Over the past several months, as it appeared that we might get a new Administration, support for, and speculations about, reviving the Office of Technology Assessment have been on the rise. In Congress, New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt has been carrying the flag.
But support is growing even at the grass roots level. Take, for example, the new online support group, Hey, hey–let’s reopen-the ota-with citizen input, which gets considerable play on my facebook page. The group has also set up a predictive market that allows members to wager on OTA’s future.
My prediction is that OTA will be revived, and–putting my money where my mouth is–I am prepared to bet heavily on it. But my rationale is not analytically grounded. As in any betting situation, it is a gut reaction, made in the face of uncertainty. Given my hopes and passions about a revived OTA, I would vote based not on a careful analysis of all the complex variables but rather in response to the excited signals coming from the emotional center of my brain.
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This is just what Dan Ariely, author of Predictable Irrationality would predict–even in the case of experts. As he points out, individual predictions about uncertain events are rarely based on rational assessments; moreover, because they are typically ladened with considerable emotional baggage, such predictions are typically way off the mark.
If–as I suspect–others are like me, it would behoove OTA’s supporters to rethink the rationale that they use to promote the revival of OTA. Responding to critics from the past, who argued that OTA’s reports were untimely and therefore unresponsive to Congress’ day-to-day legislative needs, OTA’s supporters have generally sought to demonstrate OTA’s positive impact by linking its reports to subsequent Congressional legislation. Perhaps that is not what is most important. Reading recent books about uncertainty–such as Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkards’ Walk and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, I’m more and more convinced that what decision makers need today, in this age of complexity and high uncertainty, is a way to think holistically and creatively about the possibility of future outliers and unanticipated events–metaphorically described by Taleb as Black Swans. As he emphasizes, we are fooled by our belief that we can make sense of the world by reducing problems down to what we know. The demon in all of this, he says, is:
not just the bell curve and the self-deceiving statistician, nor the Platonified scholar who needs theories to fool himself with. It is the drive to ‘focus’ on what make sense to us. Living in our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination that we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others (The Black Swan, p. xxvii)
Ironically, anticipating the future was one of OTA’s original goals, and holism was the method used to achieve it. In fact, many of our studies were highly successful in this regard. Speaking of my own work, for example, I would point to Intellectual Property Rights in An Age of Electronics and Information, which anticipated how networking technology might undermine the copyright and patent systems; Electronic Enterprises: Looking to the Future which pointed out how network architecture would determine the future of the networked economy; Global Standards: Building Blocks for the Future, which identified the need for a global standards strategies long before the Chinese decided to become major players in this arena.
No doubt, these are uncertain times. Today, we are trying to make sense of recent, unanticipated disasters, such as the outcome of the war in Iraq and Afganistan and the recent colossal market crash. These events are Black Swans; Could they have been anticipated? I doubt it, given the way knowledge generation is organized in bureaucratic universities and disciplinary silos, where creativity and the cross fertilization of ideas and methodologies is generally inhibited. But OTA was designed to identify Black Swans. To this end, it fostered an interdisciplinary culture, a more relaxed research methodology, and reached out to a broad array of thinkers and publics. Would not a refunded OTA be best suited to address the present situation?
Recognizing that people are becoming more and more anxious in the face of uncertainty, and highly unanticipated events, I propose a new narrative for marketing OTA. Technology Assessment to the Rescue! This is not only a good idea; it gets you right in the guts.
