ASU professor and Center Faculty Fellow, Brad Allenby recently published a paper that considers emerging technologies’ impact on the future of humanity. Allenby begins his argument with a 3-level framework: the instrumental level, which represents any particular instrument; the systems level, within which said instruments exist; and the unpredictable effects level, giving rise to the systems. Mistakes occur, explains Allenby, when largely predictable instruments are used to draw unpredictable conclusions or when “use of a technology is treated as if it were separable from the technology itself.”
From a technological advancements perspective, Allenby notes that it is highly likely that today is different from yesterday. This is not surprising and is due, as Allenby and many others have lately expressed, to the speed and industry-wide permeation of technological progress over recent years. Add to this the destabilizing nature of progress and it is not atypical for human beings to recoil and cry “whoa – hold on here!” This precautionary reaction, however, has a tendency to backfire where global competitiveness, leadership and safety are concerned.
Complex systems, evolve. Humans are such complex systems. The challenge humans face is tossing out their inadequate, static systems for more favorable, flexible and creative ones. Productivity requires recognition that at the end of the day, technology’s great impacts, both beneficial or otherwise, cannot, try as one might, be predicted. Emerging technologies, Allenby concludes, are not the danger, rather, the danger lies in human misunderstanding of complex systems and how they work.