Solving Yesterday's Safety Problems Tomorrow

This ignores that suppressing the development of technology, or attempting to "guide" it (which is usually the same thing) also has negative side effects. It also assumes that the people arguing for suppression or "guidance" don't have an agenda that serves their needs or wants (but have been disguised as being in "everyone's interest'), or always know what is best. Both of these ideas could be described as naive at best. As for this: Your claim that safety problems are halfway to being solved by the time they are recognized sounds more ideological than factual. In this case, it's true. Drunk driving deaths have declined dramatically over the years, but you'd never know it by listening to MADD press releases. MADD, of course, is driven as much by the need to justify its existence as it is to stop drunk driving. For that matter, the entire automobile safety effort gathered steam after a dramatic reduction the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven was already in progress. We were already well on our way to addressing the problem when Ralph Nader's book appeared in 1965. The fatality rate had been dropping steadily since the early 1950 (when records of this sort were first compiled).

"This ignores that suppressing the development of technology, or attempting to “guide” it (which is usually the same thing) also has negative side effects. It also assumes that the people arguing for suppression or “guidance” don’t have an agenda that serves their needs or wants (but have been disguised as being in “everyone’s interest’), or always know what is best. Both of these ideas could be described as naive at best." Sorry, but it doesn't ignore this at all. A proper discussion or debate of these kinds of issues would take into account the negative side-effects of both regulation and non-regulation, but at least it would begin a process of discussion and debate. As things presently stand there is virtually no discussion or debate whatsoever, and people are forced to adapt to new technologies that they themselves have had no say in developing. As it presently stands technological research and development is non-democratic, it is neither by the people nor for the people, but is being pushed forward by private interests seeking to maximize capitalistic gains, and yet the results of these efforts are being imposed on people at large as a 'lifestyle' to which they must adapt. The effects of many new technologies are akin to the effects of new legislation, and yet while we will debate the pros and cons of various legislative proposals to death, we leave the lifestyle changes wrought by technological innovation and development in the hands of private interest groups. This is not the way in which a society should be shaped. As to the question of regulations being directed by people with non-public interests, this is certainly possible, but that is why these things need to be made part of a public, democratic political process. This would still be preferable to the current situation where social life is being shaped by a group of profit-oriented technofiles whose narrowly focused profit-making interests are almost certainly not representative of the interests of the people as a whole.

You can't effectively regulate what doesn't exist (meaning the new technologies). I'll take the free market over a group of bureaucrats or elected officials who respond to the most hysterical elements of society when deciding what technologies to choose or allow in my life. As Winston Churchill once said about democracy, it's a lousy form of government, but, in the real world, everything else is worse. It's the same with comparing the free-market approach to letting annoited technocrats or elected officials make these decisions. And asking the average person to give opinions on new technology is like asking them what life would be like on Pluto if we colonized it. Speculation that basically amounts to a creative writing exercise is not what I want guiding my life. And, yes, we do have choices. You don't have to adopt every new technology that comes down the pike. Your real objection is that the overwhelming majority of people DO want the new technology in question...otherwise, its introduction would basically be a non-event. No one worried about of the Internet or cellphones, for example, until they became common. How did they reach that point? Once they were affordable, it turned out that the great majority of people really did want them.

You quote Winston Churchill and yet deny the very democratic process that I'm referring to. While the free market can be an important and helpful element of a democratic society, do not conflate Democracy with free market economics. They are separate and distinct notions. There's real choice, and then there's choice in a purely abstract, ideal sense (which is the kind libertarians almost always resort to in these kinds of arguments). Someone may have the formal, abstract choice not to use computers, not to buy 'smart clothing,' not to own a car, or not to let their kids play video games, but in reality there are a host of compelling forces that place huge penalties upon us (or our kids) if we do not 'comply' with the demands and real constraints that our social structures place upon us. Not only would one become a social 'pariah,' but it would be difficult to actually go about one's business in a day to day manner if we did not adapt ourselves to the 'reality' (a reality we've constructed, by the way) of the current form of technological life, a form that could be very different if we had made different choices in the early stages of the development of certain key technological. Most people 'choose' to own an automobile because they actually need one for day to day living. They need one because of the 'automobiled' way our society is structured. Cities are planned and designed on the assumption that people use automobiles. Most people can't just walk to their local grocery store or hardware store, they have to drive to the mall or the big box commercial 'park.' If you're going to talk about choices, then talk about choice in its real lived context, not in some abstract ideal sense of the term. The idea of 'choice' in the way most free market lobbyists use that term is an empty notion, it sounds great in theory but does a lousy job when applied to the real world conditions within which we actually live. When I talk of technology here I'm referring to the entire technological and institutional structure, the system, that builds up around the implementation of certain technologies. Look at the social infrastructure that is designed, built and supported by the internal combustion automobile. It is an extremely complex network of physical structures (roadways, suburbs, car dealerships, gasoline stations, and so on), institutional structures (corporations, government, research facilities, and so on), social conditions (employment, urban design, and so on), as well as a host of other conditions that are all woven together in a complex fabric supporting, maintaining and advancing the internal combustion automobile. These are powerful social forces that shape people's lives in compelling ways, and they all exist to support the automobile. You have to think of technology in this complex, systematic, structural sense to appreciate the force of my arguments. You can say that someone can 'choose' not to buy a car or, in the more recent example, not to buy a computer, but look at how deeply integrated computers and information technologies have become in our society. It would be akin to self-imposed exile to refuse to use a computer in our society, and focusing on simplified examples of choice just miss the point. To reduce such complex issues to some abstract, idealized notion of choice is simplistic to say the least, but that's almost always where people go in these kinds of discussions. You can talk about the virtues of democracy all you like, but as I see it, it's just talk. In actual fact you are opposed to democratic process, as your cynical reference to the "average person" having any say in things clearly professes. You may speak as if you support democracy, but the process you outlined, a process where the future shape of society is determined by technofiles and corporate interests is nothing like a democratic society as I understand the term.