All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World-Wide Web.
[¶1.] When I bought my first "personal" computer, it was definitely My Computer. With 64K of memory and one floppy disk drive, it really could not do very much. But it was an icon, a real computer of my very own. Several generations of development later, I am writing on a desktop machine comparable in power to the mainframes of only a decade ago. But it is now only my computer; the sense of elite possession has dissipated. To my sons, my students, and most of my younger colleagues, only a few large, superpowerful mainframes are ever referred to as capital "C" Computers; the machines they own and work on are strictly small "c" computers--capable and necessary appliances, but far from having the mythic overtones I still carry over from my experiences in the earlier days of computing.
[¶2.] At home and at work, small, compact electronic digital computers have moved more rapidly through the stages of development, deployment, and social incorporation than any major technological innovation in history. That much is widely recognized. What is less widely understood are the consequences of having moved so quickly to depending on computers and computerized networks for the performance of a wide range of tasks, critical and mundane.
[¶3.] The span of activities subject to computer control now ranges from international fund transfers to supermarket checkouts, from spacecraft controls to automobile warnings; there is even a proposal for guiding the blind via computer-coordinated and interpreted transmissions from computer-controlled Global Positioning Satellites. Yet the rapidity of consequential social and political change is rarely noted. Increasingly, business, social, and even personal rules and structures are being altered to better comply with the formalities and restrictions of computers and information systems.
[¶4.] Are the computers therefore taking over the conduct of human affairs? Not directly, in the traditional sense of runaway robots or insane mainframes. But they are reshaping our world and our lives through the long-term and indirect effects they exert on social and organizational forms and through the new kinds of dependencies that are thereby created.
[¶5.] What I call the "computer trap" has four parts: the lure, the snare, the costs, and the long-term consequences. The lure is obvious--the promise of modern computer "technology," which each year seems to offer increasing computing power and connectivity at decreasing cost, ever more powerful and adaptable tools with simpler and more human-centered interfaces. The snare is what usually ensues. Once heavily invested in the use of computers to perform central tasks, organizations and individuals alike become heavily invested in and irreversibly committed to the new capacities and potentials.
[¶6.] The costs are varied and have been pointed out by many. Computerization creates a whole new set of institutional dependencies, including a dependency on the manufacturers of hardware and software that often seems to border on pathology in the scramble to keep up with the incredible rate of change. It also has direct costs that may well be underestimated. A decade ago, Paul Strassman, seeking to explain why the widespread introduction of automation and computers had not resulted in any noticeable increase in the productivity of the American economy since the beginning of the 1970s, noted that most of the newly acquired power was being absorbed by administration and management.
[¶7.] As of this writing, economic productivity has remained flat for twenty-five years, the longest such period in America in this century. And the search for explanations as to why the computer "revolution" has not resulted in the anticipated gains has been expanded on, most recently by Thomas Landauer, who sets out in great detail the consequences for organizational as well as personal learning and for institutional stability in the face of overly rapid change, poor software design, and insensitivity to users.
[¶8.] What have been less frequently discussed in the focus on economic indicators and short-term effects on performance and productivity are the long-term, unintended, and frequently unanticipated consequences that flow both from increased dependence on computers and computerized systems and from the secondary effects that follow as the direct and indirect costs of that dependency. These are the subject of this book. The short-term and direct consequences that I discuss tend to be effects on regulation and the regulatory environment, occupational skills, operational reliability and safety, and managerial roles and responsibilities that are likely to result in long-term and indirect costs. Of particular interest are those that are likely to follow from the interactive reconstruction of organizational and social forms, and from changes in the modes and means of representation, political and economic as well as social.
[¶9.] Because this work is empirically grounded in research on organizations that manage safety-critical tasks, I pay particular attention to the potential loss of experiential knowledge as operations are increasingly computerized. The enduring myth is that extensive computerization and networking will distribute power as well as information and technical capability more evenly through industry, offices, bureaus, and the society at large. Virtual communities and virtual organizations are being promoted as flexible, adaptive, and empowering forms. What I see instead, in personal life, in business, in markets, and in the military, is the substitution of data-scanning for information-gathering, of rules and procedures for learning, and of models and calculations for judgment and expertise. In short, the replacement of art with artifice.
[¶10.] It is neither my intent nor my purpose to argue that the introduction of computers and computerized equipment is in itself a bad or disruptive thing. There are many places where the introduction of computers has enabled human beings to better cope with and manage an increasingly complex world, and there are many things that can be better done with computers than by hand. But in the rush to computerize, to automate, and to network, relatively little attention seems to have been paid to evaluating the consequences of submitting that particular realm of human activity to rapid and ofttimes radical technical change. This book attempts to take a step in that direction.