Basically there are two ways to confront a new technology due to its sociological effects. Namely:
Regulate a technology when it is still young and little known and then still hides its unexpected or undesirable consequences; or choose to wait to see what these consequences are, although then we will lose control over its regulation.
David Collingridge Dilemma
This dimea was initially silvered by David Collingridge, an academic at Aston University in the United Kingdom, in 1980, through his book The Social Control of Technology:
When change is easy, its need cannot be anticipated; By the time the need for change is apparent, the change has already become expensive, difficult, and laborious.
As abounds in it Eugeny Morozov, visiting professor at Stanford University, in the book That explains everything (edited by John Brockman):
Collingridge's dilemma is one of the most elegant ways to explain many of the complex ethical and technological dilemmas (think drones or facial recognition systems) that plague our globalized world.
Another way of facing new technologies also has to do with our predisposition to new things, which is strongly linked to our age, as he satirically wrote Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in an article published in Sunday Times, August 29, 1999::
I imagine that previous generations had to put up with grumbling and huffing at the appearance of inventions such as television, the telephone, the cinema, the radio, the car, the bicycle, the printing press, the wheel, etc., but don't think that we have learned how the thing works, namely:
Everything that is already in the world when you were born is normal.
Everything that is invented between now and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative, and with a little luck, you can make a living from it.
Everything that is invented after you have turned thirty goes against the natural order of things and is the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it, until it has been used for about ten years and slowly begins to considered normal.
–
The news
Collingridge's dilemma when facing technology
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.