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Taking care of the future
Published in Jack Stilgoe, Experiment Earth, 2015
‘Technological fix’ is a misnomer. They are never fixes in the sense of repairing something that is broken. As Thomas Hughes explains, ‘Technological fixes are partial, reductionist responses to complex problems. They are not solutions’ (Hughes 2004, p. 241). Twenty-first century global problems are rarely acute. They are more often chronic, requiring management rather than a cure. Alvin Weinberg’s faith in technological fixes now seems anachronistic. It is hard to imagine a contemporary government taking seriously schemes such as Star Wars. But, according to Evgeny Morozov, the enthusiasm for fixes is undimmed. He recasts it as ‘solutionism’, which ‘presumes rather than investigates the problems that it is trying to solve’ (Morozov 2013, p. 6). Morozov’s focus is the new array of digital technologies for which claims are made that they will not just make our lives easier, but also solve big social problems. We see with other emerging technologies that similar claims are made about the future. Emerging technologies are often constructed as solutions to problems of their own imagination, as well as being imagined as problems for governance in themselves, too. Following Morozov, as well as the growing field of the sociology of expectations and an older set of ideas about the sociology of social problems (e.g. Schneider 1985), social scientists should therefore seek to track the claims that are made about the definition of such problems.
The Migration of Authority in Tactical Decision Making
Published in Malcolm Cook, Jan Noyes, Yvonne Masakowski, Decision Making in Complex Environments, 2007
Sidney Dekker, Nalini Suparamaniam
In order to renegotiate authority, or sometimes even to realise that authority needs to be renegotiated, people need to coordinate. They need to coordinate across distances and across organisations, teams and countries. Communications technology (for example, e-mail, faxes, telephones) assists as the medium for these interactions. Here the question was on how technology augmented coordination. Our data pointed to a paradox: a mismatch in which technology both augmented coordination but also caused difficulties that interfered with coordination. Technology and human work in other work domains (for example, Dekker and Hollnagel, 1999) often show a similar tension between delivering benefits and creating problems at the same time. Technology is often introduced on the back of promises of quantitative benefits and with the idea that there is a “technological fix” for whatever problems there are with coordination.
Life-cycle analysis of electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles
Published in Transportation Planning and Technology, 2023
Khashayar Khavarian, Kara M. Kockelman
Using technology to solve problems is popular, though not always successful. A ‘technological fix’ using low-cost but inappropriate technology can create more problems than it solves (Rosner 2013). One method for recognizing and mitigating emissions and energy effects of new technologies is the application of life-cycle assessment/analysis (LCA). LCA is defined as ‘a tool to assess the potential environmental impacts and resources used throughout a product’s life cycle, i.e. from raw material acquisition, via production and use stages, to waste management’ (Bjørn et al. 2018, 18). While LCAs for similar products can reach somewhat different conclusions (GDRC 2016), such analyses are very valuable in identifying important environmental issues and suggesting directions for improvement. Since the 1960s, pollution, energy use, and material scarcity have been major drivers of LCA, with focus evolving from material waste to pollution, to energy demand and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions today.