COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00003 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	.require "memo.pub[let,jmc]" source
C00047 00003	.if false then begin
C00050 ENDMK
C⊗;
.require "memo.pub[let,jmc]" source;
.double space
.cb DEFENDING AND EXTENDING THE FREEDOM TO INNOVATE

.cb by John McCarthy


	This article is about what makes it possible for people
to invent new things and get them used.  There are some threats
to the freedom to innovate and also some opportunities to use
computer technology so that good ideas will be invented more easily
and accepted more quickly.

	In the good old days, an inventor had only to worry about
whether his invention was worthwhile, whether it had already been
invented, getting money to develop it, getting a patent
that would stand up in court, and getting people to buy his product
once it was on the market.  There were quite a few successful inventors,
and many American and European companies are named for the inventors
of their original products.

	Many people think that a major obstacle to invention is that
companies buy up inventions and
suppress them.  Perhaps it has happened, but it can't amount to much.
  Tales of the everlasting light bulb and the gasoline
pill have appeared in print since the 1920s.  One could imagine that these
suppression efforts were totally successful, but then one has to say why
foreign companies anxious to break into the American market don't step out
of line, why companies go bankrupt without trying to save themselves by
introducing the forbidden better products, and why "socialist" countries
not motivated by profit don't have them.  I can't think of anything being
marketed today that was developed many years ago but suppressed until recently
 by a company owning the invention.

	However, there is evidence of government suppression of new
technology.  When an innovation is totally suppressed,
we cannot be sure that it would have been a success had it been
allowed.  Therefore, the clearest cases are when an innovation has
been allowed in some countries and suppressed in others.
The British government has suppressed
several inventions that are in use in the U.S.  Presently citizen's
band radios are forbidden in Britain (also in Japan where
most of them are made) and so were acoustic couplers
that permit computer terminals to use ordinary telephones to
communicate with computers.  For some years, public time-sharing in
Japan was a monopoly of the government telephone company.

	Electronic funds transfer has the potential of eliminating
violent crime for money, because a robber cannot safely demand that
you transfer money to his account.  It can also greatly reduce theft
by making it hard for the fence to transfer money to the thief.  It
is being hampered though not totally suppressed in the U.S., and our
regulations for new drugs have become so hard to satisfy that
many are used for years in Europe before being allowed in the U.S.
On a related topics, many drugs that require prescriptions in the
U.S. are available over the counter in other countries.  I am not
aware of a study showing that other countries have suffered for
their more liberal policy.

	Several centuries ago, and more recently in oriental societies,
inventors had a much harder time, and in some countries hundreds of years often
went by without significant invention.  Since most
people saw no innovation in their lifetimes, they often believed
that society and technology had always been
as they saw it.  In Europe, innovation was discouraged by
 a legend of a Golden Age
when things had been better and a belief that present people and
things were degenerate remnants of the past.  (One thing that might
have encouraged such ideas is the fact that crop land loses its
fertility with time unless it can be fertilized, so there were
always tales of the bigger crops of past times).  Many societies, like
the medieval Catholic church and Japan between 1637 and 1868 had
explicit objections to any innovation as corrupting the pure
principles that had been established.

	Innovation is easiest when there are many possible
supporters of it.  The inventor of a new household gadget, to
take an easy case, can go to dozens of manufacturers any one
of which can decide to make it.  In traditional societies or
present planned societies, there may be only one person who
can say yes or no to an idea in a given field.  If he says no,
that's it.  The Russians are always saying that someone in
Russia invented something first, but the idea was rejected there
and developed in the West.  They criticise the person who
rejected the good idea but don't criticise the system which
permits one person or bureaucracy to kill an idea.  Perhaps many of
the ideas they referred to, as was the fate of what became the Xerox
copier, were rejected by many companies in the West before one took it up
and made it successful.

	However, it won't work simply to make everyone
more receptive to all new ideas, because almost all new ideas
are bad, and when bureaucrats are told by their superiors
to be more receptive to new ideas, they sometimes give money
to their relatives, and usually tend to back ideas similar
to those the other bureaucrats are backing, so that there will
be less criticism when the idea fails.  Someone risking
his own money often pays the best attention to the likely success
of the idea and how well the project is going.

	If the same function
can be provided by a device sold in the store and a system
that requires a monopoly to work, the gadget is often preferable
even at considerably greater cost, and it is likely to be
available much sooner.  An example is the telephone answering
machine which provides the same service that telephone companies
are just beginning to offer as part of the electronic telephone
exchanges.  Most likely it could always have been done better
centrally but wasn't.

	Unfortunately, not every worthwhile innovation takes
the form of a gadget that anyone can make and sell and anyone
can buy or not as he chooses.  When streetcars, home electricity,
piped gas and telephones were invented in the late nineteenth
century, they all required local monopolies for success.  The
companies had to get franchises from cities and towns, and
some of the benefits of competition were necessarily lost.
Inventions that require franchises today have a harder time,
because having the idea and the money to back it doesn't carry
weight with people who want everything studied endlessly at
the expense of the backers or who believe that groups distinguished
by misfortune rather than potential contribution should share
the hoped for gravy.  Hundreds of millions that have been
invested in research aimed recovering minerals from the ocean
bottoms and may never pay off, because our government has
forbidden sea mining while the U.S. tries to negotiate an
unnecessary "law of the sea" treaty.

	The United States has been better than other countries
about freedom to innovate.  As a result many inventions originate
in the U.S., and until recently the U.S. had the highest standard
of living.  However, movements for the suppression of innovation
have been strong in the U.S. since the late 1960s, and this is
one of the reasons why our standard of living increased slowly
enough so that some European countries have passed us and has
even declined in the last two years.

	The attacks and restrictions on innovation are part of
the larger move toward increased regulation and planning.  Regulators
and advocates of regulation like to think of the battle as between
the public interest (represented by themselves) and the companies
(usually referred to as monopolies whether they are or are not)
greedily "pushing" unneeded goodies on a passive public.  However,
we prefer to regard the battle as between the public's right
buy whatever technology makes possible and the desire of
the "public policy community" to decide what is good for the public.

	Here are two typical and rather mild statements
from a recent article on "Social analysis
of computing"

.begin narrow 5
%2"It is hard to believe that the public could best be served by
rapid development of a poorly understood technology"%1.
.end

and

.begin narrow 5
%2"With such meager systematic attention, it is hard to believe
that important understandings about the long-term and more
subtle social features of computing will be acquired before
inappropriate commitments are made"%1.
.end

	The trouble is that no inventor can ever be sure of
how his invention will be used.  Indeed most are over-optimistic about
what good the invention will do, otherwise they wouldn't work
so hard.  What saves us is that the
public isn't as childlike as planners like to imagine them.  Not even
children are as childlike as some planners like to imagine them.
They can try something offered for sale and stop using it if it doesn't
suit them.
Few things if any meet the classical criteria of an addictive drug -
bad for you, but once hooked, you're hooked for life.  Almost
always, people choose reasonably well among the options available
to them.  Moreover, when someone thinks people have chosen badly, he
may be wrong.  Some of the reasons may not be expressed in words but
may still be valid.

	There are two separable questions.  (1) When
are general decisions by social scientists or politicians
about what people should buy and use likely to be better than
the decisions the individuals concerned will make on the spot?
(2) When do
 people have a %2right%1
to make their own decisions even if they may be mistaken?
A good slogan might be, "Unless there is very strong evidence
to the contrary, each person should be regarded as the best
judge of his own welfare".

	While the 1970s were bad years for innovations and
%2laisser innover%1 acquired the ill-repute of %2laisser faire%1
in liberal circles, there is good reason to hope that the 1980s
will be better.  At least politicians of both parties are worried
about the recent lack of innovation and investment in innovation
in America, and "the re-industrialization of 
America" has become a popular slogan.

	It isn't only products that benefit from there being many
possible adopters of innovation.  The existence of different states
and countries is helpful in getting a hearing for legal innovations.
For example, since about the 1930s it has been legal in California to make
a right turn on a red light after stopping if the traffic permits.
The rule gradually spread and recently the Feds coerced the last two
states into adopting it by threatening to withhold highway money.  It's
nice that this good rule prevails in the whole country, but this seems to
be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.  Without freedom for states
to differ, California couldn't have tried out the rule in the first place.
The next innovation may have a far harder time.

	Ideally, anyone who thinks he has a better way of doing something
should be able to get it objectively considered by a person or
group with the ability to investigate the matter thoroughly and
the power to adopt it.  Would be innovators often imagine that someone,
somewhere has the power to do what they want if only they could get
his ear.  They often find kings, dictators and communist countries
fascinating, because they imagine that the obstacles they see at
home could be overcome by a stroke of a pen.

	Often there is no-one with the power to adopt the proposal.
When there is, he or they are often swamped with other proposals.

	When an innovation is proposed, it usually requires the
support of many people before it can be adopted widely.
For some kinds of innovation, a lot depends on who proposes it.
The fuzzier the criteria, the more innovation is limited to the
existing authorities.  It would be difficult for a non-professional
who was not a public official or politician to get a paper proposing
a change in foreign policy accepted by the magazine %2Foreign Affairs%1,
and if it were published, it would probably not be taken seriously.

	The opposite extreme is mathematics and physics,
in which a paper can be submitted to any of dozens
of journals by anyone in the world.  The writer is often unknown
by reputation to the referee to whom the editor sends the paper.
If the referee says the result is correct and significant, the
paper will be published.  In 1905, an obscure employee of the
Swiss patent office submitted four papers to the German
physics journal %2Annalen der Physik%1.  All four were published,
and one of them introduced the theory of relativity.
Within a few years these papers made Albert Einstein's reputation
as the world's leading physicist.

	The possibility of innovation in social and political matters can
extended to more people if these subjects become more objective.
Once the best time to plant crops was a matter of religion in
some countries, and I suppose you could get in trouble for making
unorthodox statements about it.  A second problem is that
issues are like horses; their owners
hope to ride them to power.  A politician won't easily pay much
attention to an argument from some nobody that his winning issue
is unsound.

	Eventually, we may hope to extend mathematical
treatment to social issues, but it is much farther away than
many social scientists believe.  Successful theories be based
on logical rather than numerical or statistical relations.  In the limit,
an unknown person could provide a computer-checked proof that a new
policy would be better than the present policy.

.bb Attitudes to innovation

	Many factors in society encourage or discourage invention,
and here are a few of each.

	First, the society should consider invention a good thing, which
hasn't always been true.  Second, potential inventors
should have access to many different sources of backing.  In a feudal
or semi-feudal society like
 pre-Meiji Japan or the Soviet Union today,
a potential inventor belongs to an organization and if his immediate
bosses don't like the idea or it doesn't apply to their activity, he
is out of luck.  Many successful American inventors try many backers
before they find one.
Third, unless it is possible to make a lot of money from a successful
invention, there won't be backers, because most inventions fail.
Fourth, a substantial part of the public must like new things and
be eager to try them out.

	On the other hand, overly powerful planners discourage invention.
They make their plan, perhaps taking into account many sources of
information, but once it is made, they want to carry it out, and
they regard new ideas that don't fit into the plan as a nuisance -
to be stamped out or at least to be delayed until the next plan.
Invention is also discouraged if groups are considered to have
a right to a share of the market, so that competition is disallowed.
Unrealistic demands for guaranteed safety discourage invention, since
an invention that costs a few tens of thousands to develop may cost
millions for required safety studies.
The latest discouragement is %2technology assessment%1.  The idea is
that the social effect of the invention should be completely determined
before the invention is allowed to be sold.

	The point isn't that innovations cannot turn out badly.  They
often do.  The point is the reaction to the prospect that they might.

	We can stop using DDT or use it more sparingly if it turns out
to harm useful animals.  Those who had bumper stickers labelled "Damn
Deadly Toxin", however, bear part of the responsibility for the large
increase in malaria deaths in backward countries after use of DDT was
stopped.  We can spray asbestos covered surfaces with plastic now that
it has been determined that asbestos fibers increase significantly
the amount of lung cancer if breathed.

	The problem is demanding unreasonable criteria for safety
and/or for not injuring anyone's economic interests, or at least
the interests of favored groups.

	There seem to be several motivations, and often they co-exist
in the same person.

	#. There are safety objections to specific technologies.  Sometimes
this is justified, or if not justified, then simply mistaken as to the
facts.  Sometimes, however, the objection survives an admission that the
facts were wrong, and sometimes it depends on ignoring the hazards of the
older technologies.

	Thus Consumer's Union and Ralph Nader have opposed the use of
microwave ovens, especially by children, on the theory that microwatts of
microwave leakage might harm people.  Their statements don't compare this
danger, which they admit is unsupported by experimental evidence, with the
hundreds of people who are killed and injured every year from accidents
with conventional cooking.  If their opposition caused the lesser use of
microwave ovens in the U.S. than in Japan, we can estimate (on the basis
of the %2Statistical Abstract of the United States%1) that their position
has caused the deaths of several children a year since the early 1970s.
Of course, if the danger of microwaves is substantial, they have saved
some children, but every year that goes by with no report at all of injury
from microwave ovens makes this increasingly unlikely.

	The most important example of applying differing standards
applied to old and new ways of doing things is nuclear energy.
A few days after the Three Mile Island accident which injured
no-one, the %2New York Times%1
reported eleven coal miners killed in an accident.  Another story somewhat
later reported four killed by a wood stove that caught fire.
It has recently turned out that well insulated houses accumulated
carbon monoxide, formaldehyde and radon, the latter sometimes to
levels illegal in uranium mines, and yet the government continues
its campaign for super insulation.  The current evidence is that
it is safer to produce the energy than to superinsulate houses.
Applying different standards to different technologies
 is natural as long as people continue to think about issues
mainly in a qualitative rather than a quantitative way.
While there are too many issues concerning nuclear energy
than can be taken up in this article, most of the opposition involves
applying different standards to it and other sources of energy.

	#. During the 1960s and 1970s there developed a strong
ideology that everything could be done better if planned on a
national scale.  In the case of innovation, this led to the
idea of technology assessment, and the Congress's Office of
Technology Assessment.  The idea was that the potential effects of every
innovation should be examined before it was used.  Unfortunately,
we cannot agree even on the effects of past innovations - let alone
future ones.  Some people think that the invention of the automobile
was a disaster for the U.S., and if we had only taken the time to
think about it, we would have done something quite different.
However, they can't agree on what would have been done differently.
The evidence is otherwise, since other countries, in which large
scale use of cars is more recent, haven't been a been able to
think of any path much different from ours or that is regarded
has having worked out better.

	#. An argument frequently used for preventing an innovation, is that
if even a test is permitted, irresistible momentum may be created.  This
was one of the main environmentalist arguments against developing the
American supersonic transport even to the stage of testing.  The argument
amounts to a confession that the public may evaluate the results of the
test differently from the environmentalists, and therefore the public
shouldn't have that opportunity.  

	#. Economic regulation as a way of protection against
competition has an older history.  Regulating the rates truckers
may charge, the products they can carry, and the routes they can
operate on goes back to the 1930s.  Even when Congress has
legislated that the only objections on safety grounds, it is
routine for companies to file safety objections to delay competitive
products.  There is no penalty for this even if the objection
is ruled trivial.

	The regulators have invariably asserted more power than
than the Congressional debates indicate Congress thought it was
giving them, but it has been very difficult for Congress to bring
itself to slap them down.  This is because once an interest is
established, it can contribute to incumbent campaigns.

	#. The environmental movement, which started reasonably,
developed leaders with a taste for power.  With three million
alligators in Florida, they resist removing alligators from the list
of endangered species, because it might signal an environmental
retreat.

	#. A preference for a specific technology may make a person
attack all rivals.  Some of the enthusiasm for solar energy takes
this form.

	It may be a mistake to try to make too much sense of all this.
Once a person has taken sides, he may favor a proposal if made by the
"good guys" that he would oppose if made by the "bad guys".  He may even
switch sides on a proposed technology in order to maintain his conception
of who is good and bad.  The switch of the Sierra Club on nuclear energy
in 1975 can be given this interpretation.


.bb Computers and innovation

	Many people say that technology is
changing the world faster and faster, and people can't adapt to it.  This
is wrong.  In fact, the inventions brought into use
since World War II such as TV, jet travel and the pill
have affected daily life much less than those
adopted between 1890 and 1920 such as
electric lights, piped-in gas, telephones, automobiles, and
mechanical refrigeration affected the life of that time.
For most people, computers,
nuclear energy, lasers, and DNA are just names in the news, because
no-one cares whether his electric bill was prepared by a typist or
a computer or whether the light goes on because of burning coal
or fissioning uranium.

	Since people take health and prosperity as only their just
deserts, maybe the lack of technological innovation in daily life has
contributed to the anti-technological beliefs.  This lack
is temporary, because cheap information processing will lead to
many more popular inventions.

	A wave of innovations coming from computer technology can
be expected between a few years ago and the end of the century.
The use of computers for large scale scientific and business computations
has already changed these activities, but the use of computer
facilities in daily life will be much more important.

	We don't refer to the personal computers already on the market.
They are an interesting hobby and useful for small business, but most
people don't need a lot of straight computation, however cheap.  The
real changes will come when home computers or just home computer
terminals are connected by telephone to all the repositories of
information in our society.

	To begin with, everyone can have immediate access to all the
books in the Library of Congress (perhaps 30 million) without needing
even one bookshelf.  Already the cost of storing the information on
computer disk files is less than that of storing it on library shelves.
The cost of getting it into computer form is large, but the main problem
is creating the library and dealing with copyrights, etc.  Maintaining
the library seems to be a natural monopoly, but having multiple copies
of it wouldn't be very expensive if the resulting competition would
be useful.

	Access to existing kinds of
books, magazines and newspapers is important, but keeping the information
in computer form will transform publication.  At present, eighty to ninety
percent of the cost of a book is in printing, distribution and advertising.
With computer publication, almost all of the costs will be the actual
preparation of the material, i.e. that much of what the reader pays
can go to the author.  Moreover, something can be published simply by
typing it into the computer system and declaring the file public.  If
the author has to rent the file space for a book, this will come to less
than a dollar a month.

	Since readers can have programs notify them automatically when something
new by a favorite author appears, famous authors won't need publishers.
A journalist specializing in a energy or in the affairs of a particular
foreign country won't necessarily need a newspaper or magazine if he
has acquired a public.  Much smaller publics with specialized interests
can exist.  Of course, no-one will decide what to read by looking in
the grand catalog file; library catalogs are already too big.  People
will find things of interest through "magazines" whose editors have
a reputation for selecting interesting stuff and getting their writers
to write for their public.  Reviews will be important.

	The standards of controversy will improve, because when someone
is attacked, the reader will be able to ask whether he has an answer.
Present controversial style depends for many of its effects on the
fact that it is rarely possible for the reader or listener to here
an immediate answer.  When this is impossible, the attacker will have
to take it into account.

	An important start on the computer library can be made by
getting the Government to keep the information that is supposed to
be available to the public in computer files that anyone can access
from anywhere in the country.  This includes the laws and regulations
published in the Federal Register, but also information required by
the Freedom of Information Act.  Now much of this information is in
reading rooms in Washington, and only organizations can afford to
dig it out.

	Besides the information in newspapers, books and magazines,
everyone can have immediate access to airline schedules and availability
of seats, and the same information for movies, plays and concerts.
Stores will keep catalogs in computer file, so that a person or a
program acting for him will be able to find the "best buy"
very quickly.

	Computer technology has already helped electronic innovation
by making the design process easier and more objective.  An engineer
can design a computer using a computer aided design system without
the aid of draftsmen.  One man can design circuitry that formerly
required several.  Moreover, the design can be simulated, and potential
backers can have a greater assurance that the design will work if
built.  In the case of integrated circuits, the design in the computer
can be carried all the way to making the masks that are used to
produce the circuit.

	This technology is gradually being extended to mechanical
design.  When an inventor can design and simulate an automobile
engine without leaving his computer terminal, and can also generate
the computer instructions for the machining and automatic assembly,
we will see many more new engines than we see now.  Moreover, the
simulations will make convincing a potential backer more of an
objective matter and less of an exercise in salesmanship.

	Extending this ability to simulate to social organizations
so that proposed changes can be evaluated objectively is a much
longer term goal.

	While there are many attacks on freedom to innovate,
maybe there isn't too much to worry about in the long run.  Unless
freedom to innovate is suppressed in all countries, the few that
preserve it will eventually dominate the world intellectually.
If the use of innovations is encouraged in some countries and
prevented in others, then the former will come to dominate the
world physically as well.
Therefore, maybe we shouldn't think mainly defensively but should
put almost all of our effort into
considering ways in which the ability to innovate
can be extended.

	Of course, it would be nice if one of the countries that
preserved freedom to innovate was the United States.  Maybe
we will return to our traditional attitude:

	%2Let it be tried.  If it works out badly we can always change
it%1.
.if false then begin
thalidomide,sst

	There is one outstanding example of the U.S. benefitting from
delaying a new drug.  In the 1960s thalidomide was introduced in
several European countries as a sleeping pill.  Its use by pregnant
women led to several thousand cases of children born with missing
or stunted limbs before the effect was detected and ascribed to
thalidomide.  There is little evidence that our much stiffer regulations
introduced after the thalidomide tragedy have saved people in
proportion to the number of people who have been harmed by the
delays they cause.  At present the U.S. is parasitic on other countries
in testing new drugs.

	There are two theories of the anti-technology movement.  One is
that it is a reaction of people to e situation in which they
find themselves.  People experience certain technology, and
according to their experience and personalities, a certain
percentage have a strong negative reaction.  The other theory
is that anti-technology is primarily a movement.  It recruits
followers by certain appeals.  It represents for many people
a claim on political power.  It has alliances with other movements.
The two theories have different consequences as to how one
would predict the consequences of various events.
According to the former theory, concessions would
relieve the worries that lead to anti-technological
sentiments, while according to the other theory, the concessions
would only encourage the seekers after power.
It seems to me that both effects exist, but the movement
theory better predicts the effects of events.

.end