Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences

Since I had been reading on the topic of technology, complexity, decision making and the like, I decided to follow up on some of the sources I had come across in my other reading. I chose Inviting Disaster, by James R. Chiles, (another Minnesotan), Why Things Bite Back by Edward Tenner, and Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow. I also decided to review them together, although I have also reviewed the latter separately.The Chiles book Inviting Disaster is thoroughly entertaining. The author is a professional writer with a readable style who often tries out equipment, goes on site, or goes along with technicians in order to do his research. He is by no means given to just armchair research and that makes for a very exciting narration.I did have some difficulty getting used to his method of pairing recent and 19th Century tales of disaster, especially his habit of jumping back and forth between the two narrations. It does focus ones attention on the similarities between the two events and the degree to which we have learned little from experience! It would appear that leaning from mistakes has been given more lip service than practice over the years. This may well be due to the fact that it's only been more recently that failure itself has been made a subject in its own right with a proper examination of how systems "go off the rails" and what can be done about it.The author includes an interesting variety of situations, and the list makes it clear that complexity itself gives rise to surprising new outcomes. Just as the authors of Figments of Reality note, complex systems can give rise to emergent characteristics which are entirely unexpected and therefore not planned. (In their book intelligence/mind arising from brain/nerve.In Inviting Disaster, Chiles focuses on the effects of top down management, the over riding desire to accomplish records and goals, and the disenfranchisement of front line workers who have important information about front line conditions as the primary cause of disaster. He also notes that with very complex systems, the Devil can be in the details, and it tends to be these that get overlooked or ignored. In the final chapters, he suggests that successful companies have tended to focus on customer satisfaction and safety, and not only value but reward bottom up communication.The book has a very extensive bibliography that the interested reader might enjoy following up for further information on the technology/human interface. The appendix also includes a list of disasters and near disasters and brief descriptions of each; an eye opener. Why Things Bite Back is by a historian turned science editor, Edward Tenner. This volume focuses on what the author calls "revenge effects" of technology, the reverse or worse outcomes arising from applications of technology that were intended to eliminate or mitigate problems. Tenner's book takes a more holistic look at the unexpected outcomes of science and technology rather t

This book is a well researched and enjoyable examination of some of the most perplexing outcomes of technological innovation. A well intentioned intervention that leads to unforeseen negative consequences is what Tenner calls a "revenge effect", and it seems that our modern world is full of them. An airline concerned with safety may require that all infant passengers have their own seat rather than travelling on the lap of an adult. However, since the seat will cost money, many families choose to travel by car which is more dangerous than air travel, and so more injuries and deaths result. Thus, the airlines' safety intervention has resulted in the revenge effect of a net increase in passenger injury and death.Tenner claims, that the answer to many of these technological revenge riddles involves a deintensification of our technologies, and a better understanding of the greater system in which technological innovation takes place. Every new release of our technological products purports to be better, faster and stronger than the last, but hitting the problem harder with a more intense version of the same technology is not sustainable. Often this "improvement" race succeeds only in increasing the number and severity of revenge effects. Even in computing where advances have been exponential there is no hard evidence of anything more than a minimal increase in the efficiency of the average computer user. Better system understanding, coupled with technological deintensification will allow a more subtle, lasting, and better integrated solution to many problems.

I discovered Tenner's ideas on how technology bites back when I read a magazine article on the history of the chair-- how it was first a throne, for royalty, and how gradually, wealthy people owned them-- that chairs led to tables, led to computer keyboards-- and backpain. I really liked how the history of so simple a device could be so fascinating.So I found the book. Being in health care, I was pleased to discover that so much of the book covers the way that medical technology has bitten boack, and how we have been, to some extent, misled on the "wonders" of modern drugs and therapies. For example, the dazzling emergency medical techniques developed in Korea and Viet Nam now allow meergency docs to save more crash victims lives, but that now allows more para and quadraplegics, more brain-damaged to live at huge expense. It's good that they can be saved, but expensive. I've used this book as a source of some great quotes and interesting facts in my lectures on alternative health care. It really opens your eyes to see that a gee whiz technology can also have "bite-back" effects you'd never think of.

This is an excellent book that explores in a very interesting way the complex and often unforeseen consequences of "improved" technology. The author writes very well and unlike other books in the popular/technical genre he backs up what he says with firm scholarship and many citations. My only quibble is that I think that the book could have used - right up front at the beginning - some clear definitions regarding "revenge effects" "reverse revenge effects," "recombination effects," etc. It was somewhat annoying not to have these and have to distill them from the examples given in the book. But again, a minor quibble. Highly recommended.

Why is it that any step forward seems to be followed by three steps back ? This guy knows, he also knows why: * Bigger roads lead to more traffic jams * New "cheaper" technique for gallbladder operations actually increased the expenditures (more operations performed). * Introduction of PC's in the office did not actually lead to an overall productivity increase. * Mandatory use of gloves in professional boxing actually multiplied cumulative, chronic damage. Covering a broad variety of subjects like antibiotics, killer bees, DDT, computers and zebra mussels. Exceptionally well researched, did you know for example that good old Murphy was a captain at Edwards Air Force Base ? or that during the American War of Independence, 75% of American troops treated in hospitals did not survive (disease, often not related to wounds caused nine out of ten casualties) ? In his mission, the author occasionally (well, no make that often) loses the concept of common sense: any flaw in any invention or technological advance is made to be bigger than life. Something along the line of: since airconditioning equipment raises the temperature outside, the net effect is zero, duh. If more thinkers like this man would be around, we certainly wouldn't use cars, hospitals or pain killers and certainly would not want kids. Notwithstanding the pessimistic tone, this definitely gives you something to ponder.