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Humans are not good at calculating risks, and that makes the dangers of new technologies difficult to assess. Besides, even if we were better at estimating risk, the difficulty of predicting future technological developments makes it nearly impossible to know in advance which technologies truly pose a threat to us and which do not.

This point is brought home in a letter from Norton Zinder to Rockefeller University president Fred Seitz in January of 1978. Zinder thanked Seitz for sending him a clipping about recombinant DNA and responded to some comments Seitz had made about the differences between public reaction to recombinant DNA and public reaction to the early stages of computing technology. In contrast to recombinant DNA, which Zinder reckoned would “continue to be an issue of one kind or another,” Saitz had pointed out that the “birth pangs of modern electronics went and continue to go almost without note.” Very few people had complained about “potential privacy invasion by access to an individual’s detailed [digital] records.” What was responsible for the difference? Zinder referenced a “subliminal fear of genetic engineering of humans” and “natural fears of ‘messing with life itself.’” Timing also played a role. If the technological change arrived slowly, Zinder thought that it was more likely society would adjust. But if, say, the power to genetically engineer humans “arises suddenly, as I believe it might, then the problems will dwarf those of the present.”¹

Saitz’s comment about the difference between public reactions to genetic engineering and public reactions to computing technology turned out to be quite prescient. Advances in digital technology, the advent of social media and the attempts by companies like Google and Facebook to collect, package and sell consumers’ information without their consent — all of this occurred relatively slowly, over several decades, and since it didn’t press our “messing with something profound and fundamental” buttons the way that genetic engineering does, relatively few people sounded the alarm early on about the potential consequences. And yet, one could argue that “surveillance capitalism,” as Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff has termed it, is at least as much a threat to our well being as our ability to tinker with our own genome.

Notes

1 Norton Zinder Collection, Series: Rockefeller, Box 16, Folder: 1977 RU, Zinder to Fred Seitz, January 3, 1978.