In this post, I will quote from ‘Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist’s Inquiry into Western Technology’ (1996) by Robert McCormick Adams. “The broad versatility of computers depends upon software, and software is at the same time the key source of vulnerability in computer-based operating systems: “Increasingly, the development of advanced software is an important limiting factor in the introduction and reliability of new military and commercial systems. Software requirements, as well as development costs, expand at a dramatic pace as automated systems proliferate and increase in sophistication. Despite these growing demands, the generation of advanced software programs remains largely a painstaking, labor-intensive task. As a result, the ability of U.S. industry to provide high-quality, reliable software is in jeopardy.” Also included under the information industries rubric are a dazzling array of additional technologies. Integrated circuitry, requiring demanding techniques of microelectronics and optoelectronics, merges with the category of advanced materials and has been mentioned earlier. Lasers play a vital part in information storage and printing, but also have become essential tools in manufacturing, components in compact disc players, and medical instruments with applications in eye surgery and dentistry. Fiber optic technology is recognized as the only mode of transmission consistent with the national goal of information superhighways. But at the terminals it interconnects, high-rate data transmission, high-density data storage, rapid real-time signal processing, and high-definition displays all are indispensable adaptations to a geometric rate of increase in the information base involved in making complex decisions – and to the decreasing intervals of time available to make them. In all of these areas save high-performance computing and computer networks, it is reported that Japan has at present a considerable lead. The commitment of federal support for R & D in the biomedical field has been second only to that for defense. It has, moreover, maintained a considerably more consistent record of growth. Clinical as well as basic research that is funded by the National Institutes of Health is conducted both inhouse and at independent hospitals and universities, and the targeting of funding into recognizable areas of concern is generally credited with having solidified public and congressional support for the program. The effect, in any case, has been to provide an unusual degree of continuity for studies in a very broad spectrum of biological fields ranging well beyond immediate issues of human health. Without such support at least the pace of the truly revolutionary advances that began with the Watson-Crick discovery of the double helix of DNA strands in 1953 surely would have slowed very substantially. With it, recombinant DNA and monoclonal antibody technologies and other new and sophisticated forms of bioprocessing have transformed the health sciences. New vaccines, human insulin and growth hormone, treatment of a number of inherited diseases, “transgenic” experimental animals that can be used to develop human genetic therapies, and new treatments for cancer, anemia, blood clots, and many other conditions all are under development. The mapping of the entire human genome that is currently underway constitutes an unfolding process of major scientific discovery, but from it will come a vast number of further contributions to human health that will gradually take on a more “technological” character, and that as yet cannot even be anticipated. Similar, major impacts on agricultural productivity, waste remediation, energy conservation, and industrial chemistry flow from the same technologies. Concurrent with this have been striking advances in other medical technologies, most of them linked to electronics and the computer sciences. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computer-aided tomography (CAT), and positron emission tomography (PET) are relatively noninvasive tools of great power. Cardiac pacemakers and fiber optics and lasers that have expanded the use of angioplasty, arthroscopic and other surgical approaches are merely the most salient and widely employed examples of major new additions in a diverse and rapidly growing field. In no area has there been a more substantial, federally orchestrated synergy between scientific discoveries by academic scientists in academic laboratories and their commercialization. This discussion has covered the major elements on the National Critical Technologies Panel’s list of twenty-two “critical technologies” that will continue to be the major growth sectors in the U.S. economy. Merely for the sake of completeness, the remaining members of the list may be summarily mentioned: surface transportation technologies; energy sources, conservation, and renewable energy technologies; and pollution minimization, remediation, and waste management. On a global scale, high-technology industrial activity has become increasingly interdependent but at the same time intensely competitive. Driven by dynamic economies of scale and scope that are subject to many feedbacks, it is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of large concerns whose oligopolistic strategies are directed at dominating global rather than merely national or regional markets. More than four-fifths of the world’s R & D expenditures that have fueled this growth, and more than two-thirds of the world’s total R & D personnel, still are to be found in just five of the most industrialized countries: the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Perhaps the predominant characteristics of the present world economic environment are its turbulence and uncertainty. Maximum flexibility becomes a high corporate priority – the ability to shift scale of output, product mixes, and even manufacturing locations and niches of primary activity quickly and at minimal cost. In large part as a result of the increasing utilization of robotics in assembly lines, heightened flexibility as well as economies of scale in industry have become possible at lower output levels. This is hastening the obsolescence of an older generation of giant plants, and regrettably also of some of the great industrial cities that grew up around them. With the progressively wider dispersal of manufacturing, there is a corresponding “change in the nature of markets from ‘places’ to ‘networks,'” so that “work increasingly becomes detached from place, operations from their central headquarters. With R & D investments continuing at high levels, the pace of innovation remains high. This is accompanied by the increasing effectiveness with which new means of communication can generate new consumer preferences while also encouraging great latitude of choice within them. Pressure increases to make produce cycles shorter, driving down product development time. Enormously speeded as well as simplified and rendered more accurate by computer-aided design and manufacturing robotics, and by closely controlled inventories, orders trigger “lean” or “just-in-time” production. Customized manufacture, more responsive than ever to individual consumer preferences, ceases to be inconsistent with a high, sustained volume of output. The competitive advantages of powerful global oligopolies are enhanced by management innovations that facilitate complex, multi-plant operations across international boundaries. Their strategies of dispersal weaken the bargaining positions of both national governments and organized labor. The newer, most advanced technologies, more dependent upon economies of scope and rapid flexibility than of scale, still further reinforce the advantages of corporate size and diversification. The importance of a nation-state’s ability to control its supply of critical natural resources (other than sources of energy) has steadily declined. With Japan as an outstanding (although not the only) example of how well this can be dispensed with, the openness of world markets, the declining costs of long-distance transport and communications, and the increasing availablity of acceptable synthetics have made national control of resources a relatively minor competitive advantage. For high-tech commodities in particular, the principal value-added elements are the products of lengthy, specialized R & D and an educated labor force. Fundamental criteria of profitability and competitive success are also shifting decisively. The political climate to which firms must respond includes rising pressure for public access to fuller information. With the deterioration of servicing industries, reliability and user-friendliness take on unprecedented importance. Affordability is of course not a new concern, but the context of choice is affected by the explosion of new consumer goods and widening awareness of international marketing networks. Mobility is also not new, but receives greater emphasis because of widespread life-style changes. Safety also has grown in importance as a consideration, at least partly because of growing testing and dissemination of information by governmental and public interest organizations. Finally, potential environmental impacts have become a major public concern, articulated with great effectiveness at a global level by proliferating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and of course also a subject of governmental action. As all of these trends continue, there is a dispersal of performance criteria accompanied by an erosion of control by even the most powerful nation-states over international corporate activities. Employment levels and security of employment are among the first and most common of national interests to suffer. As a result of the worldwide slowdown in growth, this is perhaps in any case unavoidable. But it has now extended even to highly successful firms in fields of great technological promise and rapid advance. The “lean” or “flexible” approaches to manufacturing that are currently regarded as essential all tend to involve at least selective reductions in labor force size and security of employment. Parallel to a significantly reduced, stable core, a marginalized, for the most part involuntarily temporary or part-time work force is created with sharply reduced benefits and working conditions, and with little opportunity for further training or advancement. While it can be argued that new, small-firm start-ups represent a natural form of rejuvenation that will ultimately be beneficial, even in a vigorous sector like the computer industry current job replacements are overmatched by short and medium-term job losses. The effect is the gradual creation of a two-tier labor force, and the progressive de-skilling of one of its major components. Exacerbating this problem in the United States are deficiencies in its educational system and the low priority given to supplementary work-force training in most sectors of American industry. United States per capita expenditures on education rank rather low among those of industrialized countries (twelfth of fourteen in OECD rankings) if we consider precollegiate schooling only. There are also disturbingly large variations in levels of spending and availability of advanced classes and specialized equipment that tend to favor schools and school districts with a high proportion of college matriculants. Students from low-income and inner city neighborhoods, who constitute the major source of supply of the industrial work force, thus tend to be ill prepared to be selected for the upper tier of permanently retained employees when there is an industrial contraction. Nor are steps taken subsequently to overcome these deficiencies. The 1990 report of the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, written well before the recent contraction had reached its present proportions, notes with concern that prevailing practices in industry tend to reinforce rather than correct the disparity: “Because most American employers organize work in a way that does not require high skills, they report no shortage of people who have such skills and foresee no such shortage. With some exceptions the education and skill levels of American workers roughly match the demands of their jobs. More than 70 percent of the jobs in America will not require a college education by the year 2000. No nation has produced a highly qualified technical workforce without first providing its workers with a strong general education. But our children rank at the bottom on most international tests – behind children in Europe and East Asia, even in some newly industrialized countries.” In the most advanced industrial sectors, the higher technical and organizational requirements of automation and lean production lead to an increasing dependence on trained scientific and engineering personnel. For those who qualify, the news is good, although the United States has lost much of the competitive advantage it held in this respect over Japan and Germany a generation ago. But in any case, this numerically much smaller trend can in no way compensate for the disruptive social impacts suffered by the work force at large. Very high R & D costs have come to constitute a necessary entry fee and continuing requirement in high value-added, high-technology industries. On average, basic research is the smallest part – only around one-twelfth – of the composite, while applied research accounts for one-quarter and development for a full two-thirds of the total. Automation is another heavy fixed cost, to a considerable degree directly replacing the variable labor component of total production costs. Variable costs, in short, are tending to give way to fixed costs. The consequence is that high-technology change provides an avenue of escape from the usual assumption that economic actions tend to engender negative feedbacks and quickly stabilize prices and market shares around a new equilibrium. Advances of this type require large initial investments but then lead to steeply falling unit costs and provide leverage for further breakthroughs and entry into new applications. The new methodological prescription is that “situations dominated by increasing returns should be modled not as static, deterministic problems but as dynamic processes based on random events and natural positive feedbacks, or nonlinearities.” The fixed costs are, however, front-end investments. Deep and immediate market penetration is a prerequisite for these to be promptly defrayed. Continuous and sensitive attention to every aspect of consumer demand, and a readiness to adapt quickly to shifts in consumer preferences, thus are also absolutely essential. And domestic markets alone, even for major industrial countries, are frequently not large enough to sustain fully automated plants in complex fields. Hence successful marketing efforts on a global scale become a further essential. It is sometimes suggested that a kind of asymptomatic function may be in sight on a truly global scale, setting limits to our collective possibilities of further growth. The raising of such an unprecedented – and it should be stressed, at this juncture absolutely unproven – eventuality obviously deepens the climate of pessimism. Virtually universal aspirations for improved well-being, consistently maintained across a century or more to come and enormously advanced by a host of discoveries and innovations of a scientific-technological character, now seem open to doubt. Moreover, the political mechanisms by which to deal constructively with forebodings of irreconcilable conflict and growing long-range uncertainties are simply not in place at present. It is difficult to see how such a complex of grave and divisive challenges can be addressed without moving beyond a framework of overriding national self-interest and a purely competitive economic marketplace.”
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