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