Chapter 5- Challenge #4: Pace Too Rapid
Summary-
This chapter focused on the stresses of pace of innovation on society. It covered many likely causes of slowing pace in technological innovation such as screening time, companies holding back markets from expanding and official policy. It also highlighted the opposing consumers' sense that technology is developing too quickly, and the overwhelming feeling that drives them away from new products. Some of these products and their innovation and introduction timelines were shown to demonstrate the flaw of a Trial and Error system. The strongest example was the disappointing and destructive rushed initiation of Nuclear Reactors. In a Trial and Error system, products and technology are tested on a trial and error basis, which often leads to long term disadvantages being missed before their launch and allows technology to easily be rushed onto market on a need basis. This was exactly what happened with the nuclear reactor, where many environmental, social, and political needs were overlooked, to a catastrophic end. Overall the author concluded there are too many systems in place that ebb and flow in different directions and differing times such that control of the system speed is simply not feasible. It would require a great shift on all sides of innovation, public to corporate. However, the system can be changed, just as it was for slavery, women's rights, human sacrifice and so on, all of which required a great system-wide shift to be fizzled out. If the interest is there to slow down the pace of advancement, it can be done.
Analysis and Synthesis-
There were a couple of things that shocked me in this fifth chapter. Very early on the author stated that "the national Institutes of Health in the U.S. now takes more than $30 billion annually from taxpayers and gives it to biomedical researchers; and U.S. military R & D is about ten times higher than that” (55). Clearly rapid innovation requires funding, but I had no idea such large amounts were being extracted every year from tax payers in the U.S. On this note, his later comment on America's attitude that "progress is unstoppable" makes sense. Progress is being fueled by you, whether you like it or not, coming out of your personal finances every single year. Meanwhile many tax payers make a lot of noise about technology moving to fast and having to contribute to progress they do not want. However, I must agree that "it is difficult to separate out their concerns over the pace of technology from their concerns over the direction". Most people I know who are afraid of technological advancement is not because of the advancement speed. Those who claim to truly be afraid of the speed of it are, more frequently than not, technophobes. It makes me wonder what exactly that means for designers, producers and controllers of the market. What about our market makes people fear that things are moving too rapidly, and what does that mean?
If we could, and did, as Woodhouse suggests, slow the market so innovations were coming at a less overwhelming speed to the consumers, how could we get the entire world market to operate at a cohesive pace? It would not and could not be an individual case basis for each market on the micro and macro scales. As Woodhouse describes, the speed at which things advance, and the speed at which people perceive things are advancing at, depends on the context they're living and acting in. This is obvious. However, this is not obvious in terms of what it means for the global economy. For the market to be the right speed in one country would require massive change for another, and so on and so forth. This would all too easily create a chain of inconvenience and cause other countries markets to run at an inconvenient and uncomfortable pace. It is impossible for this to be effective, so I must disagree with Woodhouse's claim. While it is true that a market can be slowed, or sped up, it is impossible to keep this consistent throughout the global market. Slowly this will come back to effect the same market, altering its speed of innovation once again. It is simply impossible to effectively control the speed of global technological innovation.
