Article excerpt. Evgeny Morozov. Author, The Net Delusion.

In 1980 David Collingridge, an obscure academic at the University of Aston in the UK, published an important book called The Social Control of Technology, which set the tone of many subsequent debates about technology assessment.

In it, he articulated what has become known as “The Collingridge dilemma”, the idea that there is always a trade-off between knowing the impact of a given technology and the ease of influencing its social, political, and innovation trajectories.

Collingridge’s basic insight was that we can successfully regulate a given technology when it’s still young and unpopular and thus probably still hiding its unanticipated and undesirable consequences or we can wait and see what those consequences are but then risk losing control over its regulation.

Sensory adaptation achieves huge economies by exploiting the non-randomness in temporal sequence of states of the world.

Collingridge

It’s called a “dilemma” for good reasons – explains many of the complex ethical and technological quandaries think drones or automated facial recognition that plague our globalized world today.