Following up on our post ‘How to Manage Unintended Consequences of Technology‘, in this interesting piece ‘Embracing externalities‘, Seth Godin remind us that externalities should be accounted by industrialism for the better.
“The opportunity is simple to describe but requires real effort to achieve: the community must enforce systems that build the external costs into the way that the industrialist does business. Faced with an incentive to decrease bycatch, waste or illness, the industrialist will do what industrialists always seek to do–make it work a little better, a little faster, a little more profitably.”
This thought is quite interesting to apply to the externalities created by technology, for example social networks. How can we make sure companies that create value from those products compensate for the externalities they necessarily create?
” Industrialism can’t solve every problem, but it can go a very long way in solving the problems that it created in the first place“. So do any technology provider: ‘Technology can’t solve every problem, but it can go a very long way in solving the problems that it created in the first place’… We should not forget that regulation can achieve this goal.
