Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book is slightly mistitled; it probably should have been called "HOW Things Bite Back", since there's not a lot of "why" until the last few pages of the book. Tenner provides many discrete examples of how various technological solutions to problems of the past have resulted in unforseen consequences, but never really gets at the heart of the philosophical question of why there must always be such unintended consequences. Despite this, it's a fairly interesting little look at various disasters, big and small. Surprisingly, for someone who's not a sports fanatic, the foray into how technology has changed sports in unexpected ways turned out to be the most interesting section.

Publishers prefer catchy titles for their books, and this one is certainly catchy, but its subtitle is what buyers should pay attention to. Unlike some other reviewers, I was pleasantly surprised by the author's scrupulously neutral (some would even say optimistic) tone, which gives authority to his analysis. I was prepared for an anti-technology rant. Instead I found a carefully researched -- and fascinating -- set of cautionary tales. I WOULD take this book along to the beach, but I'm also somebody who reads the reverse side of cereal boxes.

What I got out of reading this book is more than just that new technologies can have unintended consequences -- that is to say, that people frequently FAIL to predict their consequences -- but also that it is essentially IMPOSSIBLE to predict all such consequences. The policy implications may be subtle, but they are important: while we might be able to improve our predictive abilities somewhat, we should be much more humble in our assumptions about the likely environmental, economic and social effects of technologies. There is much more to his argument, of course, but the evidence Tenner marshals in order to underscore this central point makes the book a must-read for anybody working in areas where technological development plays a central role.

If Edward Tenner has any plans to write a 2nd edition, I hope that he also includes some examples of the unintended consequences of new energy technologies and consumer electronics (besides computers). If he does, I'll buy that one too.

Boy, we humans make a mess of things, don't we? Our solutions to problems end up causing other problems. We can never get ahead of the curve. So, what's the point? Why do we bother inventing things? If we stopped right now, and lived like its 2002 forever, we will be in better shape, and live quieter, more stress-free, and even safer, lives. That is NOT what Tenner advocates in his book. But it is a conclusion one could reach when you read the litany of unintended consequences he provides.

Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Tenner shows quite clearly how and why we have unintended consequences. Once you read this book, you will find yourself thinking about many of the technological fixes in your life and wondering what unintended consequences they begat.

The next step - and maybe this can be Tenner's next book - is ask, what can we do about this situation? We cannot and should not stop innovation or problem-solving. But maybe we can do two things. One, explore how feedback loops can be enhanced, especially now that we are living in a digital world. It sounds silly when you read that someday, your refrigerator will order milk from a grocery store when it "senses" you are low on milk, but the faster and more efficient the feedback loops, the better we can be at forecasting danger ahead. Secondly, when a new solution or invention comes to fruition, look back for a moment, not ahead. Something is always lost when a new tool comes into human hands. Maybe the old tool had positive attributes we should try to keep. For a great example of this, read the little essay on railroads in George Kennan's Around the Cragged Hill. As he describes it, at the very point in history that the railroads had created a magnificent system, uniting the country while allowing it to spread, maximizing speed and safety, the car was invented. And the railroads withered. A sad story, the way he tells it. And while Kennan may be a little too romantic when it comes to 19th century rails, I am sure that there are many things about the rails that we have lost, now that we drive or fly.

I always appreciate a book that makes me think. This one does and is recommended.

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 than at specific disasters. Medicine, Environmental Disasters, Computerized Offices, and Sports are among the facets of modern life that are examined.science and technology. In general Tenner sees there has been an exchange from the overwhelming, localized disaster affecting a few to a few thousand individuals to the chronic, more socially distributed effects of negative outcomes that require more sustained vigilance and therefore more expense distributed over an entire society or over the world's population as a whole.

One of the more interesting aspects of the book is the point made that there has been a major change for the worse in the level of satisfaction with life that has arisen as an unexpected outcome of reduced risk. Apparently as life becomes easier and we are less threatened by major problems, we begin to magnify minor problems. He also notes the odd relationship between computers and productivity; their promise doesn't seem to have lived up to the expectations of the industry, and he suggests that our dependence upon them has created complications. He admits, however that some of this may be due to the lag between the introduction of new equipment and the full embracement of the technology, noting that there was also a problem created by the lag between introduction of electrical motors and the abandonment of steam power in industry during the earlier part of the 20th century.

The book has a small annotated bib for "further reading", but the more extensive notes to the chapters with their resources, include titles that might interest the reader too.

Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow, a professor of sociology at Yale, is the most detailed of the three. I found it more difficult to get into this book, however, because of its more technical discussions of industry failures, particularly those in the nuclear power industry. The book was reverently referred to by both of the above authors, however, so when I had finished reading them, I returned to this book and got much more out of it than I had on my first reading. (See my individual review on this book under the title.)

Because of his overall approach as a sociologist to the subject of the human/technology/organization interfaces, Professor Perrow tended to look more closely at how human goals, preconceived notions of reality, and social structures set up some types of failure. He also notes that in some instances, had the various individuals actually tried to cause the accidents of which they became a part, they probably would have had difficulty doing so.

The final chapter of the book is very interesting for the author's social commentary and his suggestions for resolution of dangerous situations. Although I'm not entirely sure I believe that his position is a strong as it seems on first reading, I think it's definitely something that should be considered; certainly to do so would cause us less harm than not doing so might.

The bibliography contains a wide range of references and demonstrates the thoroughness of the academic research. I would make an excellent starting point for anyone who wanted to do their own similar study.

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 book deserves a 5-Star rating for the depth of its research, the overall quality of descriptive analysis, and the scope of its coverage. It is full of well-documented examples of technological unintended consequences.

It falls to a 3-Star rating for its failure to explain why these things happen, and for its dry, flat tone. I'm fairly sure this was written as a popular book on the subject, and not a text book, and as such we expect a different kind of writing. (College students are forced to read any number of numb, incomprehensible texts.) Other popular accounts of technical issues manage to hew to the science and engineering line with livelier writing. ("To Engineer is Human" is a good example.) "Why Things Bite Back" is clearly written, it just isn't a page turner, and lacks the sense of "I was there" that fosters a close relationship between the reader and the book.

The book failed to touch on other examples of unintended consequences. In fairness to Tenner, he never pretends to cover non-technological issues. The examples and impact of the law of unintended consequences in the social sciences, law, and government is possibly even greater than technological issues. Just as an example, think of the unintended consequences of the U.S. income tax laws. Tens (or hundreds) of thousands of professionals are paid billions of dollars a year to help citizens negotiate what started as a method of financing government. These social issues are at least as interesting as the technology issues. Maybe Tenner needs to write a second book.

Recommended, but not a good book for reading at the beach.

I can't recall reading another book on technology that was as well-balanced as this is. For this reason alone, Why Things Bite Back is good reading.

But Tenner achieves much more than balance. He identifies useful categories, like revenge effects and reverse revenge effects. Within the former, Tenner identifies repeating effects (e.g., doing the same thing more often rather than gaining free time, as happened with time-saving devices like home clothes washers and dryers when we quit taking as many clothes to the laundry), recomplicating effects (e.g., being expected to remember more numbers as we go from rotary to push button telephone "dialing"), regenerating effects (e.g., Patriot missles breaking up Scuds into multiple, smaller projectiles), and recongesting effects (e.g., the transformation of apparently limitless electromagnetic bandwidth to congested, largely filled bandwidth).

Whew! When reading this, I wondered how Tenner would later use these categories, which he introduced at the beginning of the book. Well, he does return to them and, in doing so, seems to be taking a first pass at crafting a useful nomenclature.

My main problem with the book is that Tenner presses some of the arguments too hard, such as the perceived link between defeating TB and facilitating AIDS. I was disappointed to see this argument pop up again 260 pages after its first mention--this time in the book's conclusion.

Tenner concludes that we can best manage revenge effects by retreating from intensity through three means: diversification, dematerialization, and finesse. Tenner provides numerous examples of each strategy, such as fostering diversity in plant species, substituting brains for stuff, and allowing a fever to play its role in fighting infection.

Despite the presence of a few weak arguments, Why Things Bite Back is really remarkable and goes a long way toward preparing us to meet the challenge of continued, fast-paced technological progress.

Maybe I had the wrong expectations from a book titled "Why Things Bite Back." I expected to read what it was about things and our relationships to them that create discomfort and even tragedy. I wanted an exploration into why the drawbacks of things are overlooked until it's too late, and how we can learn to avoid that. Instead I got "A Bunch of Things That Go Wrong," story after story of the unforseen consequences of technologies. I was looking for insight and got observation instead.

Edward Tenner has written an amazing book dealing with unintended consequences of technology. The book probably would have received five stars if it was available in a more up to date version and/or more individual technologies had been explored (hopefully 'Our Own Devices', his newest book will rectify both points). A revised edition would be most welcome. (For instance in the section on computers the Pentium chip had just been released.)

Tenner's gift is in his ability to take very complex subjects with a myriad of unseen interactions and to explain the outcomes in a logical, readable and comprehensive manner. This would be an excellent book to use in a systems safety course, along with James Chiles' 'Inviting Disaster,' which is also an excellent read.

The ability to explain revenge effects, reverse revenge effects and the like on a number of diverse subjects from sports medicine to forest fire prevention makes this a must read for safety professionals, as well as making it fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in the world as it interacts with technology.

This could more aptly be titled "Lots of Ways in Which Technological Improvements have Unexpected Consequences." There's really not much about the "why," just lots and lots of anecdotes: improved car safety leads people to drive faster, computer automation takes as much time to learn as it saves, improved transportation leads to the plague of exotic species taking over in new locations, and so on. It's a fascinating litany, with the sections on computer productivity and reduced biodiversity being of particular interest, but it wasn't clear to me how much we could learn from it other than to be more careful.