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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-6-laws-of-technology-everyone-should-know-1511701201
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A customer tries out the Animoji feature on Apple’s iPhone X smartphone at a Chicago store on Nov. 3. PHOTO:
BLOOMBERG NEWS
By
Christopher Mims
Nov. 26, 2017 8:00 a.m. ET
Three decades ago, a historian wrote six laws to explain society’s unease with the power
and pervasiveness of technology. Though based on historical examples taken from the
Cold War, the laws read as a cheat sheet for explaining our era of Facebook, Google, the
iPhone and FOMO.
You’ve probably never heard of these principles or their author, Melvin Kranzberg, a
professor of the history of technology at Georgia Institute of Technology who died in
1995.
What’s a bigger shame is that most of the innovators today, who are building the services
and tools that have upended society, don’t know them, either.
Fortunately, the laws have been passed down by a small group of technologists who say
they have profoundly impacted their thinking. The text should serve as a foundation—
something like a Hippocratic oath—for all people who build things.
Melvin Kranzberg in the 1960s. He became a technology historian. PHOTO: CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
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Prof. Kranzberg’s first law, a seemingly mundane observation, is also his most
important. He realized that the impact of a technology depends on its geographic and
cultural context, which means it is often good and bad—at the same time.
His example was DDT, a pesticide and probable carcinogen that nonetheless saved the
lives of hundreds of thousands of people in India as a cheap and effective malaria
prevention. Today, we can see how one technology, Facebook groups, can serve as a
lifeline for parents of children with rare diseases while also radicalizing political
extremists.
There is no absolute good or bad here, just how good or bad a technology is in a given
context. This points to a problem tech companies are too often reluctant to face: Their
enormous power means they have an obligation to try to anticipate the potential impact
of anything they produce.
“The dirty little secret of highly accomplished people is what we’ve had to neglect to
achieve that,” says Bill Buxton, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and one of
the creators of the multitouch interface. “To become spectacular at any discipline in
technology means you’re not well-equipped to address these questions.”
There are countless examples of this failure from the past year alone, from successful
Russian influence campaigns across social media to Tesla’s too-aggressive rollout of
autopilot technology.
In our modern world, the invention of the smartphone has led to the necessity for
countless other technologies, from phone cases to 5G wireless. Apple’s cure for staring
at your phone too much? A smartwatch to glance at 100 times a day.
Steel, oil and rail were the package of technologies that dominated the 19th and early
20th centuries, especially in America, just as the internet, mobile phones and wireless
connectivity are transforming the 21st century.
Craig Federighi, Apple senior vice president, software engineering, spoke about differential privacy, which Apple says is a
way to collect user data while protecting the individual’s anonymity, at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference in
2016. PHOTO: APPLE
More broadly, lawmakers are taking an interest in everything from privacy and data
transparency to national security and antitrust issues in tech—more because of a shift
in our culture than in the technology itself.
But does that mean we owe the modern world to the existential contest between the U.S.
and the former U.S.S.R.? Or was that conflict itself driven by previous technological
developments that allowed Hitler to threaten both nations?
The trick is, because technology generally reaches mass adoption via corporations,
those businesses must think of the consequences of their actions as well as how they
profit from them. When corporations don’t, regulators, journalists and the public
sometimes do it for them.
Mr. Cook sets the tone at Apple, with his penchant for public pronouncements about
how the company protects users’ data. Google has recently adopted initiatives such as
“inclusive design” checklists to assure that the widest possible audience has tested new
services, and antidiscrimination measures to make AI less racist. Facebook now has
teams dedicated to privacy, security and safety that review new features and services
before they are rolled out.
As Prof. Kranzberg presciently noted at the dawn of the internet age, “Many of our
technology-related problems arise because of the unforeseen consequences when
apparently benign technologies are employed on a massive scale.”
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