The Challenge of Technological Uncertainty

摘要

To hold incompatible truths in tension is to adopt an attitude of wisdom. . . . It is also to treat ambivalence as the optimal compromise, to equate hypocrisy with adaptability, and to equate paradox with effectiveness. Ambivalence, hypocrisy, inconsistency, and equivocality may be pejorative labels in times of stability, but they are markers of heightened awareness in times of transition. In times of transition people are especially sensitive to the fact that they talk reality into existence and [that they] need plausible stories to retain their success in doing so.rnAmong other things, the cold war was an era of transition, ornamented with ambivalence, hypocrisy, inconsistency, and paradox. Bringing these issues into focus matters now because we arguably again inhabit an era of transition-from cold war to placeless conflicts, from nation-based structures to global flows, from American ascendance to American declension, from just plain weather to global warming, etc. Amid these puzzling shifts, scholars, policy makers, managers, and citizens are increasingly aware of, and uneasy about, our limited understanding of that sort of technology on which contemporary society relies to address complex problems, themselves often poorly specified.