It was Pournelle’s reply to Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, who were saying, in the 1960s and 1970s, that the Earth was running out of resources and massive famines were only years away. It was a reply to Jeremy Rifkin’s so-called fourth law of thermodynamics; it was a reply to all the people scared of nuclear power and trying to regulate it into oblivion.
Club of Rome letter talked about disasters decades away, precisely, the first decades of the twenty first century. They were dismissed as unreliable because there was a petrol crisis in the year following the letter, and when that was solved people misrepresented the content of the letter as if it was talking of a disaster only years away.
That was the fundamental meaning of A Step Farther Out unto me, the lesson I took in contrast to the Sierra Club’s doom-and-gloom. On one side was rationality and hope, the other, ignorance and despair
Given the current situation, and what science is saying on the current state of the planet, it seems to me that they got things amazingly right.
But how many people have died because of the slow approval in the US, of drugs more quickly approved in other countries—all the drugs that didn’t go wrong? And I ask that question because it’s what you can try to collect statistics about—this says nothing about all the drugs that were never developed because the approval process is too long and costly. According to this source, the FDA’s longer approval process prevents 5,000 casualties per year by screening off medications found to be harmful, and causes at least 20,000-120,000 casualties per year just by delaying approval of those beneficial medications that are still developed and eventually approved.
It’s a huge mistake to generalise the cost/benefits of regulation regarding medicine to technology as a whole.
So there really is a reason to be allergic to people who go around saying, “Ah, but technology has risks as well as benefits”. There’s a historical record showing over-conservativeness, the many silent deaths of regulation being outweighed by a few visible deaths of nonregulation. If you’re really playing the middle, why not say, “Ah, but technology has benefits as well as risks”?
The historical record can’t possibly take into consideration the rising destructive potential of technology and the abysmal conditions of life we started in. Worst case, if you allowed an unsafe steam engine in the 1800, it could blow up, start a fire and kill an average of dozens people.
I feel the reasoning on the cost and benefits of regulation and industrialisation is still really shallow if confronted to everything else in the sequences. The risks coming from regular technology aren’t even close to extinction level threat, but they are pretty real and there’s a lot of damages that could be cut down without any drawback.
Club of Rome letter talked about disasters decades away, precisely, the first decades of the twenty first century. They were dismissed as unreliable because there was a petrol crisis in the year following the letter, and when that was solved people misrepresented the content of the letter as if it was talking of a disaster only years away.
Given the current situation, and what science is saying on the current state of the planet, it seems to me that they got things amazingly right.
It’s a huge mistake to generalise the cost/benefits of regulation regarding medicine to technology as a whole.
The historical record can’t possibly take into consideration the rising destructive potential of technology and the abysmal conditions of life we started in. Worst case, if you allowed an unsafe steam engine in the 1800, it could blow up, start a fire and kill an average of dozens people.
I feel the reasoning on the cost and benefits of regulation and industrialisation is still really shallow if confronted to everything else in the sequences. The risks coming from regular technology aren’t even close to extinction level threat, but they are pretty real and there’s a lot of damages that could be cut down without any drawback.