Policies and Prospects: Technical and Social Change

Abstract

Forecasting technical change is a dangerous business. Most people who have tried it in the past — industry, government or university academics — have made absolute howlers when attempting to spell out how much time or money will be required to develop a new technology, and how acceptable it will be to the intended users. The ghastly example of Concorde, and the continuing arguments about nuclear fast-breeder reactors, provide two obvious examples. Looking back to the mid-1960s, we can find such statements as:

The years 1965/66 will be memorable in the history of man’s control of energy. Ten years ago, nuclear energy could compete with fossil power only where there was a shortage of coal and of oil or where (as in England) there was a growing reluctance to mine the thinning coal deposits, and this was possible only because the byproduct plutonium could be sold to the military. It was a great surprise, even to many experts, when in these last years not only the cost per kilowatt hour of nuclear plants fell below that of coal-burning plants, but even the capital cost per installed kilowatt, by the advent of the American boiler reactor. In Britain probably the last coal-burning plant ever to be built is now on order. [my italics]. (Dennis Gabor, ‘Material Development’, in Mankind 2000, ed. Robert Jungk and Johan Galtung, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, 1969, p. 159.)