1. What is progress?
2. What are the most significant barriers holding back further progress?
3. If those challenges can be overcome, what does the world look like in 50 years?

I was honored to be asked by Clay Routledge to contribute answers to those questions alongside others, including: Steven Pinker (Harvard University), Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress), Matt Clancy (Institute for Progress), Marian Tupy (Human​Progress​.org), James Pethokoukis (AEI). I encourage you to jump over the roundtable and read all their excellent responses. I’ve included my answers down below:

What is progress?

Progress is the advancement of human health, happiness, and general well-being. Measures of well-being can be challenging, however, so we should consider a broad range of metrics, including: life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty measures, energy production/consumption, GDP, productivity, agricultural yields/nourishment, and access to various important goods, services, and conveniences. While each of these metrics may have limitations, taken together, they stand for something meaningful that represents a rough proxy for progress.

But we should always remember what progress means at a deeper level for every individual. Innovation and economic growth are important because they allow us to live lives of our own choosing and enjoy the fruits of a prosperous, pluralistic society.  Progress “is not just bigger piles of money,” as Hans Rosling once noted. “The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.”  Accordingly, we should aim to broaden the range of opportunities available to all people to help them flourish.

What are the most significant barriers holding back further progress?

The most significant threat to continued progress is the risk of stagnation accompanying efforts to protect the status quo. As Virginia Postrel taught us in her wonderful book The Future & Its Enemies, we should reject stasis-minded thinking and instead shoot for a world of dynamism, which cherishes and protects the freedom to think and act differently.

Progress hinges upon the growth of knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience, and the most important experiences involve trial-and-error learning. Public attitudes and policies that restrict people and ideas from intermingling freely are a recipe for intellectual, social, and economic stagnation. Accordingly, when we consider public policies toward progress, we should first seek to identify and remove legal and regulatory impediments that limit risk-taking, entrepreneurialism, and technological innovation. As science writer Matt Ridley provocatively puts it, to unlock more growth and prosperity, we must first remove obstacles to “ideas having sex.”

The free movement of people and capital is essential to this process. Openness to immigration is the easiest way for a nation to expand its potential for innovation and growth. But domestic labor skills and mobility are equally important. For entrepreneurs and workers, we need to reframe the battle for progress as “the freedom to innovate” and “the right to earn a living.”

Unfortunately, many barriers exist to advancing those goals, like occupational licensing rules and permitting processes, cronyist industrial protectionist schemes, inefficient tax schemes, and many other layers of regulatory red tape. Reforming or eliminating such rules is crucial for broadening opportunities.

Finally, we need to address cultural barriers to progress. Technology and entrepreneurs often get a bad rap in the media and popular culture. Fear and pessimism dominate their narratives. We must do a better job communicating the benefits of openness to change and give people more reasons to be optimistic about a dynamic future.

If those challenges can be overcome, what does the world look like in 50 years?

I agree with Yogi Berra that “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Nonetheless, history shows we can achieve remarkable things when we get the prerequisites for progress right and let people tap into their inherent inquisitiveness and inventiveness. Moving the needle on innovation and growth even just a little will yield compounding returns to future generations. But we should dare to dream bigger and think what progress means for each person today and in the future.

A pro-progress agenda will help us lead longer lives and significantly expand our capabilities because that is what people have always desired most. Accordingly, I believe the most significant advance of the next 50 years will be a radical increase in life expectancy and dramatic improvements in our physical and mental capabilities while we are alive.

Today’s tech critics often claim that technological innovation somehow undermines our humanity. They couldn’t be more wrong. There are few things more human than acts of invention. When we take steps to address practical human needs and wants, we enrich our lives and the lives of countless others. The future will be wonderful, so long as we are free to make it so.

Chances are you’ve never heard of him, however. As prolific as he was, Florman did not command as much attention as the endless parade of tech critics whose apocalyptic predictions grabbed all the headlines. An engineer by training, Florman became concerned about the growing criticism of his profession throughout the 1960s and 70s. He pushed back against that impulse in a series of books over the next two decades, including most notably: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976), Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (1981), and The Civilized Engineer (1987). He was also a prolific essayist, penning hundreds of articles for a wide variety of journals, magazines, and newspapers beginning in 1959. He was also a regular columnist for MIT Technology Review for sixteen years.

Florman’s primary mission in his books and many of those essays was to defend the engineering profession against attacks emanating from various corners. More broadly, as he noted in a short autobiography on his personal website, Florman was interested in discussing, “the relationship of technology to the general culture.”

Florman could be considered a “rational optimist,” to borrow Matt Ridley’s notable term [1] for those of us who believe, as I have summarized elsewhere, that there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism, and human betterment.[2] Rational optimists are highly pragmatic and base their optimism on facts and historical analysis, not on dogmatism or blind faith in any particular viewpoint, ideology, or gut feeling. But they are unified in the belief that technological change is a crucial component of moving the needle on progress and prosperity.

Florman’s unique contribution to advancing rational optimism came in the way he itemized the various claims made by tech critics and then powerfully debunked each one of them. He was providing other rational optimists with a blueprint for how defend technological innovation against its many critics and criticisms. As he argued in The Civilized Engineer, we need to “broaden our conception of engineering to include all technological creativity.”^[3] And then we need to defend it with vigor.

In 1982, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers appropriately awarded Florman the distinguished Ralph Coats Roe Medal for his “outstanding contribution toward a better public understanding and appreciation of the engineer’s worth to contemporary society.” Carl Sagan had won the award the previous year. Alas, Forman never attained the same degree of notoriety as Sagan. That is a shame because Florman was as much a philosopher and a historian as he was an engineer, and his robust thinking on technology and society deserves far greater attention. More generally, his plain-spoken style and straight-forward defense of technological progress continues to be a model for how to counter today’s techno-pessimists.

This essay highlights some of the most important themes and arguments found in Florman’s writing and explains its continuing relevance to the ongoing battles over technology and progress.

What Motivates The “Antitechnologists”?

Florman was interested in answering questions about what motivates both engineers as well as their critics. He dug deep into psychology and history to figure out what makes these people tick. Who are engineers, and why do they do what they do? That was his primary question, and we will turn to his answers momentarily. But he also wanted to know what drove the technology critics to oppose innovation so vociferously.

Florman’s most important contribution to the history of ideas lies in his 6-part explanation of “the main themes that run through the works of the antitechnologists.”^[4] Florman used the term “antitechnologists” to describe the many different critics of engineering and innovation. He recognized that the term wasn’t perfect and that some people he labelled as such would object to it. Nevertheless, because they offer no umbrella label for their movement or way of thinking, Florman noted that opposition to, or general discomfort with, technology was what motivated these critics. Hence, the label “antitechnologists.”

Florman surveyed a wide swath of technological critics from many different disciplines—philosophy, sociology, law, and other fields. He condensed their main criticisms into six general points:

• Technology is a “thing” or a force that has escaped from human control and is spoiling our lives.
• Technology forces man to do work that is tedious and degrading.
• Technology forces man to consume things that he does not really desire.
• Technology creates an elite class of technocrats, and so disenfranchises the masses.
• Technology cripples man by cutting him off from the natural world in which he evolved.
• Technology provides man with technical diversions which destroy his existential sense of his own being.^[5]

No one else before this had ever crafted such a taxonomy of complaints from tech critics, and no one has done it better since Florman did so in 1976. In fact, it is astonishing how well Florman’s list continues to identify what motivates modern technology critics. New technologies have come and gone, but these same concerns tend to be brought up again and again. Florman’s books addressed and debunked each of these concerns in powerful fashion.

The Relentless Pessimism & Elitism of the Antitechnologists

Florman identified the way a persistent pessimism unifies antitechnologists. “Our intellectual journals are full of gloomy tracts that depict a society debased by technology,” he noted.^[6] What motivated such gloom and doom? “It is fear. They are terrified by the scene unfolding before their eyes.”^[7] He elaborated:

“The antitechnologists are frightened; they counsel halt and retreat. They tell the people that Satan (technology) is leading them astray, but the people have heard that story before. They will not stand still for vague promises of a psychic contentment that is to follow in the wake of voluntary temperance.”^[8]

The antitechnologist’s worldview isn’t just relentlessly pessimistic but also highly elitist and paternalistic, Florman argued. He referred to it as “Platonic snobbery.”^[9] The economist and political scientist Thomas Sowell would later call that snobbish attitude, “the vision of the anointed.”[10] Like Sowell, Florman was angered at the way critics stared down their noses at average folk and disregarded their values and choices:

“The antitechnologists have every right to be gloomy, and have a bounden duty to express their doubts about the direction our lives are taking. But their persistent disregard of the average person’s sentiments is a crucial weakness in their argument—particularly when they then ask us to consider the ‘real’ satisfactions that they claim ordinary people experienced in other cultures of other times.”^[11]

Florman noted that critics commonly complain about “too many people wanting too many things,” but he noted that, “[t]his is not caused by technology; it is a consequence of the type of creature that man is.”^[12] One can moralize all they want about supposed over-consumption or “conspicuous consumption,” but in the end, most of us strive to better our lives in various ways—including by working to attain things that may be out of our reach or even superfluous in the eyes of others.

For many antitechnologists and other social critics, only the noble search for truth and wisdom will suffice. Basically, everybody should just get back to studying philosophy, sociology, and other soft sciences. Modern tech critics, Forman said, fashion themselves as the intellectual descendants of Greek philosophers who believed that, “[t]he ideal of the new Athenian citizen was to care for his body in the gymnasium, reason his way to Truth in the academy, gossip in the agora, and debate in the senate. Technology was not deemed worthy of a free man’s time.”^[13]

“It is not surprising to find philosophers recommending the study of philosophy as a way of life,” Florman noted amusingly.^[14] But that does not mean all of us want (or even need) to devote our lives to such things. Nonetheless, critics often sneer at the choices made by the rest of us—especially when they involve the fruits of science and technology. “The most effective weapon in the arsenal of the antitechnologists is self-righteousness,” he noted,^[15] and, “[a]s seen by the antitechnologists, engineers and scientists are half-men whose analysis and manipulation of the world deprives them of the emotional experiences that are the essence of the good life.”^[16]

Indeed, it is not uncommon (both in the past and today) to see tech critics self-anoint themselves “humanists” and then suggest that anyone who thinks differently from them (namely, those who are pro-innovation) are the equivalent of anti-humanistic. I wrote about this in my 2018 essay, “Is It ‘Techno-Chauvinist’ & ‘Anti-Humanist’ to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology?” I argued that, “[p]roperly understood, ‘technology’ and technological innovation are simply extensions of our humanity and represent efforts to continuously improve the human condition. In that sense, humanism and technology are compliments, not opposites.”

But the critics remain fundamentally hostile to that notion and they often suggest that there is something suspicious about those who believe, along with Florman, that there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism, and human betterment. We rational optimists, the critics suggest, are simply too focused on crass, materialistic measures of happiness and human flourishing.

Florman observed this when noting how much grief he and fellow engineers and scientists got when engaging with critics. “Anyone who has attempted to defend technology against the reproaches of an avowed humanist soon discovers that beneath all the layers of reasoning—political, environmental, aesthetic, or moral—lies a deep-seated disdain for ‘the scientific view.’”^[17]

Everywhere you look in the world of Science & Technology Studies (STS) today, you find this attitude at work. In fact, the field is perhaps better labelled Anti-Science & Technology Studies, or at least Science & Technology Skeptical Studies. For most STSers, the burden of proof lies squarely on scientists, engineers, and innovators who must prove to some (often undefined) higher authorities that their ideas and inventions will bring worth to society (however the critics measure worth and value, which is often very unclear). Until then, just go slow, the critics say. Better yet, consult your local philosophy department for a proper course of action!

The critics will retort that they are just looking out for society’s best interests and trying to counter that selfish, materialist side of humanity. Florman countered by noting how, “most people are in search of the good life—not ‘the goods life’ as [Lewis] Mumford puts it, although some goods are entailed—and most human desires are for good things in moderate amounts.”^[18] Trying to better our lives through the creation and acquisition of new and better goods and services is just a natural and quite healthy human instinct to help us attain some ever-changing definition of whatever each of us considers “the good life.” “Something other than technology is responsible for people wanting to live in a house on a grassy plot beyond walking distance to job, market, neighbor, and school,” Florman responded.^[19] We all want to “get ahead” and improve our lot in life. That’s not because technology forces the urge upon us. Rather, that urge comes quite naturally as part of a desire to improve our lot in life.

The Power of Nostalgia

I have spent a fair amount of time in my own writing documenting the central role that nostalgia plays in motivating technological criticism.[20] Florman’s books repeatedly highlighted this reality. “The antitechnologists romanticize the work of earlier times in an attempt to make it seem more appealing than work in a technological age,” he noted. “But their idyllic descriptions of peasant life do not ring true.”^[21]

The funny thing is, it is hard to pin down the critics regarding exactly when the “golden era” or “good ‘ol days” were. But if there is one thing that they all agree on, it’s that those days have long passed us by. In a 2019 essay on “Four Flavors of Doom: A Taxonomy of Contemporary Pessimism,” philosopher Maarten Boudry noted:

“In the good old days, everything was better. Where once the world was whole and beautiful, now everything has gone to ruin. Different nostalgic thinkers locate their favorite Golden Age in different historical periods. Some yearn for a past that they were lucky enough to experience in their youth, while others locate utopia at a point farther back in time…”

Not all nostalgia is bad. Clay Routledge has written eloquently about how “nostalgia serves important psychological functions,” and can sometimes possess a positive character that strengthens individuals and society. But the nostalgia found in the works of tech critics is usually a different thing altogether. It is rooted in misery about the present and dread of the future—all because technology has apparently stolen away or destroyed all that was supposedly great about the past. Florman noted how, “the current pessimism about technology is a renewed manifestation of pastoralism,” that is typically rooted in historical revisionism about bygone eras.^[22] Many critics engage in what rhetoricians call “appeals to nature” and wax poetic about the joys of life for Pre-Technological Man, who apparently enjoyed an idyllic life free of the annoying intrusions created by modern contrivances.

Such “good ol days” romanticism is largely untethered from reality. “For most of recorded history humanity lived on the brink of starvation,” Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip noted in a column in early 2019. Even a cursory review of history offers voluminous, unambiguous proof that the old days were, in reality, eras of abject misery. Widespread poverty, mass hunger, poor hygiene, disease, short lifespans, and so on were the norm. What lifted humanity up and improved our lot as a species is that we learned how to apply knowledge to tasks in a better way through incessant trial-and-error experimentation. Recent books by Hans Rosling,^[23] Steven Pinker,^[24] and many others^[25] have thoroughly documented these improvements to human well-being over time.

The critics are unmoved by such evidence, preferring to just jump around in time and cherry-pick moments when they feel life was better than it is now. “Fond as they are of tribal and peasant life, the antitechnologists become positively euphoric over the Middle Ages,” Florman quipped.^[26] Why? Mostly because the Middle Ages lacked the technological advances of modern times, which the critics loathe. But facts are pesky things, and as Florman insisted, “it is fair to go on to ask whether or not life was ‘better’ in these earlier cultures than it is in our own.”^[27] “We all are moved to reverie by talk of an arcadian golden age,” he noted. “But when we awaken from this reverie, we realize that the antitechnologists have diverted us with half-truths and distortions.”^[28]

The critics’ reverence for the old days would be humorous if it wasn’t rooted in an arrogant and dangerous belief that society can be somehow reshaped to resemble whatever preferred past the critics desire. “Recognizing that we cannot return to earlier times, the antitechnologists nevertheless would have us attempt to recapture the satisfactions of these vanished cultures,” Florman noted. “In order to do this, what is required is nothing less than a change in the nature of man.”^[29] That is, the critics will insist that, “something must be done” (namely be forced from above via some grand design) to remake humans and discourage their inner homo faber desire to be an incessant tool-builder. But this is madness, Florman argued in one of the best passages from his work:

“we are beginning to realize that for mankind there will never be a time to rest at the top of the mountain. There will be no new arcadian age. There will always be new burdens, new problems, new failures, new beginnings. And the glory of man is to respond to his harsh fate with zest and ever-renewed effort.”^[30]

If the critics had their way, however, that zest would be dampened and those efforts restrained in the name of recapturing some mythical lost age. This sort of “rosy retrospection bias” is all the more shocking coming, as it does, from learned people who should know a lot more about the actual history of our species and the long struggle to escape utter despair and destitution. Alas, as the great Scottish philosopher David Hume observed in a 1777 essay, “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endued with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning.”^[31]

Why Invent? Homo Faber is our Nature

While taking on the critics and debunking their misplaced nostalgia about the past, Florman mounted a defense of engineers and innovators by noting that the need to tinker and create is in our blood. He began by noting how “the nature of engineering has been misconceived”^[32] because, in a sense, we are all engineers and innovators to some degree.

Florman’s thinking was very much in line with Benjamin Franklin, who once noted, “man is a tool-making animal.” “Both genetically and culturally the engineering instinct has been nurtured within us,” Florman argued, and this instinct “was as old as the human race.”^[33] “To be human is to be technological. When we are being technological we are being human—we are expressing the age-old desire of the tribe to survive and prosper.”^[34] In fact, he claimed, it was no exaggeration to say that humans, “are driven to technological creativity because of instincts hardly less basic than hunger and sex.”^[35] Had our past situation been as rosy as the critics sometimes suggest, perhaps we would have never bothered to fashion tools to escape those eras! It was precisely because humans wanted to improve their lives and the lives of their loved ones that we started crafting more and better tools. Flint and firewood were never going to suffice.

But our engineering instincts do not end with basic needs. “Engineering responds to impulses that go beyond mere survival: a craving for variety and new possibilities, a feeling for proportion—for beauty—that we share with the artist,” Florman argued.^[36] In essence, engineering and innovation respond to both basic human needs and higher ones at every stage of “Maslow’s pyramid,” which describes a five-level hierarchy of human needs. This same theme is developed in Arthur Diamond’s recent book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. As Diamond argues, one of the most unheralded features of technological innovation is that, “by providing goods that are especially useful in pursuing a life plan full of challenging, worthwhile creative projects,” it allows each of us the pursue different conceptions of what we consider a good life.[37] But we are only able to do so by first satisfying our basic physiological needs, which innovation also handles for us.

Florman was frustrated that critics failed to understand this point and equally concerned that engineers and innovators had been cast as uncaring gadget-worshipers who did not see beauty and truth in higher arts and other more worldly goals and human values. That’s hogwash, he argued:

“What an ironic turn of events! For if ever there was a group dedicated to—obsessed with—morality, conscience, and social responsibility, it has been the engineering profession. Practically every description of the practice of engineering has stressed the concept of service to humanity.^[38] [. . .] Even in an age of global affluence, the main existential pleasure of the engineer will always be to contribute to the well-being of his fellow man.”^[39]

Engineers and innovators do not always set out with some grandiose design to change the world, although some aspire to do so. Rather, the “existential pleasures of engineering” that Florman described in the title of his most notable book comes about by solving practical day-to-day problems:

“The engineer does not find existential pleasure by seeking it frontally. It comes to him gratuitously, seeping into him unawares. He does not arise in the morning and say, ‘Today I shall find happiness.’ Quite the contrary. He arises and says, ‘Today I will do the work that needs to be done, the work for which I have been trained, the work which I want to do because in doing it I feel challenged and alive.’ Then happiness arrives mysteriously as a byproduct of his effort.”^[40]

And this pleasure of getting practical work done is something that engineers and innovators enjoy collectively by coming together and using specialized skills in new and unique combinations. “[T]echnological progress depends upon a variety of skills and knowledge that are far beyond the capacity of any one individual,” he insisted. “High civilization requires a high degree of specialization, and it was toward high civilization that the human journey appears always to have been directed.”^[41] Adam Smith could not have said it any better.

“Muddling Through”: Why Trial-and-Error is the Key to Progress

My favorite insights from Florman’s work relate to the way humans have repeatedly faced up to adversity and found ways to “muddle through.” This was the focus of an old essay of mine— “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change”—which argued that humans are a remarkably resilient species and that we regularly find creative ways to deal with major changes through constant trial-and-error experimentation and the learning that results from it.[42]

Florman made this same point far more eloquently long ago:

“We have been attempting to muddle along, acknowledging that we are selfish and foolish, and proceeding by means of trial and error. We call ourselves pragmatists. Mistakes are made, of course. Also, tastes change, so that what seemed desirable to one generation appears disagreeable to the next. But our overriding concern has been to make sure that matters of taste do not become matters of dogma, for that is the way toward violent conflict and tyranny. Trial and error, however, is exactly what the antitechnologists cannot abide.^[43]

It is the error part of trial-and-error that is so vital to societal learning. “Even the most cautious engineer recognizes that risk is inherent in what he or she does,” Florman noted. “Over the long haul the improbable becomes the inevitable, and accidents will happen. The unanticipated will occur.”[44] But “[s]ometimes the only way to gain knowledge is by experiencing failure,” he correctly observed[45] “To be willing to learn through failure—failure that cannot be hidden—requires tenacity and courage.”[46]

I’ve argued that this represents the central dividing line between innovation supporters and technology critics. The critics are so focused on risk-adverse, precautionary principle-based thinking that they simply cannot tolerate the idea that society can learn more through trial-and-error than through preemptive planning. They imagine it is possible to override that process and predetermine the proper course of action to create a safer, more stable society. In this mindset, failure is to be avoided at all costs through prescriptions and prohibitions. Innovation is to be treated as guilty until proven innocent in the hope of eliminating the error (or risk / failure) associated with trial-and-error experiments. To reiterate, this logic misses the fact that the entire point of trial-and-error is to learn from our mistakes and “fail better” next time, until we’ve solved the problem at hand entirely.[47]

Florman noted that, “sensible people have agreed that there is no free lunch; there are only difficult choices, options, and trade-offs.”[48] In other words, precautionary controls come at a cost. “All we can do is do the best we can, plan where we can, agree where we can, and compromise where we must,” he said.^[49] But, again, the antitechnologists absolutely cannot accept this worldview. They are fundamentally hostile to it because they either believe that a precautionary approach will do a better job improving public welfare, or they believe that trial-and-error fails to safeguard any number of other values or institutions that they regard as sacrosanct. This shuts down the learning process from which wisdom is generated. As the old adage goes, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” There can be no reward without some risk, and there can be no human advances without unless we are free to learn from the error portion of trial-and-error.

The Costs of Precautionary Regulation

Florman did not spend much time in his writing mulling over the finer points of public policy, but he did express skepticism about our collective ability to define and enforce “the public interest” in various contexts. A great many regulatory regimes—and their underlying statutes—rest on the notion of “protecting the public interest.” It is impossible to be against that notion, but it is often equally impossible to define what it even means.[50]

This leads to what Florman called, “the search for virtues that nobody can define”[51] “As engineers we are agreed that the public interest is very important; but it is folly to think that we can agree on what the public interest is. We cannot even agree on the scientific facts!”^[52] This is especially true today in debates over what constitutes “responsible innovation” or “ethical innovation.”[53] What Florman noted about such conversations three decades ago is equally true today:

“Whenever engineering ethics is on the agenda, emotions come quickly to a boil. […] “It is oh so easy to mouth clichés, for example to pledge to protect the public interest, as the various codes of engineering ethics do. But such a pledge is only a beginning and hardly that. The real questions remain: What is the public interest, and how is it to be served?”[54]

That reality makes it extremely difficult to formulate consensus regarding public polices for emerging technologies. And it makes it particularly difficult to define and enforce a “precautionary principle” for emerging technologies that will somehow strike the Goldilocks balance of getting things just right. This was the focus of my 2016 book Permissionless Innovation, which argued that the precautionary principle should be the last resort when contemplating innovation policy. Experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted by default because, “living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy on them—means that best-case scenarios will never come about,” I argued. The precautionary principle should only be tapped when the harms alleged to be associated with a new technology are highly probable, tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic, or directly threatening to life and limb in some fashion.

For his part, Florman did not want to get his defense of engineering mixed up with politics and regulatory considerations. Engineers and technologists, he noted, come in many flavors and supported many different causes. Generally speaking, they tend to be quite pragmatic and shun strong ideological leanings and political pronouncements.

Of course, at some point, there is no avoiding this fight; one must comment on how to strike the right balance when politics enter the picture and threatens to stifle technological creativity. Florman’s perspectives on regulatory policy were somewhat jumbled, however. On one hand, he expressed concern about excessive and misguided regulations, but he also saw government playing an important role both in supporting various types of engineering projects and regulating certain technological developments:

“The regulatory impulse, running wild, wreaks havoc, first of all by stifling creative and productive forces that are vital to national survival. But it does harm also—and perhaps more ominously—by fomenting a counter-revolution among outraged industrialists, the intensity of which threatens to sweep away many of the very regulations we most need.”^[55]

In his 1987 book, The Civilized Engineer, Florman even expressed surprise and regret about growing pushback against regulation during the Reagan years. He also expressed skepticism about “the deceptive allure” of benefit-cost analysis, which was on the rise at the time, saying that the “attempt to apply mathematical consistency to the regulatory process was deplorably simplistic.”^[56] I have always been a big believer in the importance of benefit-cost analysis (BCA), so I was surprised to read of Florman’s skepticism of it. But he was writing in the early days of BCA and it was not entirely clear how well it work in practice. Four decades on, BCA has become far more rigorous, academically respected, and well-established throughout government. It has widespread and bipartisan support as a policy evaluation tool.

Florman adamantly opposed any sort of “technocracy”—or administration of government by technically-skilled elites. He thought it was silly that so many tech critics believe that such a thing already existed. “The myth of the technocratic elite is an expression of fear, like a fairy tale about ogres,” he argued. “It springs from an understandable apprehension, but since it has no basis in reality, it has no place in serious discourse.”^[57] Nor did he believe that there was any real chance a technocracy would ever take hold. “No matter how complex technology becomes, and no matter how important it turns out to be in human affairs, we are not likely to see authority vested in a class of technocrats.”^[58]

Florman hoped for wiser administration of law and regulations that affected engineering endeavors and innovation more generally. Like so many others, he did not necessarily want more law, just better law. One cannot fault that instinct, but Florman was not really interested in fleshing out the finer details of policy about how to accomplish that objective. He preferred instead to use history as a rough guide for policy. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the decline of Britain’s economic might in more recent times, Florman observed the ways in which societal and governmental attitudes toward innovation influenced the relative growth of science, technology, and national economies. In essence, he was explaining how “innovation culture” and “innovation arbitrage” had been realities for far longer than most people realize.[59]

“Where the entrepreneurial spirit cannot be rewarded, and where non-productive workers cannot be discharged, stagnation will set in,” Florman concluded.[60] This is very much in line with the thinking of economic historians like Joel Mokyr[61] and Deirdre McCloskey,[62] who have identified how attitudes toward creativity and entrepreneurialism affect the aggregate innovative capacity of nations, and thus their competitive advantage and relative prosperity in the world.

Debunking Determinism, Anxiety & Alienation Concerns

One of the ironies of modern technological criticism is the way many critics can’t seem to get their story straight when it comes to “technological determinism” versus social determinism. In the extreme view, technological determinism is the idea that technology drives history and almost has a will of its own. It is like an autonomous force that is practically unstoppable. By contrast, social determinism means that society (individuals, institutions, etc.) guide and control the development of technology.

In the field of Science and Technology Studies, technological determinism is a very hot matter. Academic and social critics are fond of painting innovation advocates as rigid tech determinists who are little better than uncaring anti-humanistic gadget-worshipers. The critics have employed a variety of other creative labels to describe tech determinism, including: “techno-fundamentalism,” “technological solutionism,” and even “techno-chauvinism.”

Engineers and other innovators often get hit with such labels and accused of being rigid technological determinists who just want to see tech plow over people and politics. But this was, and remains, a ridiculous argument. Sure, there will always be some wild-eyed futurists and extropian extremists who make preposterous claims about how “there is no stopping technology.” “Even now the salvation-through-technology doctrine has some adherents whose absurdities have helped to inspire the antitechnological movement, Florman said.”^[63] But that hardly represents the majority of innovation supporters, who well understand that society and politics play a crucial role in shaping the future course of technological development.

As Florman noted, we can dismiss extreme deterministic perspectives for a rather simple reason: technologies fail all the time! “If promising technologies can suffer fatal blows from unexpected circumstances,” Florman correctly argued, then “[t]his means that we are still—however precariously—in control of our own destiny.”[64] He believed that, “technology is not an independent force, much less a thing, but merely one of the types of activities in which people engage.”^[65] The rigid view of tech determinism can be dismissed, he said, because “it can be shown that technology is still very much under society’s control, that it is in fact an expression of our very human desires, fancies, and fears.”^[66]

But what is amazing about this debate is that some of the most rigid technological determinists are the technology critics themselves! Recall how Florman began his 6-part taxonomy of common complaints from tech critics. “A primary characteristic of the antitechnologists,” Florman argued, “is the way in which they refer to ‘technology’ as a thing, or at least a force, as if it had an existence of its own” and which “has escaped from human control and is spoiling our lives.”[67]

He noted that many of the leading tech critics of the post-war era often spoke in remarkably deterministic ways. “The idea that a man of the masses has no thoughts of his own, but is something on the order of a programmed machine, owes part of its popularity with the antitechnologists to the influential writings of Herbert Marcuse,” he believed.^[68] But then such thinking accelerated and gained greater favor with the popularity of critics like French philosopher Jacques Ellul, American historian Lewis Mumford, and American cultural critic Neil Postman.

Their books painted a dismal portrait of a future in which humans were subjugated to the evils of “technique” (Ellul), “technics” (Mumford), or “technopoly” (Postman).  The narrative of their works read like dystopian science fiction. Essentially, there was no escaping the iron grip that technology had on us. Postman claimed, for example, that technology was destined to destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.”

Which gets us to commonly heard concerns about how technology leads to “anxiety” and “alienation.” “Having established the view of technology as an evil force, the antitechnologists then proceed to depict the average citizen as a helpless slave, driven by this force to perform work he detests,” Florman notes.^[69] “Anxiety and alienation are the watchwords of the day, as if material comforts made life worse, rather than better.”^[70]

These concerns about anxiety, alienation, and “dehumanization” are omnipresent in the work of modern tech critics, and they are also tied up with traditional worries about “conspicuous consumption.” It’s all part of the “false consciousness” narrative they also peddle, which basically views humans as too ignorant to look out for their own good. In this worldview, people are sheep being led to the slaughter by conniving capitalists and tech innovators, who are just trying to sell them things they don’t really need.

Florman pointed out how preposterous this line of thinking is when he noted how critics seem to always forget that, “a basic human impulse precedes and underlies each technological development”:^[71]

“Very often this impulse, or desire, is directly responsible for the new invention. But even when this is not the case, even when the invention is not a response to any particular consumer demand, the impulse is alive and at the ready, sniffing about like a mouse in a maze, seeking its fulfillment. We may regret having some of these impulses. We certainly regret giving expression to some of them. But this hardly gives us the right to blame our misfortunes on a devil external to ourselves.”^[72]

Consider the automobile, for example. Industrial era critics often focused on it and lambasted the way they thought industrialists pushed auto culture and technologies on the masses. Did we really need all those cars? All those colors? All those options? Did we really even need cars? The critics wanted us to believe that all these things were just imposed upon us. We were being force-fed options we really didn’t even need or want. “Choice” in this worldview is just a fiction; a front for the nefarious ends of our corporate overlords.

Florman demolished this reasoning throughout his books. “However much we deplore the growth of our automobile culture, clearly it has been created by people making choices, not by a runaway technology,” he argued.^[73] Consumer demand and choice is not some fiction fabricated and forced upon us, as the antitechnologists suggest. We make decisions. “Those who would blame all of life’s problems on an amorphous technology, inevitably reject the concept of individual responsibility,” Florman retorted. “This is not humanism. It is a perversion of the humanistic impulse.”^[74]

A modern tweak on the conspicuous consumption and false consciousness arguments is found in the work of leading tech critics like Evgeny Morozov, who pens attention-grabbing screeds decrying what he regards as “the folly of technological solutionism.” Morozov bluntly states that “our enemy is the romantic and revolutionary problem solver who resides within” of us, but most specifically within the engineers and technologists.[75]

But would the world really be better place it tinkerers didn’t try to scratch that itch?[76] In 2021, the Wall Street Journal profiled JoeBen Bevirt, an engineer and serial entrepreneur who has been working to bring flying cars from sci-fi to reality. Channeling Florman’s defense of the existential pleasures associated with engineering, Bevirt spoke passionately about the way innovators can help “move our species forward” through their constant tinkering to find solutions to hard problems. “That’s kind of the ethos of who we are,” he said. “We see problems, we’re engineers, we work to try to fix them.”[77]

When tech critics like Morozov decry “solutionism,” they are essentially saying that innovators like Bevirt need to just shut up and sit down. Don’t try to improve the world through tinkering; just settle for the status quo, the critics basically state. That’s the kiss of death for human progress, however, because it is only through incessant experimentation with the new and different approaches to hard problems that we can advance human well-being. “Solutionism” isn’t about just creating some shiny new toy; it’s about expanding the universe of potentially life-enriching and life-saving technologies available to humanity.

Conclusion

This review of Samuel Florman’s work may seem comprehensive, but it only scratches the surface of his wide-ranging writing. Florman was troubled that engineering lacked support or at least understanding. Perhaps that was because, he reasoned, that “[t]here is no single truth that embodies the practice of engineering, no patron saint, no motto or simple credo. There is no unique methodology that has been distilled from millenia of technological effort.”  Or, more simply, it may also be the case that the profession lacked articulate defenders. “The engineer may merely be waiting for his Shakespeare,” he suggested.^[78]

Through his life’s work, however, Samuel Florman became that Shakespeare; the great bard of engineering and passionate defender of technological innovation and rational optimism more generally. In looking for a quote or two to close out my latest book, I ended with this one from Florman:

“By turning our backs on technological change, we would be expressing our satisfaction with current world levels of hunger, disease, and privation. Further, we must press ahead in the name of the human adventure. Without experimentation and change our existence would be a dull business.”^[79]

Let us resolve to make sure that Florman’s greatest fear does not come to pass. Let us resolve to make sure that the great human adventure never ends. And let us resolve to counter the antitechnologists and their fundamentally anti-humanist worldview, which would most assuredly make our existence the “dull business” that Florman dreaded.

We can do better when we put our minds and hands to work innovating in an attempt to build a better future for humanity. Samuel Florman, the great prophet of progress, showed us the way forward.

Additional Reading from Adam Thierer:

• “How to Get the Future We Were Promised,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
• “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
•  “Is There a Science of Progress?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
• “How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity,” Medium, November 19, 2018.
• “Is It ‘Techno-Chauvinist’ & ‘Anti-Humanist’ to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology?” Medium, September 18, 2018.
• “Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream?” Medium, September 7, 2018.
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change,” Medium, June 30, 2014.

Endnotes:

[1]    Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).

[2]    Adam Thierer, “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021, https://www.discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2021/11/09/defending-innovation-against-attacks-from-all-sides.

[3]    Samuel C. Forman, The Civilized Engineer (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1987), p. 26.

[4]    Samuel C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York, St. Martins Griffin, 2^nd Edition, 1994), p. 53-4.

[5]    Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 53-4.

[6]    Samuel C. Florman, Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 186.

[7]    Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 76.

[8]    Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 77.

[9]    The Civilized Engineer, p. 38.

[10]   Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

[11]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 72.

[12]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 76.

[13]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 35.

[14]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 102.

[15]   Blaming Technology, p. 162.

[16]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 55.

[17]   Blaming Technology, p. 70.

[18]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 77.

[19]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 60.

[20]   Adam Thierer, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 14, no. 1 (2013), p. 312–50, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2012494.

[21]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 62.

[22]   Blaming Technology, p. 9.

[23]   Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).

[24]   Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).

[25]   Gregg Easterbrook, It’s Better than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear (New York: Public Affairs, 2018); Michael A. Cohen & Micah Zenko, Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

[26]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 54.

[27]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 72.

[28]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 72.

[29]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 55.

[30]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 117.

[31]   David Hume, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” (1777), https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hume-essays-moral-political-literary-lf-ed.

[32]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 20.

[33]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 6.

[34]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 20.

[35]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 115.

[36]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 20.

[37]   Arthur Diamond, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[38]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 19.

[39]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 147.

[40]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 148.

[41]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 30.

[42]   Adam Thierer, “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change,” Medium, June 30, 2014, https://medium.com/tech-liberation/muddling-through-how-we-learn-to-cope-with-technological-change-6282d0d342a6.

[43]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 84.

[44]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 71.

[45]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 72.

[46]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 72.

[47]   Adam Thierer, “Failing Better: What We Learn by Confronting Risk and Uncertainty,” in Sherzod Abdukadirov (ed.), Nudge Theory in Action: Behavioral Design in Policy and Markets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 65-94.

[48]   The Civilized Engineer, p. xi.

[49]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 85.

[50]   Adam Thierer, “Is the Public Served by the Public Interest Standard?” The Freeman, September 1, 1996,  https://fee.org/articles/is-the-public-served-by-the-public-interest-standard.

[51]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 84.

[52]   The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 22.

[53]   Adam Thierer, “Are ‘Permissionless Innovation’ and ‘Responsible Innovation’ Compatible?” Technology Liberation Front, July 12, 2017, https://techliberation.com/2017/07/12/are-permissionless-innovation-and-responsible-innovation-compatible.

[54]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 79.

[55]   Blaming Technology, p. 106.

[56]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 158.

[57]   Blaming Technology, p. 41.

[58]   Blaming Technology, p. 40-1.

[59]   Adam Thierer, “Embracing a Culture of Permissionless Innovation,” Cato Online Forum, November 17, 2014, https://www.cato.org/publications/cato-online-forum/embracing-culture-permissionless-innovation; Christopher Koopman, “Creating an Environment for Permissionless Innovation,” Testimony before the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, May 22, 2018, https://www.mercatus.org/publications/creating-environment-permissionless-innovation.

[60]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 117.

[61]   Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[62]   Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2010).

[63]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 57.

[64]   Blaming Technology, p. 22.

[65]   The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 58.

[66]   Blaming Technology, p. 10.

[67]   The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 48, 53.

[68]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 70.

[69]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 49.

[70]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 16.

[71]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 61.

[72]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 61.

[73]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 60.

[74]   Blaming Technology, p. 104.

[75]   Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).

[76]   Adam Thierer, “A Net Skeptic’s Conservative Manifesto,” Reason, April 27, 2013, https://reason.com/2013/04/27/a-net-skeptics-conservative-manifesto-2/.

[77]   Emily Bobrow, “JoeBen Bevirt Is Bringing Flying Taxis from Sci-Fi to Reality,” Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/joeben-bevirt-is-bringing-flying-taxis-from-sci-fi-to-reality-11625848177.

[78]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 96.

[79]   Blaming Technology, p. 193.

Margaret Talbot has written an excellent New Yorker essay entitled, “The Rogue Experimenters,” which documents the growth of the D.I.Y.-bio movement. This refers to the organic, bottom-up, citizen science movement, or “leaderless do-ocracy” of tinkerers, as she notes. I highly recommend you check it out.

As I noted in my new book on Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance, “DIY health services and medical devices are on the rise thanks to the combined power of open-source software, 3D printers, cloud computing, and digital platforms that allow information sharing between individuals with specific health needs. Average citizens are using these new technologies to modify their bodies and abilities, often beyond the confines of the law.”

Talbot discusses many of the same examples I discuss in my book, including:

• the Four Thieves Vinegar collective, which devised instructions for building its own version of the EpiPen;
• e-nable, an international collective of thirty thousand volunteers, designs and 3-D-prints prosthetic hands and arms (and which has, more recently, distributed more than fifty thousand face shields in more than twenty-five countries.);
• GenSpace and other community biohacking labs; and
• Open Insulin and Open Artificial Pancreas System.

I like the way Talbot compares these movements to the hacker and start-up culture of the Digital Revolution:

The D.I.Y.-bio movement, which emerged in the early two-thousands, seems almost evolutionarily adapted to its historical moment,” she argues. “It echoes aspects of startup culture, especially the early days of personal computing, with its garage-based origin stories. First came the hardware, then the software; now even the wetware of life can be created in people’s homes. D.I.Y. bio reflects popular skepticism about professional authority and gatekeeping, but it is not skeptical about learning or expertise.

She also quotes others on this point, like John Wilbanks, a health technologist at the research nonprofit Sage Bionetworks:

when new biotech companies fail, they tend to sell off their equipment for a discount, and community labs and biohackers scoop it up. Wilbanks told me, “D.I.Y. bio is very similar to the home-brew, hacker-club culture of the late seventies in Silicon Valley. If you’ve not gone on eBay to shop for a DNA sequencer that they can ship to you in twenty-four hours, check it out—there’s a massive secondary market.”

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this bottom-up citizen-science movement is that it run the political gamut. It includes “anarcho-libertarians” to those “steeped in social-justice activism,” Talbot says. But they are all generally unified by a commitment to the widespread dissemination of scientific knowledge and transparency in health-related matters. “D.I.Y. biologists often have a greater commitment than their professional counterparts do to making their work open to scrutiny—and available for free on the Internet,” Talbot notes.

“The D.I.Y.-bio ecosystem includes a lot of do-gooders, and many of them have been galvanized by the covid-19 crisis,” she also observes. Quite right. I discussed that fact in the launch essay for my book, “Evasive Entrepreneurialism and Technological Civil Disobedience in the Midst of a Pandemic.” I documented dozens of examples of various individuals and organizations rising up to meet the challenges posed by the pandemic. “Eventually, people take notice of how regulators and their rules encumber entrepreneurial activities, and they act to evade them when public welfare is undermined,” I argued. “Working around the system becomes inevitable when the permission society becomes so completely dysfunctional and counterproductive.” DIY health innovation has gone mainstream out of necessity.

Importantly, Talbot notes that when it comes to what counts as success for DIY health and biohacking, sometimes good enough is, well, good enough. On this point, she quotes Jon Schull, an e-nable (non-commercial 3D-printed prosthetics) co-founder, who says, “it doesn’t matter that e-nable hands aren’t state-of-the-art. The job of professional prostheses-makers, he said, is “to produce something really good, and if it’s merely better than nothing it’s not good enough”—but, in some circumstances, something is better than nothing.”

That is a crucial point understanding why this movement is so important: Working together in a spontaneous, bottom-up fashion, citizen scientists and tinkerers can act quickly to fill pressing public health needs. Of course, that is exactly what makes these same innovations potentially risky and has some people wondering about the wisdom of such efforts—and the potential need for more regulation.

I wish Talbott would have spent a bit more time diving into these ethical and legal questions. I really struggled with them when writing about all this stuff in my new book on evasive entrepreneurialism and technological civil disobedience. She does briefly discuss how some FDA regs might affect DIY bio movement, including efforts like Open Insulin.  “Even if Open Insulin begins producing a consistent product, it will have to overcome all kinds of regulatory obstacles to demonstrate safety and purity before taking it to market,” she notes. “Manufacturers of pharmacy-grade medications must provide the F.D.A. with reams of evidence that they can produce the substances with complete consistency, in sterile environments. Proving this level of proficiency can cost millions of dollars.” But Talbot does not spend much more time exploring what might happen next on this front if DIY efforts continue to expand.

“But what should the law say about people… who are creating their own specialized medical devices in an open-source, noncommercial fashion?” I ask in my new book.

I outlined three potential future scenarios for the movement:

1. DIY technologies go mainstream and become more commercialized.
2. biohacking remains decentralized but becomes more mainstream and professional without becoming fully commercial.
3. biohacking turn even more rogue or underground in nature as a form of guerrilla innovation that sometimes borders on neo-anarchism.

Regardless of the outcome, the ethical and regulatory issues will persist and grow as technological capabilities continue to grow more sophisticated, decentralized, and inexpensive. I argue in the book that it would be foolish for policymakers to think they can (or should) bottle up this movement altogether:

biohacking and decentralized medicine will expand for a simple reason: People care deeply about improving their health and abilities. They will take advantage of new technological capabilities that let them do so—especially when those capabilities are significantly cheaper than other options. To reiterate, that does not make these technologies safe or smart, but it does mean we will need a new approach to governance as evasive entrepreneurialism expands in this arena.

And then I continue on to note how improved risk education and awareness efforts might be one solution to the growing DIY bio movement.

Anyway, for more discussion on this, see pages 79-87 of my new book. I’ve also listed a few other essays down below that you might find interesting, including several penned by my former colleague Jordan Reimschisel.

Additional Reading:

• Andrea O’Sullivan & Adam Thierer, “3D Printers, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Tech Regulation,” The Bridge, August 1, 2018, https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/3d-printers-evasive-entrepreneurs-and-future-tech-regulation
• Jordan Reimschisel, “Biohackerspaces,” Medium, June 29, 2017, https://medium.com/@jordanreimschisel/biohackerspaces-b0cbde63c492
• Jordan Reimschisel, “Technology Could Enable Personal Medicine Whether We Like It Or Not,” Medium, August 10, 2017, https://medium.com/@jordanreimschisel/technology-could-enable-personal-medicine-whether-we-like-it-or-not-ce6e19b826fe
• Jordan Reimschisel, “Evolving Oversight of Digital Health,” Medium, June 21, 2018, https://medium.com/@jordanreimschisel/evolving-oversight-of-digital-health-d65199913503
• Adam D. Thierer and Adam Marcus, “Guns, Limbs, and Toys: What Future for 3D Printing?” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, Vol. 17, No. 2, (2016), p. 805-854, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2795562

Wallach’s latest book is entitled, A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping beyond Our Control. And, as I’ve noted here recently, the greatly expanded second edition of my latest book, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, has just been released.

Of all the books of technological criticism or skepticism that I’ve read in recent years—and I have read stacks of them!— A Dangerous Master is by far the most thoughtful and interesting. I have grown accustomed to major works of technological criticism being caustic, angry affairs. Most of them are just dripping with dystopian dread and a sense of utter exasperation and outright disgust at the pace of modern technological change.

Although he is certainly concerned about a wide variety of modern technologies—drones, robotics, nanotech, and more—Wallach isn’t a purveyor of the politics of panic. There are some moments in the book when he resorts to some hyperbolic rhetoric, such as when he frets about an impending “techstorm” and the potential, as the book’s title suggests, for technology to become a “dangerous master” of humanity. For the most part, however, his approach is deeper and more dispassionate than what is found in the leading tracts of other modern techno-critics.

Many Questions, Few Clear Answers

Wallach does a particularly good job framing the major questions about emerging technologies and their effect on society. “Navigating the future of technological possibilities is a hazardous venture,” he observes. “It begins with learning to ask the right questions—questions that reveal the pitfalls of inaction, and more importantly, the passageways available for plotting a course to a safe harbor.” (p. 7) Wallach then embarks on a 260+ page inquiry that bombards the reader with an astonishing litany of questions about the wisdom of various forms of technological innovation—both large and small. While I wasn’t about to start an exact count, I would say that the number of questions Wallach poses in the book runs well into the hundreds. In fact, many paragraphs of the book are nothing but an endless string of questions.

Thus, if there is a primary weakness with A Dangerous Master, it’s that Wallach spends so much time formulating such a long list of smart and nuanced questions that some readers may come away disappointed when they do not find equally satisfying answers. On the other hand, the lack of clear answers is also completely understandable because, as Wallach notes, there really are no simple answers to most of these questions.

Just Slow Down!

Moving on to substance, let me make clear where Wallach and I generally see eye-to-eye and where we part ways.

Generally speaking, we agree about the need to come up with better “soft governance” systems for emerging technologies, which might include multistakeholder process, developer codes of conduct, sectoral self-regulation, sensible liability rules, and so on. (More on those strategies in a moment.)

But while we both believe it is wise to consider how we might “bake-in” better ethics and norms into the process of technological development, Wallach seems much more inclined than me to expect that we will be able to pre-ordain (or potentially require?) all this happens before much of this experimentation and innovation actually moves forward. Wallach opens by asking:

Determining when to bow to the judgment of experts and whether to intervene in the deployment of a new technology is certainly not easy. How can government leaders or informed citizens effectively discern which fields of research are truly promising and which pose serious risks? Do we have the intelligence and means to mitigate the serious risks that can be anticipated? How should we prepare for unanticipated risks? (p. 6)

Again, many good questions here! But this really gets to the primary difference between Wallach’s preferred approach and my own: I tend to believe that many of these things can only be worked out through ongoing trial and error, the constant reformulation of the various norms that govern the process of innovation, and the development of sensible ex post solutions to some of the most difficult problems posed by turbulent technological change.

By contrast, Wallach’s generally attitude toward technological evolution is probably best summarized by the phrases: “Slow down!” and, “Let’s have a conversation about it first!” As he puts it in his own words: “Slowing down the accelerating adoption of technology should be done as a responsible means to ensure basic human safety and to support broadly shared values.” (p. 13)

But I tend to believe that it’s not always possible to preemptively determine which innovations to slow down, or even how to determine what those “shared values” are that will help us make this determination. More importantly, I worry that there are very serious potential risks and unintended consequences associated with slowing down many forms of technological innovation, which could improve human welfare in important ways. There can be no prosperity, after all, without a certain degree of risk-taking and disruption.

Getting Out Ahead of the Pacing Problem

Yet, what concerns Wallach most is the much-discussed issue from the field of the philosophy of technology, the so-called “pacing problem.” Wallach concisely defines the pacing problem as “the gap between the introduction of a new technology and the establishment of laws, regulations, and oversight mechanisms for shaping its safe development.” (p. 251) “There has always been a pacing problem,” he notes, but he is concerned that technological innovation—especially highly disruptive and potentially uncontrollable forms of innovation—is now accelerating at an absolutely unprecedented pace.

(Just as an aside for all the philosophy nerds out there…  Such a rigid belief in the “pacing problem” represents a techno-deterministic viewpoint that is, ironically, sometimes shared by technological skeptics like Wallach as well as technological optimists like Larry Downes and even many in the middle of this debate, like Vivek Wadhwa. See, for example, The Laws of Disruption by Downes and “Laws and Ethics Can’t Keep Pace with Technology” by Wadhwa. Although these scholars approach technology ethics and politics quite differently, they all seem to believe that the pace of modern technological change is so relentless as to almost be an unstoppable force of nature. I guess the moral of the story is that, to some extent, we’re all technological determinists now!)

Despite his repeated assertions that modern technologies are accelerating at such a potentially uncontrollable pace, Wallach nonetheless hopes we can achieve some semblance of control over emerging technologies before they reach a critical “inflection point.” In the study of history and science, an inflection point generally represents a moment when a situation and trend suddenly changes in a significant way and things begin moving rapidly in a new direction. These inflections points can sometimes develop quite abruptly, ushering in major changes by creating new social, economic, or political paradigms. As it relates to technology in particular, inflection points can refer to the moment with a particular technology achieves critical mass in terms of adoption or, more generally, to the time when that technology begins to profoundly transform the way individuals and institutions act.

Another related concept that Wallach discusses is the so-called “Collingridge dilemma,” which refers to the notion that it is difficult to put the genie back in the bottle once a given technology has reached a critical mass of public adoption or acceptance. The concept is named after David Collingridge, who wrote about this in his 1980 book, The Social Control of Technology. “The social consequences of a technology cannot be predicated early in the life of the technology,” Collingridge argued. “By the time undesirable consequences are discovered, however, the technology is often so much part of the whole economics and social fabric that its control is extremely difficult.”

On “Having a Discussion” & Coming Up with “a Broad Plan”

These related concepts of inflection points and the Collingridge dilemma constitute the operational baseline of Wallach’s worldview. “In weighing speedy development against long-term risks, speedy development wins,” he worries. “This is particularly true when the risks are uncertain and the perceived benefits great.” (p. 85)

Consequently, throughout his book, Wallach pleads with us to take what I will call Technological Time Outs. He says we need to pause at times so that we can have “a full public discussion” (p. 13) and make sure there is a “broad plan in place to manage our deployment of new technologies” (p. 19) to make sure that innovation happens only at “a humanly manageable pace” (p. 261) “to fortify the safety of people affected by unpredictable disruptions.” (p. 262) Wallach’s call for Technological Time Outs is rooted in his belief that “the accelerating pace [of modern technological innovation] undermines the quality of each of our lives.” (p. 263)

That is Wallach’s weakest assertion in the book and he doesn’t really offer much evidence to prove that the velocity of modern technological is hurting us rather than helping us, as many of us believe. Rather, he treats it as a widely accepted truism that necessitates some sort of collective effort to slow things down if the proverbial genie is about to exit the bottle, or to make sure those genies don’t get out of their bottles without a lot of preemptive planning regarding how they are to be released into the world. In the following passage on pg. 72, Wallach very succinctly summarizes his approach recommended throughout A Dangerous Master:

this book will champion the need for more upstream governance: more control over the way that potentially harmful technologies are developed or introduced into the larger society. Upstream management is certainly better than introducing regulations downstream, after a technology is deeply entrenched or something major has already gone wrong. Yet, even when we can access risks, there remain difficulties in recognizing when or determining how much control should be introduced. When does being precautionary make sense, and when is precaution an over-reaction to the risks? (p. 72)

Those who have read my Permissionless Innovation book will recall that I open by framing innovation policy debates in almost exactly the same way as Wallach suggests in that last line above. I argue in the first lines of my book that:

The central fault line in innovation policy debates today can be thought of as ‘the permission question.’  The permission question asks: Must the creators of new technologies seek the blessing of public officials before they develop and deploy their innovations? How that question is answered depends on the disposition one adopts toward new inventions and risk-taking, more generally.  Two conflicting attitudes are evident. One disposition is known as the ‘precautionary principle.’ Generally speaking, it refers to the belief that new innovations should be curtailed or disallowed until their developers can prove that they will not cause any harm to individuals, groups, specific entities, cultural norms, or various existing laws, norms, or traditions. The other vision can be labeled ‘permissionless innovation.’ It refers to the notion that experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted by default. Unless a compelling case can be made that a new invention will bring serious harm to society, innovation should be allowed to continue unabated and problems, if any develop, can be addressed later.

So, by contrasting these passages, you can see what I am setting up here is a clash of visions between what appears to be Wallach’s precautionary principle-based approach versus my own permissionless innovation-focused worldview.

How Much Formal Precaution?

But that would be a tad bit too simplistic because just a few paragraphs after Wallach makes the statement just above about “upstream management” being superior to ex post solutions formulated “after a technology is deeply entrenched,” Wallach begins slowly backing away from an overly-rigid approach to precautionary principle-based governance of technological processes and systems.

He admits, for example, that “precautionary measures in the form of regulations and governmental oversight can slow the development of research whose overall society impact will be beneficial,” (p. 26) and that can “be costly” and “slow innovation.” For countries, Wallach admits, this can have real consequences because “Countries with more stringent precautionary policies are at a competitive disadvantage to being the first to introduce a new tool or process.” (p. 74)

So, he’s willing to admit that what we might call a hard precautionary principle usually won’t be sensible or effective in practice, but he is far more open to soft precaution. But this is where real problems begin to develop with Wallach’s approach, and it presents us with a chance to turn the tables on him a bit and begin posing some serious questions about his vision for governing technology.

Much of what follows below are my miscellaneous ramblings about the current state of the intellectual dialogue about tech ethics and technological control efforts. I have discussed these issues at greater length in my new book as well as a series of essays here in past years, most notably: “On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy; “What Does It Mean to “Have a Conversation” about a New Technology?”; and, “Making Sure the “Trolley Problem” Doesn’t Derail Life-Saving Innovation.”

As I’ve argued in those and other essays, my biggest problem with modern technological criticism is that specifics are in scandalously short supply in this field! Indeed, I often find the lack of details in this arena to be utterly exasperating. Most modern technological criticism follows a simple formula:

TECHNOLOGY –>> POTENTIAL PROBLEMS –>> DO SOMETHING!

But almost all the details come in the discussion about the nature of the technology in question and the apparent many problems associated with it. Far, far less thought goes into the “DO SOMETHING!” part of the critics’ work. One reason for that is probably self-evident: There are no easy solutions. Wallach admits as much at many junctures throughout the book. But that doesn’t excuse the need for the critics to give us a more concrete blueprint for identifying and then potentially rectifying the supposed problems.

Of course, the other reason that many critics are short of specifics is because what they really mean when they quip how much we need to “have a conversation” about a new disruptive technology is that we need to have a conversation about stopping that technology.

Where Shall We Draw the Line between Hard and Soft Law?

But this is what I found most peculiar about Wallach’s book: He never really gives us a good standard by which to determine when we should look to hard governance (traditional top-down regulation) versus soft governance (more informal, bottom-up and non-regulatory approaches).

On one hand, he very much wants society to exercise greatly restraint and precaution when it comes to many of the technologies he and others worry about today. Again, he’s particularly concerned about the potential runaway development and use of drones, genetic editing, nanotech, robotics, and artificial intelligence. For at least one class of robotics—autonomous military robots—Wallach does call for immediate policy action in the form of an Executive Order to ban “killer” autonomous systems. (Incidentally, there’s also a major effort underway called the “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots” that aims to make such a ban part of international law through a multinational treaty.)

But Wallach also acknowledges the many trade-offs associated with efforts to preemptively controls on robotics and other technology. Perhaps for that reason, Wallach doesn’t develop a clear test for when the Precautionary Principle should be applied to new forms of innovation.

Clearly there are times when it is appropriate, although I believe it is only in an extremely narrow subset of cases. In the 2 ^nd Edition of my Permissionless Innovation book, I tried to offer a rough framework for when formal precautionary regulation (i.e., highly-restrictive policy defaults are necessary, such as operational restrictions, licensing requirements, research limitations, or even formal bans) might be necessary. I do not want to interrupt the flow of this review of Wallach’s book too much, so I have decided to just cut-and-paste that portion of Chapter 3 of my book (“When Does Precaution Make Sense?”) down below as an appendix to this essay.

The key takeaway of that passage from my book is that all of us who study innovation policy and the philosophy of technology—Wallach, myself, the whole darn movement—have done a remarkably poor job being specific about precisely when formal policy precaution is warranted. What is the test? All too often, we get lazy and apply what we might call an “I-Know-It-When-I-See-It” standard. Consider the possession of bazookas, tanks, and uranium. Almost all of us would agree that citizens should not be allowed to possess or use such things. Why? Well, it seems obvious, right? They just shouldn’t! But what is the exact standard we use to make that determination.

In coming years, I plan on spending a lot more time articulating a better test by which Precautionary Principle-based policies could be reasonably applied. Those who know me may be taken aback by what I just said. After all, I’ve spend many years explaining why Precautionary Principle-based thinking threatens human prosperity and should be rejected in the vast majority of cases. But that doesn’t excuse the lack of a serious and detailed exploration of the exact standard by which we determine when we should impose some limits on technological innovation.

Generally speaking, while I strongly believe that “permissionless innovation” should remain the policy default for most technologies, there certainly exists some scenarios where the threat of harm associated with a new innovation might be highly probable, tangible, immediate, irreversible, and catastrophic in nature. If so, that could qualify it for at least a light version of the Precautionary Principle. In a future paper or book chapter I’m just now starting to research, I hope to fuller develop those qualifiers and formulate a more robust test around them.

I would have very much liked to see Wallach articulate and defend a test of his own for when formal precaution would make sense. And, by extension, when should we default to soft precaution, or soft law and informal governance mechanisms for emerging technologies.

We turn to that issue next.

Toward Soft Governance & the Engineering of Better Technological Ethics

Even though Wallach doesn’t provide us with a test for determining when precaution makes sense or when we should instead default to soft governance, he does a much better job explaining the various models of soft law or informal governance that might help us deal with the potential negative ramifications of highly disruptive forms of technological change.

What Wallach proposes, in essence, is that we bake a dose of precautionary directly into the innovation process through a wide variety of informal governance/oversight mechanisms. “By embedding shared values in the very design of new tools and techniques, engineers improve the prospect of a positive outcome,” he claims. “The upstream embedding of shared values during the design process can ease the need for major course adjustments when it’s often too late.” (p. 261)

Wallach’s favored instrument of soft governance is what he refers to as “Governance Coordinating Committees” (GCCs). These Committees would coordinate “the separate initiatives by the various government agencies, advocacy groups, and representatives of industry” who would serve as “issue managers for the comprehensive oversight of each field of research.” (p. 250) He elaborates and details the function of GCCs as follows:

These committees, led by accomplished elders who have already achieved wide respect, are meant to work together with all the interested stakeholders to monitor technological development and formulate solutions to perceived problems. Rather than overlap with or function as a regulatory body, the committee would work together with existing institutions. (p. 250-51)

Wallach discussed the GCC idea in much greater detail in a 2013 book chapter he penned with Gary E. Marchant for a collected volume of essays on Innovative Governance Models for Emerging Technologies. (I highly recommend you pick up that book if you can afford it! Many terrific essays in that book on these issues.) In their chapter, Marchant and Wallach specify some of the soft law mechanisms we might use to instill a bit of precaution preemptively. These mechanisms include: “codes of conduct, statements of principles, partnership programs, voluntary programs and standards, certification programs and private industry initiatives.”

If done properly, GCCs could provide exactly the sort of wise counsel and smart recommendations that Wallach desires. In my book and many law review articles on various disruptive technologies, I have endorsed many of the ideas and strategies Wallach identifies. I’ve also stressed the importance of many other mechanisms, such as education and empowerment-based strategies that could help the public learn to cope with new innovations or use them appropriately. In addition, I’ve highlighted the many flexible, adaptive ex post remedies that can help when things go wrong. Those mechanisms include common law remedies such as product defects law, various torts, contract law, property law, and even class action lawsuits. Finally, I have written extensively about the very active role played by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and other consumer protection agencies, which have broad discretion to police “unfair and deceptive practices” by innovators.

Moreover, we already have a quasi-GCC model developing today with the so-called “multistakeholder governance” model that is often used in both informal and formal ways to handle many emerging technology policy issues.  The Department of Commerce (the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in particular) and the FTC have already developed many industry codes of conduct and best practices for technologies such as biometrics, big data, the Internet of Things, online advertising, and much more. Those agencies and others (such as the FDA and FAA) are continuing to investigate other codes or guidelines for things like advanced medical devices and drones, respectively. Meanwhile, I’ve heard other policymakers and academics float the idea of “digital ombudsmen,” “data ethicists,” and “private IRBs” (institutional review boards) as other potential soft law solutions that technology companies might consider. Perhaps going forward, many tech firms will have Chief Ethical Officers just as many of them today have Chief Privacy Officers or Chief Security Officers.

In other words, there’s already a lot of “soft law” activities going on in this space. And I haven’t even begun an inventory of the many other bodies or groups that already exist in each sector today that has set forth their own industry self-regulatory codes, but they exist in almost every field that Wallach worries about.

So, I’m not sure how much his GCC idea will add to this existing mix, but I would not be opposed to them playing the sort of coordinating “issue manager” role he describes. But I still have many questions about GCC’s, including:

• How many of them are needed and how we will know which one is the definitive GCC for each sector or technology?
• If they are overly formal in character and dominated by the most vociferous opponents of any particular technology, a real danger exists that a GCC could end up granting a small cabal a “heckler’s veto” over particular forms of innovation.
• Alternatively, the possibility of “regulatory capture” could be a problem for some GCCs if incumbent companies come to dominate their membership.
• Even if everything went fairly smoothly and the GCCs produced balanced reports and recommendations, future developers might wonder if and why they are to be bound by older guidelines.
• And if those future developers choose not to play by the same set of guidelines, what’s the penalty for non-compliance?
• And how are such guidelines enforced in a world where what I’ve called “global innovation arbitrage” is an increasing reality?

Challenging Questions for Both Hard and Soft Law

To summarize, whether we are speaking of “hard” or “soft” law approaches to technological governance, I am just not nearly as optimistic as Wallach seems to be that we will be able to find consensus on these three things:

(1) what constitutes “harm” in many of these circumstances;

(2) which “shared values” should prevail when “society” debates the shaping of ethics or guiding norms for emerging technologies but has highly contradictory opinions about those values (consider online privacy as a good example, where many people enjoy hyper-sharing while other demand hyper-privacy); and,

(3) that we can create a legitimate “governing body” (or bodies) that will be responsible for formulating these guidelines in a fair way without completely derailing the benefits of innovation in new fields and also remaining relevant for very long.

Nonetheless, as he and others have suggested, the benefit of adopting a soft law/informal governance approach to these issues is that it at least seeks to address these questions in more flexible and adaptive fashion. As I noted in my book, traditional regulatory systems “tend to be overly rigid, bureaucratic, inflexible, and slow to adapt to new realities. They focus on preemptive remedies that aim to predict the future, and future hypothetical problems that may not ever come about. Worse yet, administrative regulation generally preempts or prohibits the beneficial experiments that yield new and better ways of doing things.” ( Permissionless Innovation, p. 120)

So, despite the questions I have raised here, I welcome the more flexible soft law approach that Wallach sets forth in his book. I think it represents a far more constructive way forward when compared to the opposite “top-down” or “command-and-control” regulatory systems of the past. But I very much want to make sure that even these new and more flexible soft law approaches leave plenty of breathing room for ongoing trial-and-error experimentation with new technologies and systems.

Conclusion

In closing, I want to reiterate that not only did I appreciate the excellent questions raised by Wendell Wallach in A Dangerous Master, but I take them very seriously. When I sat down to revise and expand my Permissionless Innovation book last year, I decided to include this warning from Wallach in my revised preface: “The promoters of new technologies need to speak directly to the disquiet over the trajectory of emerging fields of research. They should not ignore, avoid, or superficially dampen criticism to protect scientific research.” (p. 28–9)

As I noted, in response to Wallach: “I take this charge seriously, as should others who herald the benefits of permissionless innovation as the optimal default for technology policy. We must be willing to take on the hard questions raised by critics and then also offer constructive strategies for dealing with a world of turbulent technological change.”

Serious questions deserve serious answers. Of course, sometimes those posing those questions fail to provide many answers of their own! Perhaps it is because they believe the questions answer themselves. Other times, it’s because they are willing to admit that easy answers to these questions typically prove quite elusive. In Wallach’s case, I believe it’s more the latter.

To wrap up, I’ll just reiterated that both Wallach and I share a common desire to find solutions to the hard questions about technological innovation. But the crucial question that probably separates his worldview and my own is this: Whether we are talking about hard or soft governance, how much faith should we place in preemptive planning vs. ongoing trial and error experimentation to solve technological challenges? Wallach is more inclined to believe we can divine these things with the sagacious foresight of “accomplished elders” and technocratic “issue managers,” who will help us slow things down until we figure out how to properly ease a new technology into society (if at all). But I believe that the only way we will find many of the answers we are searching for is by allowing still more experimentation with the very technologies that he and others seek to control the development of. We humans are outstanding problem-solvers and have the uncanny ability among all mammals to adapt to changing circumstances. We roll with the punches, learn from them, and become more resilient in the process. As I noted in my 2014 essay, “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change”:

we modern pragmatic optimists must continuously point to the unappreciated but unambiguous benefits of technological innovation and dynamic change. But we should also continue to remind the skeptics of the amazing adaptability of the human species in the face of adversity. [. . .] Humans have consistently responded to technological change in creative, and sometimes completely unexpected ways. There’s no reason to think we can’t get through modern technological disruptions using similar coping and adaptation strategies.

Will the technologies that Wallach fears bring about a “techstorm” that overwhelms our culture, our economy, and even our very humanity? It’s certainly possible, and we should continue to seriously discuss the issues that he and other skeptics raise about our expanding technological capabilities and the potential for many of them to do great harm. Because some of them truly could.

But it is equally plausible—in fact, some of us would say, highly probable—that instead of overwhelming us, we learn how to bend these new technological capabilities to our will and make them work for our collective benefit. Instead of technology becoming “a dangerous master,” we will instead make it our helpful servant, just as we have so many times before.

APPENDIX: When Does Precaution Make Sense?

[excerpt from chapter 3 of Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom. Footnotes omitted. See book for all references.]

But aren’t there times when a certain degree of precautionary policymaking makes good sense? Indeed, there are, and it is important to not dismiss every argument in favor of precautionary principle–based policymaking, even though it should not be the default policy rule in debates over technological innovation.

The challenge of determining when precautionary policies make sense comes down to weighing the (often limited) evidence about any given technology and its impact and then deciding whether the potential downsides of unrestricted use are so potentially catastrophic that trial-and-error experimentation simply cannot be allowed to continue. There certainly are some circumstances when such a precautionary rule might make sense. Governments restrict the possession of uranium and bazookas, to name just two obvious examples.

Generally speaking, permissionless innovation should remain the norm in the vast majority of cases, but there will be some scenarios where the threat of tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic harm associated with new innovations could require at least a light version of the precautionary principle to be applied.  In these cases, we might be better suited to think about when an “anti-catastrophe principle” is needed, which narrows the scope of the precautionary principle and focuses it more appropriately on the most unambiguously worst-case scenarios that meet those criteria.

But most cases don’t fall into this category. Instead, we generally allow innovators and consumers to freely experiment with technologies, and even engage in risky behaviors, unless a compelling case can be made that precautionary regulation is absolutely necessary.  How is the determination made regarding when precaution makes sense? This is where the role of benefit-cost analysis (BCA) and regulatory impact analysis is essential to getting policy right.  BCA represents an effort to formally identify the tradeoffs associated with regulatory proposals and, to the maximum extent feasible, quantify those benefits and costs.  BCA generally cautions against preemptive, precautionary regulation unless all other options have been exhausted—thus allowing trial-and-error experimentation and “learning by doing” to continue. (The mechanics of BCA are discussed in more detail in section VII.)

This is not the end of the evaluation, however. Policymakers also need to consider the complexities associated with traditional regulatory remedies in a world where technological control is increasingly challenging and quite costly. It is not feasible to throw unlimited resources at every problem, because society’s resources are finite.  We must balance risk probabilities and carefully weigh the likelihood that any given intervention has a chance of creating positive change in a cost-effective fashion.  And it is also essential to take into account the potential unintended consequences and long-term costs of any given solution because, as Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein notes, “it makes no sense to take steps to avert catastrophe if those very steps would create catastrophic risks of their own.”  “The precautionary principle rests upon an illusion that actions have no consequences beyond their intended ends,” observes Frank B. Cross of the University of Texas. But “there is no such thing as a risk-free lunch. Efforts to eliminate any given risk will create some new risks,” he says.

Oftentimes, after working through all these considerations about whether to regulate new technologies or technological processes, the best solution will be to do nothing because, as noted throughout this book, we should never underestimate the amazing ingenuity and resiliency of humans to find creative solutions to the problems posed by technological change.  (Section V discusses the importance of individual and social adaptation and resiliency in greater detail.) Other times we might find that, while some solutions are needed to address the potential risks associated with new technologies, nonregulatory alternatives are also available and should be given a chance before top-down precautionary regulations are imposed. (Section VII considers those alternative solutions in more detail.)

Finally, it is again essential to reiterate that we are talking here about the dangers of precautionary thinking as a public policy prerogative—that is, precautionary regulations that are mandated and enforced by government officials. By contrast, precautionary steps may be far more wise when undertaken in a more decentralized manner by individuals, families, businesses, groups, and other organizations. In other words, as I have noted elsewhere in much longer articles on the topic, “there is a different choice architecture at work when risk is managed in a localized manner as opposed to a society-wide fashion,” and risk-mitigation strategies that might make a great deal of sense for individuals, households, or organizations, might not be nearly as effective if imposed on the entire population as a legal or regulatory directive.

Finally, at times, more morally significant issues may exist that demand an even more exhaustive exploration of the impact of technological change on humanity. Perhaps the most notable examples arise in the field of advance medical treatments and biotechnology. Genetic experimentation and human cloning, for example, raise profound questions about altering human nature or abilities as well as the relationship between generations.

The case for policy prudence in these matters is easier to make because we are quite literally talking about the future of what it means to be human.  Controversies have raged for decades over the question of when life begins and how it should end. But these debates will be greatly magnified and extended in coming years to include equally thorny philosophical questions.  Should parents be allowed to use advanced genetic technologies to select the specific attributes they desire in their children? Or should parents at least be able to take advantage of genetic screening and genome modification technologies that ensure their children won’t suffer from specific diseases or ailments once born?

Outside the realm of technologically enhanced procreation, profound questions are already being raised about the sort of technological enhancements adults might make to their own bodies. How much of the human body can be replaced with robotic or bionic technologies before we cease to be human and become cyborgs?  As another example, “biohacking”—efforts by average citizens working together to enhance various human capabilities, typically by experimenting on their own bodies —could become more prevalent in coming years.  Collaborative forums, such as Biohack.Me, already exist where individuals can share information and collaborate on various projects of this sort.  Advocates of such amateur biohacking sometimes refer to themselves as “grinders,” which Ben Popper of the Verge defines as “homebrew biohackers [who are] obsessed with the idea of human enhancement [and] who are looking for new ways to put machines into their bodies.”

These technologies and capabilities will raise thorny ethical and legal issues as they advance. Ethically, they will raise questions of what it means to be human and the limits of what people should be allowed to do to their own bodies. In the field of law, they will challenge existing health and safety regulations imposed by the FDA and other government bodies.

Again, most innovation policy debates—including most of the technologies discussed throughout this book—do not involve such morally weighty questions. In the abstract, of course, philosophers might argue that every debate about technological innovation has an impact on the future of humanity and “what it means to be human.” But few have much of a direct influence on that question, and even fewer involve the sort of potentially immediate, irreversible, or catastrophic outcomes that should concern policymakers.

In most cases, therefore, we should let trial-and-error experimentation continue because “experimentation is part and parcel of innovation” and the key to social learning and economic prosperity.  If we froze all forms of technological innovation in place while we sorted through every possible outcome, no progress would ever occur. “Experimentation matters,” notes Harvard Business School professor Stefan H. Thomke, “because it fuels the discovery and creation of knowledge and thereby leads to the development and improvement of products, processes, systems, and organizations.”

Of course, ongoing experimentation with new technologies always entails certain risks and potential downsides, but the central argument of this book is that (a) the upsides of technological innovation almost always outweigh those downsides and that (b) humans have proven remarkably resilient in the face of uncertain, ever-changing futures.

In sum, when it comes to managing or coping with the risks associated with technological change, flexibility and patience is essential. One size most certainly does not fit all. And one-size-fits-all approaches to regulating technological risk are particularly misguided when the benefits associated with technological change are so profound. Indeed, “[t]echnology is widely considered the main source of economic progress”; therefore, nothing could be more important for raising long-term living standards than creating a policy environment conducive to ongoing technological change and the freedom to innovate.

I’m currently finishing up my next book. It addresses various strands of “Internet pessimism” and attempts to explain why all the gloom and doom theories we hear about the Internet’s impact on modern culture and economy are not generally warranted.  A key theme of my book is that most Internet pessimists overlook the importance of human adaptability in the face of technological change.  The amazing thing about humans is that we adapt so much better than other creatures. We learn how to use the new tools given to us and make them part of our lives and culture. The worst situations often bring out the most creative, innovative solutions. Media critic Jack Shafer has noted that “the techno-apocalypse never comes” because “cultures tend to assimilate and normalize new technology in ways the fretful never anticipate.”

In a cultural sense, humans have again and again adapted to technological change despite the radical disruptions to their lives, mores, manners, and methods of learning. As Aleks Krotoski recently points out in her new Guardian essay, “How the Internet Has Changed Our Concept of What Home Is”:

We are adaptable creatures and will work within the confines of our existing homes to integrate this new creature into our lives. We have already made the web part of our domestic ecologies and we continually imbue it with a sense of place. Perhaps its malleability is why it has been so successful and why we are willing to bring this interruptive technology into our most intimate worlds.

Human adaption also works magic in an economic sense. Entrepreneurs are constantly developing disruptive technologies that transform markets and expand opportunities. Innovators respond to incentives, including short-term spells of excessive “market power.” [More on that in my latest Forbes column, “No One Owns a Techno Crystal Ball.”]

Techno-pessimism and technopanics are born from irrational fears and a failure to appreciate that humans have, many times before, faced and conquered the technological unknown. Simply put, pessimists have very little faith in human ingenuity and resiliency.

Check out “Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music’s Mystery” in yesterday’s WSJ. The article describes the development of music as a central part of what Jacob Bronowski called the “Ascent of Man“:

“I believe that before we evolved language, our communication was more musical than it is now,” says cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen at the University of Reading in England, author of “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.” Unlike Darwin, Dr. Mithen is convinced that music was crucial to human survival. “Using music to express emotion or build a sense of group belonging would have been essential to the function of human society, especially before language evolved prior to modern humans.” The discovery of the world’s oldest musical instrument—a 35,000-year-old flute made from a wing bone—highlights a prehistoric moment when the mind learned to soar on flights of melody and rhythm. Researchers announced last week in Nature that they had unearthed the flute from the Ice Age rubbish of cave bear bones, reindeer horn and stone tools discarded in a cavern called Hohle Fels near Ulm, Germany. No one knows the melodies that were played in this primordial concert hall, which sheltered the humans who first settled Europe. The delicate wind instrument, though, offers evidence of how music pervaded daily life eons before iTunes, satellite radio and Muzak. …the ability to create musical instruments reflects a profound mental awakening that gave these early humans a crucial edge over the more primitive Neanderthal people who lived in the same epoch. “The expansion of modern humans hinged in part on new ways of storing symbolic information that seemed to confer an advantage on these people in competition with Neanderthals,” Dr. Conard says. To Dr. Patel, music-making was a conscious innovation, like the invention of writing or the control of fire. “It is something that we humans invented that then transformed human life,” he says. “It has a profound impact on how individual humans experience the world, by connecting us through space and time to other minds.”

If even something as central to our daily lives as music is, in fact the result of technological innovation over time and if technology can, as with music, change the way we think, communicate and build communities, I can’t help but wonder:  What will our descendants think thousands of years from now as they look back on the rise of today’s web and social networking technologies? If nothing else, this sense of perspective should make us better appreciate how important the development of communications media really is to the future of the human species.

Impossible as it is to predict how that staggeringly complex process will unfold— e.g., will Google make us smarter or stupider?—I’ll just humbly suggest that, rather than try to tinker with the future course of the species by trying to fine-tune public policy today to produce the “right” outcome, we would do better to follow the same principle that has guided the medical profession for 24 centuries: First, Do No Harm. In other words, if we don’t know what the effects of regulatory intervention in new media will be in the long-term, we’d be better off to leave well enough alone.