THE INCREASING RISKS OF TECHNOLOGY

As technology develops it brings in ever more dangerous machines, new chemicals, more radioactivity, and more electric gadgets in the home. "Therefore," argue the Luddites and their parrots, developing technology brings ever increasing risks to the citizen.

Pitiful nonsense.

It is true that a railroad disaster claims many more lives than any stage coach accident could ever have claimed, but anyone who infers from this that railroads are less safe than stage coaches tacitly measures the dangers of transportation in deaths per accident. There is no law against that, of course, but it then follows that the safest transportation is to go over the Niagara Falls in a barrel, for the number of deaths per accident can never exceed one.

If we want to avoid such pitfalls, we had better measure the comparative dangers of transportation in deaths and injuries per passenger-mile or per passenger-hour (of travel). In which case stage coaches... do I have to say any more?

And this example is typical of all technology. As technology progresses, the number of fatal accidents in transportation, in the mines, in the home, by medication, etc., not only decreases, but it decreases so fast that the trend is easily visible in as little as 10 or 15 years.

This is borne out by the figures taken from official West German statistics and sent to me in a private communication by an official of Kraftwerk Union, the well known German power plant construction company.

In the figure in the next column, the bunch of curves labeled "down" is the total number of fatal accidents (1) involving electric power in the home, (2) in mining, (3) in transportation, (4) on the job. The 1970 level is taken as 100%.

The trend is clearly downward, and easily observable in as little as a decade. The figures are, of course, relative to a unit measure, for example, traffic fatalities are given per million vehicle-miles, and deaths on the job per 100,000 workers. This increase in safety has come about with expanding technology; its indicators, such as total vehicle miles, are increasing. This is shown by the upper bunch of curves labeled "up." Numbering them by the intercept on the right vertical margin, they represent (1) funds spent on drug research, (2) sales of investment goods, (3) production of electro-medical and radiation equipment, (4) number of domestic electric appliances in use, (5) miles traveled by automobile, (6) mechanization in coal mining (in units of power).

And how do we know that the downward trend of accidents is caused by the upward trend of technology?

In part, by understanding the mechanism: better road, for example, result in both more automobile traffic and fewer accidents. But also by the lack of a credible alternative explanation: by rejecting the idea that it all happened while Halley's comet was nearing the earth, and the Scorpios were wooing the Leos.