning in 1976 when it

was discovered that the bacteria causing

Legionnaires disease had always been

present in natural waters but it was the

precise temperature of the water in

heating ventilating and air-conditioning

systems that raised the right

temperature for the maximum reproduction

of Legionella bacillus well technology

to the rescue and so a chemist got to

work and they developed a bactericide

that became widely used in those systems

but something else happened in the early

1980s and that was that there was a

mysterious epidemic of failures of tape

drives all over the United States and

IBM which made them just didn’t know

what to do they commissioned a group of

their best scientists to investigate and

what they found was that all these tape

drives were located near ventilation

ducts what happened was the bactericide

was formulated with many traces of 10

and these tin particles were deposited

on the tape heads and were crashing the

tape heads so they reformulated the

bactericide but what’s interesting to me

is that this was the first case of a

mechanical device suffering at least

indirectly from a human disease so it

shows that we’re really all in this

together

in fact it also shows something

interesting that although our

capabilities and technology have been

expanding geometrically unfortunately

our ability to model their long term

behavior which has also been increasing

has been increasing only arithmetic aliy

so one of the characteristic problems of

our time is how to close this gap

between capabilities and foresight one

other very positive consequence of 20th

century technology though was the way in

which other kinds of calamities could

lead to positive advances there are two

historians of business at the University

of Maryland

Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch who have

done some extremely interesting work

much of it still unpublished on the

history of major innovations they have

combined the list of major innovations

and they’ve discovered that the greatest

number the greatest decade for

fundamental innovations as reflected in

all of the lists that others have made a

number of lists that they emerged was

the Great Depression and nobody knows

just why this was so but one story can

reflect something of it it was the

origin of the Xerox copier which

celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last

year and Chester Carlson the inventor

was a patent attorney he really was not

intending to to work in in patent

research but he couldn’t really find an

alternative technical job so this was

the best job he could get he was upset

by the low quality and high cost of

existing patent reproductions and so he

started to develop a system of dry

photocopying which he patented in the

late 1930s and which became the first

dry photocopier that was commercially

practical in 1960 so we see that

sometimes as a result of these

dislocations as a result of people

leaving

their original intended career and going

into something else where their

creativity could make a difference that

depressions and all kinds of other

unfortunate events can have a

paradoxically stimulating effect on

creativity what does this mean it means

I think that we’re living in a time of

unexpected possibilities

think of the financial world for example

the mentor of Warren Buffett Benjamin

Graham developed his system of value

investing as a result of his own losses

in the 1929 crash and he published that

book in the early 1930s and the book

still exists in further editions and is

still a fundamental text book so many

important creative things can happen

when people learn from disasters now

think of the large and small plagues

that we have now bedbugs

killer bees spam and it’s very possible

that the solutions to those will really

extend well beyond the immediate

question if we think for example of

Louis Pasteur who in the 1860s was asked

to study the diseases of silkworms for

the silk industry and his discoveries

were really the beginning of the germ

theory of disease so very often some

kind of disaster sometimes the

consequence for example of over

cultivation of silkworms which was a

problem in Europe at the time can be the

key to something much bigger so this

means that we need to take a different

view of unintended consequences we need

to take a really positive view we need

to see what they can do for us we need

to learn from those figures that I’ve

mentioned we need to learn for example

from dr. Cushing who killed patients in

the course of his early operations he

had to have some errors he had to have

some mistakes and he learned

meticulously from his mistakes and as a

result when we say this isn’t brain

surgery that pays tribute

how difficult it was for anyone to learn

from their mistakes in a field of

medicine that was considered so

discouraging in its prospects and we can

also remember how the pharmaceutical

companies were willing to pool their

knowledge to share their knowledge in

the face of an emergency

which they hadn’t really been for years

and years they might have been able to

do it earlier the message then for me

about unintended consequences is chaos

happens

let’s make better use of it thank you

very much