Rob Woutat: Technology's Fine, But What About Common Sense?

By Rob Woutat

Community Columnist

I was driving north on Washington Avenue in Bremerton and approaching a green light at the intersection with Sixth Street when a young woman began walking across Washington Avenue against a red light.

I honked my horn, and when the woman glanced my way for a moment, I saw that she was talking on a cell phone and carrying a baby. She turned her head forward and continued on her course, talking on her phone and walking at the same slow pace against the red light, wrapped in the shield of oblivion that separates cell phone users from their surroundings, including the danger of an oncoming truck.

Developments in technology arise out of problems calling for solutions — the wheel, the bow and arrow, the internal combustion engine, all the prescription drugs and new surgical techniques, the computer, the cell phone, and so on — and no sooner do they arrive than they become necessities.

New technologies have improved our lives but in turn created new problems that call for new solutions that create more new problems that call for more new solutions ad infinitum.

The wheel and the internal combustion engine allowed the automobile, which improved the transportation of people and goods but facilitated the escapes of bank robbers, enlarged the opportunities for teenage sex, contributed to air pollution and climate change, and resulted in unknown numbers of crashes and deaths.

The new drugs and surgical techniques that have improved our lives have also increased our chances of living long enough to get cancer and dementia and other enfeebling conditions that make us more and more dependent on nurses and hospitals.

There's no doubt that we're better at foreseeing the benefits of new technologies than we are the less happy results. We think how much better life would be if we could use stem cells to create human organs to replace failing ones, or prevent all diseases and overcome death, but we think less about potential of an overcrowded planet with catastrophic shortages of food, potable water, and clean air.

What would happen if something akin to an environmental impact statement were required before the employment of a new technology? What might have happened 100 years ago, for example, if someone had asked, "Is it prudent to manufacture these horseless carriages so cheaply that almost everybody in the country could own one? And besides the obvious benefits, what disadvantages might there be?"

The promise of the cell phone was obvious: We more easily could check in with the home and the office, make emergency calls and report crimes in progress. But would we have welcomed it so cheerily if we'd imagined it also could be used to cheat on exams, spread pornography, trigger explosives, and make us oblivious to red lights and oncoming traffic?

Einstein likened technological progress to an ax in the hands of a pathological criminal. Aldous Huxley, author of "Brave New World," had a more temperate view: "Applied Science is a conjurer, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas."

Rob Woutat may be reached at