I didn't always love unintended consequences,
but I've really learned to appreciate them.
I've learned that they're really the essence
of what makes for progress,
even when they seem to be terrible.
And I'd like to review
just how unintended consequences
play the part that they do.
Let's go to 40,000 years before the present,
to the time of the cultural explosion,
when music, art, technology,
so many of the things that we're enjoying today,
so many of the things that are being demonstrated at TED
were born.
And the anthropologist Randall White
has made a very interesting observation:
that if our ancestors
40,000 years ago
had been able to see
what they had done,
they wouldn't have really understood it.
They were responding
to immediate concerns.
They were making it possible for us
to do what they do,
and yet, they didn't really understand
how they did it.
Now let's advance to 10,000 years before the present.
And this is when it really gets interesting.
What about the domestication of grains?
What about the origins of agriculture?
What would our ancestors 10,000 years ago
have said
if they really had technology assessment?
And I could just imagine the committees
reporting back to them
on where agriculture was going to take humanity,
at least in the next few hundred years.
It was really bad news.
First of all, worse nutrition,
maybe shorter life spans.
It was simply awful for women.
The skeletal remains from that period
have shown that they were grinding grain morning, noon and night.
And politically, it was awful.
It was the beginning of a much higher degree
of inequality among people.
If there had been rational technology assessment then,
I think they very well might have said,
"Let's call the whole thing off."
Even now, our choices are having unintended effects.
Historically, for example,
chopsticks -- according to one Japanese anthropologist
who wrote a dissertation about it
at the University of Michigan --
resulted in long-term changes
in the dentition, in the teeth,
of the Japanese public.
And we are also changing our teeth right now.
There is evidence
that the human mouth and teeth
are growing smaller all the time.
That's not necessarily a bad unintended consequence.
But I think from the point of view of a Neanderthal,
there would have been a lot of disapproval
of the wimpish choppers that we now have.
So these things are kind of relative
to where you or your ancestors happen to stand.
In the ancient world
there was a lot of respect for unintended consequences,
and there was a very healthy sense of caution,
reflected in the Tree of Knowledge,
in Pandora's Box,
and especially in the myth of Prometheus
that's been so important
in recent metaphors about technology.
And that's all very true.
The physicians of the ancient world --
especially the Egyptians,
who started medicine as we know it --
were very conscious
of what they could and couldn't treat.
And the translations of the surviving texts say,
"This I will not treat. This I cannot treat."
They were very conscious.
So were the followers of Hippocrates.
The Hippocratic manuscripts also --
repeatedly, according to recent studies --
show how important it is not to do harm.
More recently,
Harvey Cushing,
who really developed neurosurgery as we know it,
who changed it from a field of medicine
that had a majority of deaths resulting from surgery
to one in which there was a hopeful outlook,
he was very conscious
that he was not always going to do the right thing.
But he did his best,
and he kept meticulous records
that let him transform that branch of medicine.
Now if we look forward a bit
to the 19th century,
we find a new style of technology.
What we find is,
no longer simple tools,
but systems.
We find more and more
complex arrangements of machines
that make it harder and harder
to diagnose what's going on.
And the first people who saw that
were the telegraphers of the mid-19th century,
who were the original hackers.
Thomas Edison would have been very, very comfortable
in the atmosphere of a software firm today.
And these hackers had a word
for those mysterious bugs in telegraph systems
that they called bugs.
That was the origin of the word "bug."
This consciousness, though,
was a little slow to seep through the general population,
even people who were very, very well informed.
Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain,
was a big investor
in the most complex machine of all times --
at least until 1918 --
registered with the U.S. Patent Office.
That was the Paige typesetter.
The Paige typesetter
had 18,000 parts.
The patent had 64 pages of text
and 271 figures.
It was such a beautiful machine
because it did everything that a human being did
in setting type --
including returning the type to its place,
which was a very difficult thing.
And Mark Twain, who knew all about typesetting,
really was smitten by this machine.
Unfortunately, he was smitten in more ways than one,
because it made him bankrupt,
and he had to tour the world speaking
to recoup his money.
And this was an important thing
about 19th century technology,
that all these relationships among parts
could make the most brilliant idea fall apart,
even when judged by the most expert people.
Now there is something else, though, in the early 20th century
that made things even more complicated.
And that was that safety technology itself
could be a source of danger.
The lesson of the Titanic, for a lot of the contemporaries,
was that you must have enough lifeboats
for everyone on the ship.
And this was the result
of the tragic loss of lives
of people who could not get into them.
However, there was another case, the Eastland,
a ship that capsized in Chicago Harbor in 1915,
and it killed 841 people --
that was 14 more
than the passenger toll of the Titanic.
The reason for it, in part, was
the extra life boats that were added
that made this already unstable ship
even more unstable.
And that again proves
that when you're talking about unintended consequences,
it's not that easy to know
the right lessons to draw.
It's really a question of the system, how the ship was loaded,
the ballast and many other things.
So the 20th century, then,
saw how much more complex reality was,
but it also saw a positive side.
It saw that invention
could actually benefit from emergencies.
It could benefit
from tragedies.
And my favorite example of that --
which is not really widely known
as a technological miracle,
but it may be one of the greatest of all times,
was the scaling up of penicillin in the Second World War.
Penicillin was discovered in 1928,
but even by 1940,
no commercially and medically useful quantities of it
were being produced.
A number of pharmaceutical companies were working on it.
They were working on it independently,
and they weren't getting anywhere.
And the Government Research Bureau
brought representatives together
and told them that this is something
that has to be done.
And not only did they do it,
but within two years,
they scaled up penicillin
from preparation in one-liter flasks
to 10,000-gallon vats.
That was how quickly penicillin was produced
and became one of the greatest medical advances of all time.
In the Second World War, too,
the existence
of solar radiation
was demonstrated by studies of interference
that was detected by the radar stations of Great Britain.
So there were benefits in calamities --
benefits to pure science,
as well as to applied science
and medicine.
Now when we come to the period after the Second World War,
unintended consequences get even more interesting.
And my favorite example of that
occurred beginning in 1976,
when it was discovered
that the bacteria causing Legionnaires disease
had always been present in natural waters,
but it was the precise temperature of the water
in heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems
that raised the right temperature
for the maximum reproduction
of Legionella bacillus.
Well, technology to the rescue.
So chemists got to work,
and they developed a bactericide
that became widely used in those systems.
But something else happened in the early 1980s,
and that was that there was a mysterious epidemic
of failures of tape drives
all over the United States.
And IBM, which made them,
just didn't know what to do.
They commissioned a group of their best scientists
to investigate,
and what they found was
that all these tape drives
were located near ventilation ducts.
What happened was the bactericide was formulated
with minute traces of tin.
And these tin particles were deposited on the tape heads
and were crashing the tape heads.
So they reformulated the bactericide.
But what's interesting to me
is that this was the first case
of a mechanical device
suffering, at least indirectly, from a human disease.
So it shows that we're really all in this together.
(Laughter)
In fact, it also shows something interesting,
that although our capabilities and technology
have been expanding geometrically,
unfortunately, our ability to model their long-term behavior,
which has also been increasing,
has been increasing only arithmetically.
So one of the characteristic problems of our time
is how to close this gap
between capabilities and foresight.
One other very positive consequence
of 20th century technology, though,
was the way in which other kinds of calamities
could lead to positive advances.
There are two historians of business
at the University of Maryland,
Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch,
who have done some extremely interesting work,
much of it still unpublished,
on the history of major innovations.
They have combined the list of major innovations,
and they've discovered that the greatest number, the greatest decade,
for fundamental innovations,
as reflected in all of the lists that others have made --
a number of lists that they have merged --
was the Great Depression.
And nobody knows just why this was so,
but one story can reflect something of it.
It was the origin of the Xerox copier,
which celebrated its 50th anniversary
last year.
And Chester Carlson, the inventor,
was a patent attorney.
He really was not intending
to work in patent research,
but he couldn't really find an alternative technical job.
So this was the best job he could get.
He was upset by the low quality and high cost
of existing patent reproductions,
and so he started to develop
a system of dry photocopying,
which he patented in the late 1930s --
and which became the first dry photocopier
that was commercially practical
in 1960.
So we see that sometimes,
as a result of these dislocations,
as a result of people
leaving their original intended career
and going into something else
where their creativity could make a difference,
that depressions
and all kinds of other unfortunate events
can have a paradoxically stimulating effect
on creativity.
What does this mean?
It means, I think,
that we're living in a time of unexpected possibilities.
Think of the financial world, for example.
The mentor of Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham,
developed his system of value investing
as a result of his own losses
in the 1929 crash.
And he published that book
in the early 1930s,
and the book still exists in further editions
and is still a fundamental textbook.
So many important creative things can happen
when people learn from disasters.
Now think of the large and small plagues that we have now --
bed bugs, killer bees, spam --
and it's very possible that the solutions to those
will really extend well beyond the immediate question.
If we think, for example, of Louis Pasteur,
who in the 1860s
was asked to study
the diseases of silk worms for the silk industry,
and his discoveries were really the beginning
of the germ theory of disease.
So very often, some kind of disaster --
sometimes the consequence, for example,
of over-cultivation of silk worms,
which was a problem in Europe at the time --
can be the key to something much bigger.
So this means
that we need to take a different view
of unintended consequences.
We need to take a really positive view.
We need to see what they can do for us.
We need to learn
from those figures that I mentioned.
We need to learn, for example, from Dr. Cushing,
who killed patients
in the course of his early operations.
He had to have some errors. He had to have some mistakes.
And he learned meticulously from his mistakes.
And as a result,
when we say, "This isn't brain surgery,"
that pays tribute to how difficult it was
for anyone to learn from their mistakes
in a field of medicine
that was considered so discouraging in its prospects.
And we can also remember
how the pharmaceutical companies
were willing to pool their knowledge,
to share their knowledge,
in the face of an emergency,
which they hadn't really been for years and years.
They might have been able to do it earlier.
The message, then, for me,
about unintended consequences
is chaos happens;
let's make better use of it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)