If you lived through the 1950s, you might remember president Eisenhower, orderly suburban housing tracts, backyard bomb shelters - and dreams of a nuclear power plant in every home. Plans for industrial nuclear generators had barely left the drawing board before futurists predicted that every house would have a miniature version. From there, technoenthusiasts predicted the end of power monopolies, the emergence of the "electronic cottage," the death of the city and the decline of the corporation.
Pessimists and luddites, of course, envisioned nuclear apocalypse. Each side waited for nirvana, or Armageddon, so it could triumphantly tell the other, "I told you so."
With "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" in the April issue of Wired, Bill Joy invokes those years gone by. No luddite, Joy is an awe-inspiring technologist - as cofounder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems (SUNW), he coauthored, among other things, the Java programming language. So when his article describes a technological juggernaut thundering toward society - bringing with it mutant genes, molecular-level nanotechnology machines and superintelligent robots - all need to listen. Like the nuclear prognosticators, Joy can see the juggernaut clearly. What he can't see - which is precisely what makes his vision so scary - are any controls.
But it doesn't follow that the juggernaut is uncontrollable. To understand why not, readers should note the publication in which this article appeared. For the better part of a decade, Wired has been a cheerleader for the digital age. Until now, Wired has rarely been a venue to which people have looked for a way to put a brake on innovation. Therefore its shift with Joy's article from cheering to warning marks an important and surprising moment in the digital zeitgeist.
In an effort to locate some controls, let's go back to the nuclear age. Innovation, the argument went back in the 1950s, would make nuclear power plants smaller and cheaper. They would enter mass production and quickly become available to all.
Even today the argument might appear inescapable until you notice what's missing: The tight focus of this vision makes it almost impossible to see forces other than technology at work. In the case of nuclear development, a host of forces worked to dismantle the dream of a peaceful atom, including the environmental movement, antinuclear protests, concerned scientists, worried neighbors of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, government regulators and antiproliferation treaties. Cumulatively, these forces slowed the nuclear juggernaut to a crawl.
Similar social forces are at work on technologies today. But because the digerati, like technoenthusiasts before them, look to the future with technological tunnel vision, they too have trouble bringing other forces into view.
THE TUNNEL AHEAD
In Joy's vision, as in the nuclear one, there's a recognizable tunnel vision that leaves people out of the picture and focuses on technology in splendid isolation. This vision leads not only to doom-and-gloom scenarios, but also to tunnel design: the design of "simple" technologies that are actually difficult to use.
To escape both trite scenarios and bad design, we have to widen our horizons and bring into view not only technological systems, but also social systems. Good designs look beyond the dazzling potential of the technology to social factors, such as the limited patience of most users.
Paying attention to the latter has, for example, allowed the PalmPilot and Nintendo (dossier) Game Boy to sweep aside more complex rivals. Their elegant simplicity has made them readily usable. And their usability has in turn created an important social support system. The devices are so widely used that anyone having trouble with a Pilot or Game Boy rarely has to look far for advice from a more experienced user.
As this small example suggests, technological and social systems shape each other. The same is true on a larger scale. Technologies - such as gunpowder, the printing press, the railroad, the telegraph and the Internet - can shape society in profound ways. But, on the other hand,
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