Chief Executive Magazine, June 1998

In 1995, shortly after the Washington Post published the Unabomber's manifesto, a "guess who" game became popular on talk radio. Prompted by an article written by Tony Snow, then of the Detroit News, the object was to correctly guess who wrote a particular anti-technology passage--Vice President Al Gore in his best-selling Earth in the Balance or the Unabomber in his manifesto.

Al Gore is certainly no Unabomber. He supports neither the Unabomber's violent means nor the anarchic ends. Gore rings the anti-technology bell not to destroy the government, but to expand its power over the economy. But the comparison is still instructive for the light it sheds on a trend corporate executives would be wise to pay attention to": The loss of faith among many influential Americans in the promise of science and technology.

This statement may seem odd in a country crazed by computers and enthralled by the Internet. Certainly Americans welcome the latest technology with open arms and open wallets. But consider as well some opposite trends: The hurdles the biotechnology field has faced getting such seemingly benign products as new tomatoes approved, let alone Washington's knee-jerk reaction to cloning technologies. And check out how much success Congress has made in adopting sensible standards for adopting new regulations: That the benefits must simply exceed the costs. There's also the battle in Washington over encryption, which is simply the ability of a sender and receiver of a message or economic transaction to keep it private.

Lack of encryption will put a damper on electronic commerce and may soon affect our exports. "It's crazy to put restrictions on levels of technology," IBM CEO Lou Gerstner told Computerworld in April. "We're basically going to face the inability to export entry-level workstations in a year."

The belief that pure science produces applied technology that inherently improves everyone's living standard is no longer dominant. There is no one anti-technology zeitgeist. Rather the phenomenon is a confluence of factors, some rooted in understandable self interest and others in ideological hubris.

It's also the case that as Americans have grown older and wealthier, they have become more risk averse. Just as teenagers seek risk and excitement while their grandparents seek stability and security, a wealthy country will be more likely than a poor country to reject the very values and processes that created its wealth.

Economic historian Joel Mokyr distinguishes technophobes who are victims and those who are ideologues. Every technological advance creates both winners and losers. On the whole, our ancestors became wealthier as electric lights replaced candles. But candle-makers nevertheless experiences hardship. One can hardly blame individuals whose way of life is threatened by advancing technology for doing everything possible to stop it. This is traditional Ludditism.

The main threat to technological advancement, however, comes not from those who actually bear the brunt of the change, but the individuals who provide the intellectual air-cover for their complaints. These are the ideological Luddites, influential intellectuals such as Jeremy Rifkin and Kirkpatrick Sale, whose arguments are taken seriously by people such as Al Gore and other comfortably risk averse Americans.

Now it's easy to dismiss Rifkin, who's been preaching the same "the world is falling apart" sermon for years. Rifkin wrote in 1980: "The age of expansion...[and its] governing truths of science and technology, is about to give way to a new age of scarcity and economic contraction." Oil reserves, according to Rifkin's early prophecy, would start to run dry by the turn of the century. Oops.

Fifteen years later, Rifkin was back with another blockbuster complaint: Technological advancement was quickly eliminating the world's jobs. In The End of Work, Rifkin wrote of "technological innovations" that will create a "workerless world." Poor timing again, as anyone who even pays attention to the business pages knows one of the major constraints facing American business is finding enough skilled workers. Not to mention that the hottest idea in standard economics is new growth theory, driven by Stanford economist Paul Romer, which posits that it is precisely technological innovation that repeals the law of diminishing returns and allows for unlimited growth. Says Romer, "From now until the sun explodes, we won't run out of new things to discover."

The problem is that it's Rifkin's, not Romer's, view that saturates America's universities, newsrooms , and even governmental organizations. This feeling is not yet so oppressive as to stifle innovation in America. But it's nevertheless out there. And America's CEOs would be wise to keep an eye on it.

'Gore rings the anti-technology bell not to destroy government, but to expand its power.'