Is AI good or bad – and who decides?

One of the most frequently cited technology historians, Professor Melvin Kranzberg, was a major proponent of the law of unintended consequences. So much becomes obvious in his original 1986 paper, at the point where he expands on how he coined the first of his own Laws of Technology. "I mean that technology's interaction with the social ecology is such that technical developments frequently have environmental, social and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purpose of the technical devices and practices themselves, and the same technology can have quite different results when introduced into different contexts or under different circumstances." Going further, Kranzberg observed that many technology-related problems arise when "apparently benign" technologies are introduced at scale. Kranzberg died in 1995 and, for him in his time, an example of this phenomenon was DDT – in one context, a pesticide with dangerous side effects; in another, an important weapon to curb the spread of malaria.