Do not allow these people to have power
Because we understand this, anticipating problems should be part of technological development itself. A clear-eyed view of our ignorance doesn’t mean not pursuing technology, but counsels caution and wisdom by employing foresight, without expecting anything close to flawless prescience. It also means taking practical steps to regulate development and give time to redress emerging problems, while at the very least avoiding the worst possible outcomes.
It’s wrapped up all reasonable like and yet it isn’t, at all, reasonable. It’s an insistence that some - the elite, the Illuminati - should have power over what the rest of us are even allowed to try out.
One part of this is that of course it slows economic growth. Growth is people doing new things, or old things in new ways. If we’ve got to wait for the dullards to think through why they don’t like it then growth will be slower.
But rather more important is that even if we accept that the current dullards are well meaning that’s not the way it will stay. For once there is a power position from which human society can be misdirected then those who wish to misdirect human society will colonise it.
We could imagine that fools would ban fracking because of the risk of miniscule earthquakes. Ridiculous, we know, purely an invention. Or that nuclear power will be so festooned with regulation that it becomes uneconomic. Just a suggestion of that dystopian future of course, not a current reality. We could even really stretch credulity and mutter that some would try to ban air conditioning in Britain - in a properly Protestant country all should swelter and suffer for offending Gaia instead. We might even move to the truly preposterous as an invented forecast and suggest that people will insist no houses can be built in a field because that would mean the proles have houses to live in and then where would we be?
Yes, yes, of course those are the wildest shores of what is even conceivable about what might go wrong if we embrace the Precautionary Principle. Ha, ha, aren’t we the jolly japes for suggesting such ridiculousnesses.
If we allow anyone to determine what we may or may not do then those who wish us ill will determine what we may do. Even if our examples are wholly flights of fancy that couldn’t possibly come true. Oh Dearie Us, No.
Tim Worstall