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Loading... Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended…by Edward Tenner
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 1   caffron | Aug 22, 2009 |  A wonderful set of case studies in how the law of unintended consequences always applies in any undertaking. The book avoids the obvious trap - the temptation to preach that we should therefore do nothing, whilst providing cautionary advice, such that we should always consider the law of unintended consequences. If only more people would read this book, we might have less woolly thinking and more visionary thinking instead. (  ) sirfurboy | Apr 23, 2009 | Not read yet  pod | Jan 1, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0679747567, Paperback)If it can go wrong, it will--thus Murphy's Law. Science journalist Edward Tenner looks more closely at this eternal verity, named after a U.S. Air Force captain who, during a test of rocket-sled deceleration, noticed that critical gauges had been improperly set and concluded, "If there's more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then somebody will do it that way." Tenner concurs, and he gives us myriad case studies of how technological fixes often create bigger problems than the ones they were meant to solve in the first place. The indiscriminate use of antibiotics, by way of example, has yielded hardier strains of bacteria and viruses that do not respond to pharmaceutical treatment; the wide-scale use of air conditioning in cities has raised the outdoor temperature in some places by as much as 10 degrees, adding stress to already-taxed cooling systems; the modern reliance on medical intervention to deal with simple illnesses, to say nothing of the rapidly growing number of elective surgeries, means that even a low percentage of error (one patient in twenty-five, by a recent estimate) can affect increasingly large numbers of people. Tenner examines what he deems the "unintended consequences" of technological innovation, drawing examples from everyday objects and situations. Although he recounts disaster after painful disaster, his book makes for curiously entertaining, if sometimes scary, reading. --Gregory McNamee(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:57 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
The book is incredibly well-written. The language flows smoothly, and the author uses examples which will engage readers with a wide variety of backgrounds. The author includes references as well as a recommended reading section for those who would like to further pursue the theme. I would recommend this work even for those who do not typically read nonfiction, as the "story" is something anyone can relate to.