risk stepper (world) or more up to date US 2022


Can technology make us safer?  What are the tradeoffs? In what ways is it not so simple? Is technology the best approach?
  Concepts to watch out for:

• what are the alternatives
• what exactly is the danger and to whom?
  
• how hard is it to measure the costs and benefits against each other
• how much is about technology, how much is about changing human behavior
• cost of safety
• do people take more risks if you give them more safety protection
• making things more complicated (by adding safety features) means more to go wrong
• increasing safety beyond a certain point increases costs rapidly (exponential)
• we want both safety and low cost, often not possible--we are not realistic
• how visible and immediate is the risk
• what are odds of having a problem
• why don't we pay attention to some risks--are the tradeoffs worth it?
  

How do we evaluate risk?

• there is a methodology and professionals for risk analysis
• but there may be unknown unknowns (risks we didn't imagine)
• our human sense of risk does not match up with scientific risk analysis
• the risk of bad outcomes from COVID is greater than the risk of vaccination
• so why the concern about vaccination
• it is a new technology and we know those often have unexpected effects
• choice vs. luck
• we have trouble thinking statistically--which set of unlikely events is more likely?
• we hold technology to a higher standard than we hold people
  

It is all about trade-offs

• where are we willing to give up some safety for what technology can do for us
• are you willing to pay more for a higher level of safety
• what risks feel more controllable
• https://ourworldindata.org/what-does-the-world-die-from

Current safety issues

• too much safety regulation?
• we manage more things with medications, what are the dangers of those medications
• antibiotic resistance
• war and killing come to seem too much like a game--technology distances us from what's real
  

Safer:

• airbags and other safety technology, security locks
  
• security technology--fingerprint sensors, id card locks, security cameras...
• medicine
• better building materials
  
• technology often protects us from the dangers of the world around us

how much safety technology is too much?

• increased safety almost always increases costs
• Risk compensation: people take more risks when they feel safe
• bicyclists take more risks when wearing helmets
• drivers take more risks when they feel safe in their car
• excessive regulation
  

Less safe:

• automobiles mean we travel fast enough that accidents are very dangerous
• people feel safer in larger SUVs and pickup trucks but they are more dangerous for pedestrians
  
  
• risk of having information stored in computers--possibility of theft
• loss of privacy makes our information more available to people who might do harm
  
• military technology can do more and more
• nuclear weapons could wipe out all life on earth
• systems to do harm at a distance
  
• we are increasingly dependent on big complex systems
• the more complex a system the more likely there are to be errors
• a problem with a big system does more harm
  

Football helmets:

• football players hit harder and harder--result of better training and increased weight
  
• research has shown that football causes brain damage and young onset dementia
  
• new scientific research is showing that even less than a concussion can cause cumulative long-term brain issues
• do we leave that as an individual choice?
• change the rules on how to hit?
• make better helmets--technological fix
  
• helmets only reduce the risk of traumatic brain injury 20%
  
• cost is an issue particularly for high school programs
• if a helmet that absorbs shock better is bigger/heavier does that have risks? increase in spinal cord injuries
  
• if you have better helmets will people hit with their head more
• is the lack of safety part of the thrill
• helmets with more shock absorption are bigger or heavier, that increases the risk of spinal cord injuries
  
• it isn't as easy as it would seem to use technology to make us safer
• in the chart on the right of football player weight trends and the force of hits, Morris Badgro was a 190 lb typical player in 1927, Haloti Ngata was a 335 lb. player in 2006
  

How big does a risk have to be for the government to regulate it?

•  the risk needs to be proven first--but how much harm do you allow to happen while waiting for a higher level of proof
  
• if the risk cannot be easily evaluated by ordinary people then there should be regulation
• how much does the risk affect others or just the person who takes the risk
• is it enough to have safety warnings instead of banning something
  
• are the people taking the risks able to make good decisions?
  

 Technological Fix: we can fix something with technology and not have to change our behavior.

Nye considers two kinds of examples, accidents and military technology.  He has a political view you may not agree with on military technology, but you need to understand the arguments he is making whether you agree or not.

Is a technology safe?  This turns out to be a complicated question

• very complex technology bring special risk issues because there are so many things that can go wrong that you have to think about risk differently
  
• for many big technologies research goes into trying to predict the risk of an accident
• you can never get to a risk of zero: sometimes risk reduction is impractical and sometimes less severe risks are tolerated if the cost of risk reduction would be greater than the improvement
  
• should a crewed spacecraft be 99.9% safe (likely to complete a mission without harming the people) or 99.99% safe?
• "Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1.5 million systems, subsystems and assemblies. With 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects."  Jerome Lederer, Director of Manned Space Flight Safety
  
• how much are we willing to pay for safety?
• reduce risk by redundancy--have duplicate systems--have greater safety at increased cost
• redundancy doesn't work in all situations
  
• that depends--do people choose to take the risk, how much do we think the technology should be trustable...
• what tradeoff do we make between risk and cost?
  
• different kinds of risks are taken more or less seriously

Why do we react strongly to technological disasters? (maybe less so than 30 years ago)

• we pay a lot more attention to one big accident than many small ones
• our perceptions of safety aren't necessarily accurate
• we are more frightened of big accidents--more in the news
• small probabilities aren't intuitive
• a big car feels safer, but a small car may better be able to avoid an accident (such as hitting a deer)
  
• a big car is likely to cause more injuries to people in other cars when involved in an accident
  
• bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2008
• people want to assume the systems we use everyday are safe
• but in many cases necessary maintenance has not been done
  
• there have been bridge collapses caused by bad design (Takoma Narrows)
• some are caused by shoddy construction
• this one was caused by maintenance issues (and weak design)
  
• we wonder where else are there similar risks
• they get a lot of news coverage
  

• because whatever trust we feel in our government tends to carry over particularly to the technologies the government develops to increase public safety
• because we don't like being out of control--if something is going to go wrong we want to feel we could do something to prevent the situation or escape.  Therefore our tendency when faced with a disaster is to find someone to blame
• we don't like to think that accidents are inevitable--any complex system will break down sometimes
  
• because disasters attract readers/viewers so they are played up by the news media, in oversimplified form
  

Disasters usually have complex causes

• maintenance may intersect with design issues
  
• sometimes what we do to prevent problems in one place increases problems somewhere else--if you prevent floods in one part of a river by building levees the water is channeled downstream and may cause worse flooding there
• sometimes the problem is the harmful consequences of a technology that no one knew about in advance (or the people who saw the problem developing were ignored)
• sometimes accidents are caused by human error (this is what is usually said about the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident).  But could the system have been better designed to prevent human error, or the operators better trained?
• we had a speaker in spring 2006 who had worked on a risk study of Oconee nuclear station in the 1970s--he particularly remembered a valve with a label on the wall next to it that said "this valve turns the wrong way"
• how much can and should we do to save people  from their own stupidity
  
• sometimes accidents happen because there are known risks but they were small enough to have been ignored
• the risk of damage caused by loose insulation that caused the space shuttle Columbia accident was known, but it was one of a list of over 100 critical risks--it would have been too expensive to fix them all
• The case of the Challenger accident--they knew that cold weather could cause components to fail and chose to launch anyway
  
• an engineer tried to warn NASA of the risk
• they decided to launch anyway, the evidence of the risk wasn't very clear
• it would have looked bad to delay the launch
• known measurable risks, known unknowns and unknown unknowns
  

• the more complex a system is the harder it is to reduce risks
• technological systems tend to become bigger and more interconnected
  
• we grow more dependent on technology
• we can also use technology to reduce risk
• we live safer lives
• but the safety systems are complicated as well and we become dependent on them
• when we feel safer we take more risks
  

As technologies become more complex and more interwoven into large systems it becomes harder to anticipate all possible accidents.

• blackouts are often caused by a small problem in one place that resonates through the system in unexpected ways
• critics for the originally plan for the strategic defense initiative (sometimes called Star Wars) saw this as a key issue
  

• the idea was we could develop a system to protect us from a nuclear missile attack
• before that the strategy was "mutually assured destruction"
  
• to do this well you need to shoot down missiles from satellites, and you only have a few minutes to do it
• the targeting is going to have to be done by a computer program
  
• some scientists at the time said it would be impossible to debug the necessary computer program, which would involve millions of lines of code and which could not be fully tested until it was needed
• at any given level of technology there are systems that are so complex that we can't make them reliable
  

How much is worth spending on safety:

• should all cell phone towers be required to have backup generators?
• is it worth increased costs to pay for that?
• government would have to require it
• you can do more and more--where do you stop?
  

All of these problems can apply to military technologies, but in addition military technologies have gotten us into the pattern of believing that greater destructive power makes us safer.  Nye questions this.  The more weapons we have the safer we are--is this true?
Consider the arms race of the Cold War--let me try to tell the story more neutrally than Nye does:

• the U.S. built missiles armed with nuclear weapons because they had two advantages over long range bombers--they were impossible to defend against and they were cheaper
• the Soviets started building their own nuclear weapons and missiles sooner than we expected
• the competition became which country could deliver the most bombs (one missile carrying many separately targeted warheads was a key technological innovation)
  
• the official military strategy became mutually assured destruction--if the other side strikes first you want to be able to retaliate and cause unacceptable damage to the other side.  Submarine launched missiles were particularly valuable to this because they were unlikely to be destroyed by a first strike.  Also if the  Soviet Union attacked we wanted to be able to launch our counterattack before their missiles landed
  
• this worked, neither side dared start a nuclear war, but it was expensive and risky
  
• Reagan's idea of a defense against nuclear missiles, what became the strategic defense initiative, threatened to destabilize that--if one side developed a way of defending against retaliation it would theoretically be in their interest to launch a first strike immediately while they had that advantage
• the Soviet Union collapsed for political reasons, but some people believe that not being able to keep up in the expanded arms race Reagan created contributed to its fall
• today nuclear war is still unthinkable and that is limiting what the US can do to help Ukraine--if we escalate will the Russians then use nuclear weapons?
  

People have often made the argument that increasingly destructive military technology would make war so horrible that governments would no longer dare start wars

If anything the opposite has happened, at least for small wars: the U.S. uses technology to reduce the number of American soldiers killed, which makes war more politically acceptable

Take this back to risk:

• advances in nuclear weapons have increased risk?
  
• not the risk of total war
• but we have weapons that could wipe out life on earth (nuclear winter)
• does technology make us too powerful
• our everyday technologies bring us other kinds of risks
• is technology making us safer?