Interview with Edward Tenner
Structure.
Interview.
the room/edward tenner and things that bite back/pj fisher/20 08 96.
Edward Tenner <http://www.randomhouse.com/releases/96may/0-679-42563-2.html> a highly respected Princeton historian, has caused a stir with his new book Why Things Bite Back. Across 300 pages he tells us exactly why new roads lead to more congestion, safety helmets cause more injuries and PCs create more paper than ever before. PJ Fisher went to meet him and found him more than willing to talk.
Section 1
Who is Edward Tenner?
"I started as an historian and took a degree in European Social and Intellectual History at Princeton University. At the time I was not really terribly aware of new technology.
Like many others I couldn't get a job in my specialty so I took a job in scientific publishing. At first I didn't think I was very well trained for this. But one of the things I learned from leaving academia was that you don't have to follow a series of prerequisites in order to do something. After working on a book with one of my teachers, I discovered that the history of science and technology is part of general history and I wanted to explore that some more. After working with another colleague on some papers on healthcare, I began to see some of the paradoxes that come with the improvement of treatment.
I became more and more interested in paradox and especially the paradox that Europeans conquered the world not so much by the force of arms, but by disease they were carrying that for complex epidemiological reasons was devastating to the people they encountered.
Today Edward Tenner holds a visiting research appointment in the Department of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton University.
Section 2
So what is a revenge effect?
"They happen because it is very humanity to know in advance exactly what the technological and social systems we are dealing with really are. So when you take a new technology and put it into a psychological and a social context you are really performing an experiment and the results can very often be the opposite of what you expected. That's not the formal definition but that is why we so often encounter revenge effects as consequences that tend to cancel out our reasons for adopting a technology in the first case."
In the introduction to the book you allude to one or two weird cases: the Audi sedans that mysteriously accelerated on their own and the computer that refused to work when one particular technician walked into the room. Do ghosts in the machine really exist? <link>
"Well sometimes there are very random changes of state that combine to produce something that is really amazing. I've heard about experiments where you would never have expected that all the electrons would have passed through a filament in a certain way, but they did. And there are things that amaze physicists and experimenters and so there should be things that amaze people. And while I don't attribute any occult properties to them still find it interesting that nature and technology act as though they have these properties."
Section 3
Is the trend of the revenge effect accelerating as we approach the end of the twentieth century. Is it getting worse?
I'm not sure if the consequences are worse for us now. I am not saying that technology is making things worse or that the results are getting more serious. But I think that though they may be minor, they are getting to be more frequent. Just because more products are being introduced in different combinations and in different ways, so there are more ways they can behave more unexpectedly. <link http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/13.05.html>
Am I right in thinking it is not the machinery or the technology that is at fault it is the way we use it? My example would be the paperless office which hasn't happened. Is that because we refuse to let go of paper or because we refuse to learn how to work on screen.
<link do you like reading this interview on screen? A revenge effect?>
"It's because we haven't been realistic enough about the present and foreseeable limits of display technology Even an excellent display only has the resolution of even a 300 dpi laser print. And far less than the 600 and 1200 dpi lasers that are becoming the standard. It's a race between the improvement and quality of displays and the improvement of the capability of laser printed paper. The paper has been gaining on displays which have not really improved that significantly in the last ten years, as you know." <link:www.adobe.com>
But technology can make life better AND easier. Where is the revenge effect in my TV remote?
"Oh, I can see the revenge effect in that, very easily! Just look at the design of programming in the commercially intensive atmosphere of the United States. The most important thing for advertisers is to keep people watching. The entire programme has to be designed to prevent them zapping channels. Consequently there is too much emphasis on the short, the soundbite - everything is too superficial, too snappy. Your remote control may well have some of the blame for it. Because it is so easy to shift, the networks feel they have no choice but to programme this way.<link to www.mtv.com>
So a revenge effect doesn't necessarily happen to a person it can happen to all sorts of things.
That's right. The effect is very much more diffuse. For example, the person who installs an alarm in their house connected to the police may not experience any revenge effects from it apart from the need to reprogramme it occasionally when it is goes off without reason. But, for the police something like 97% of these alarms are false so the whole community may be less secure because the police are tied up on these false trips.
Car alarms too. They have become almost useless in large parts of the United States. People are much more likely to think someone has set off their own car alarm rather than the car is being broken into by a car thief. So to that extent they have defeated the whole purpose of car alarms.
And they take revenge quite literally by smashing up the car?
Yes, it's called lynching!
Section 4
Reverse revenge effects
Is there a reverse revenge effect. For example "bad" technology such as nuclear weapons have actually had unforeseen positive effects? Haven't they actually kept the peace?
Well, perhaps with hindsight. It's almost miraculous given the
scope and intensity of the Cold War that it didn't become a hot
one. It's very probable nuclear weapons played a big part in
that. However if you look at how high the risk was at various
points, the resultant war would have been far, far worse than
any other. You are paying a very high price for that kind of stability.
We are now living in a pessimistic age, after the atomic optimism of the fifties, the white heat of the technological revolution has long since faded - are we now too cynical about technology?
I think people have reacted against the political exploitation of political goals. Whether it is sincere or not, presidents or prime ministers from Harold Wilson onwards <http://www.theatlantic.com/atlantic/issues/96jun/blair/blair.htm> have used technology to portray a really fantastic future. You can see why they do. The horizon of such technology being implemented is long enough for that kind of promise to be made - `the market will take care of it and the government contribution is not going to be very big'. You can paint a wonderful picture of the future and you don't have to take much responsibility for it. Those kind of promises are so easy to make and have lost so much credibility that perhaps the revenge effect is that if there is something that does genuinely have great promise but needs substantial investment, it doesn't get done.
So what is happening now. Do we just accept what we have?
Technology has reached a certain kind of maturity. There's something called Smeed's law, after R J Smeed
one of the first traffic engineers in the world. He recorded the number of auto accidents per million miles driven against the density of automobiles. And it is a very interesting reverse revenge effect that as countries motorised more and more, driving actually became safer. The reason for this is that the early adopters had a cavalier attitude to driving. Something that was great fun to do as fast as possible without attention to the laws or pedestrians. But as the roads filled up, drivers became more and more disciplined as more and more rules appeared. Certainly the PC has followed that from the days of the homebrew computer club and the intense hobbyists. So much of that has been taken out of the realm of the adventurer and into the realm of commerce. A lot of the joy has gone.
But new safety devices bring their own problems: <linkhttp://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/BUSINESS/t000071806.html>
Section 5
Computers
Are Network Computers a revenge effect on PCs which have become too cumbersome, too flabby, too slow with applications simply too big? Or is it simply another way of commerce selling us the same technology?
As far as I can see, the excitement about NCs is really a group of companies who see them as a way of unseating Microsoft. So I approach the whole idea with a lot of skepticism. Probably the best use would be a household with lots of bandwidth and maybe one or two PCs already and lots of people who wanted to be online at the same time. You could have these additional units which would enable you to get online quickly, but I think very few people would trust these devices for essential files. I have a lot of skepticism about people working this way for anything other than games.
One thing that struck me about PCs and their negative aspects is that in a positive way they have generated all sorts of new industries such as the computer magazine industry <www.pcw.vnu.co.uk> and consultancy.
Well it certainly helps me write books! Probably we are part of
the same industry in helping people manage with new technology.
But what's interesting is the demand for human help has increased
rather than decreased as the software applications have become
supposedly more advanced and sophisticated. And that's consistent
with my argument that more advanced technology needs greater vigilance,
greater care. There are more things that can go wrong when something
is supposedly designed to be easier to operate. So there have
to be more people behind the scenes or in reserve to help you
when that software malfunctions. It's like automobiles: 75 years
ago, you could fix a lot more on your own car and people were
known to take apart their car and put it back together just to
see how it worked. By the measure of what makes a car good today
they were terrible cars but they were easy to fix and they were
simple.
And the other strange thing to emerge in computing is the emergence
of never ending beta software. Microsoft puts versions of its
software for people to download so people become guinea pigs on
a global scale. There never seems to be a finished version.
<www.microsoft.com/ie>
But Microsoft<www.microsoft.com> at some point needs to produce something it can sell. You're right, however, they are using these to get people to do a lot of development work for free. What's really intriguing to me is going over to the strategy of an annual model change for operating systems, and there are very interesting parallels with the history of the automobile industry. Particularly Sloan's idea at General Motors <www.saturn.com> of the frequent, often cosmetic, model changes as a way to stimulate.
There is now a question whether we are in period of real stagnation in the search for important new applications that help people. What we, have I think, is this baroque age of software development. We are moving to different demands.
Are we moving to software with built-in obsolescence?
An engineer I know who designs tennis rackets asked a manufacturer what the most important criterion was when they were evaluating rackets and the answer was that it should not break down in the warranty period.
So the warranty becomes a template or an envelope for designing the product so it becomes very possible for a manufacturer to reduce costs as much as possible but produce a product that will last at least as long as the warranty period. So there is a revenge effect in the warranty periods in that it doesn't help you very much when you go past it.
The manufactures are always looking of ways to reduce costs but that' s different from designing things to fall apart. I don't think they have anything to gain from that - if that were the case then the Yugo <www.yugo.com ha! There is no link> would be the most successful car in the western world.
Section 6
Back trouble
Would you agree that the world is still a better place on the
whole despite all these revenge effects?
I think so. We're comparing technological problems now with the problems we had a hundred years ago or even two hundred years ago. There was technology then and that technology had problems. American railroad timetables once had advertisements for artificial limbs. What's happened though is that we have substituted chronic problems for catastrophic ones so instead of the massive loss of life and limb, we now have less dramatic but still disabling problems.
The patterns of industrial disability tend to come on slowly and
cumulatively - back problems, carpal tunnel syndrome. It is hard
to say: "install this safety device and it isn't going to
happen". You need long periods of study and validating different
techniques. Even now there is no mouse or keyboard in the world
that has a health claim from manufacturer's categorically stating
it has been scientifically verified that this design is healthier
for you than some other design.
Some people suggest that RSI does not exist. There is no medical proof.
What they tend to say is that it's a form of hysteria. The difficulty I have with that kind of argument is that it assumes some kind of radical division of mind and body that goes against the whole direction of current medical research. I think it is more meaningful to ask why is it that in newspaper offices that use the same editorial keyboard systems in one paper there will be a very high incidence of RSI while in other papers a very low level. IT can't be the equipment alone or the equipment mainly but it is probably a combination of the stress the workers are under. There is something about the job conditions there that is resulting in a problem both mental and physical. I think it's a terrible retreat from the frontier of medical research to say that something is either visible on an x-ray machine or an oscilloscope or it is faked.
ends