Looking Ahead

Human Factors Challenges in A Changing World

Raymond S. Nickerson

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000149098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This volume aims to review some of the recent developments and trends that seem especially relevant to any attempt to understand near-term-future possibilities; to consider what a variety of knowledgeable people are saying about changes and developments that could occur; and to relate the possibilities to needs and opportunities for human factors research. Human factors, in this case, includes not only the implications of human capabilities and limitations for the design of equipment and machines intended for human use, but also applied psychology in a more general sense. In particular, it is taken to involve social systems as well as physical ones, the interaction of people with the environment as well as with machines, the facilitation of communication between people as well as between people and computers, and the design of policies and procedures as well as the design of equipment. The author's intention is to focus on anticipated problems -- including opportunities as well as difficulties -- and ask how human factors research might contribute to solutions. It is assumed that there are ways in which such research could be useful in addressing societal problems that the profession has not yet realized and that these are more likely to be recognized in the future if the community is actively seeking to identify them.

1

Looking Ahead

DOI: 10.1201/9781003064039-1

No one knows what the world will be like 50 or 100 years from now. Trying to project even 10, 20, or 30 years ahead is a fooľs game, because there are so few ways to be right and so many ways to be wrong. The only truly safe prediction that one can make is that the future will be different from what we expect it to be, that it will be as full of surprises as it has been in the past. So, why should we play this game at all? I believe there are good reasons for doing so, the most compelling of which follows from the assumption that there are many possible futures, some much more desirable than others, and that the kind of future we will get depends to no small degree on the kind we work to achieve. The only alternatives to this view that I see are an insipid fatalism, which is singularly uninspiring, or a live-for-today let-the-fiiture-take-care-of-itself form of egoism, which seems objectionable to me on moral grounds.

Most of us, I suspect, are futurists in the sense that we are interested in the kind of world that our children, their children, and their children’s children will inhabit, and would like to play some part in making it better than it might otherwise be. To do so intelligendy we need to have some idea of what the possibilities are so we can work toward those we prefer and against those we do not. As I think about what the world of tomorrow might be like, the thing that impresses me most is the enormous range of possibilities there appears to be, some very attractive and others quite frightening. I see justification for neither unbridled optimism nor petulant doomsaying, but many goals worth working toward as well as potential disasters to be avoided, and reasons to believe that thoughtful effort can make a difference.

My purpose in this book is to review some of the recent developments and trends that seem to me to be especially relevant to any attempt to understand, even fuzzily, near-term future possibilities, to consider what a variety of knowledgeable people are saying about changes and developments that could occur, and to relate the possibilities to needs and opportunities for human factors research. Human factors, for this purpose, is taken to include not only the implications of human capabilities and limitations for the design of equipment and machines that are intended for human use, but applied psychology much more generally. In particular, it is taken to involve social systems as well as physical ones, the interaction of people with the environment as well as with machines, the facilitation of communication between people as well as between people and computers, and the design of policies and procedures as well as of equipment.

Although a consideration of recent developments and current trends is an obvious starting point for any attempt to understand what the possibilities for the future are, one must bear in mind that many of the twists and turns that the future will take will not be revealed by any analysis of the past. As Kay (1984) has pointed out, in warning against attempts to predict the future by looking at trends, “There is no trend that led from the railroad to the airplane. There is no trend that led from the horse and buggy to the car; no trend that led from the desk calculator to the pocket calculator; no trend that led from the ditto machine to the Xerox machine; no trend that led from the mainframe computer to the personal computer” (p. 111).

On the other hand, the automobile has evolved over this entire century; and there is every reason to believe that it will be a preferred means of transportation for the foreseeable future and that it will continue to evolve for some time to come. Electric power is generated in a variety of ways; each of these ways, as a technology in its own right, is undergoing development. How the various possibilities will compare in cost effectiveness in years ahead remains to be seen, but it seems reasonable to expect all of the ongoing efforts at improvement to continue in the future. Trends are apparent in the automation of industrial processes, the study of which should help improve our understanding of future labor needs. Long-term environmental changes are among the more worrisome trends that are attracting attention today, and we can ill afford to ignore them. I believe that Kay was right in suggesting that the study of trends will not reveal coming technological breakthroughs and innovations that can change qualitatively the way things are done, but it does not follow, nor did he suggest, that the study of trends is of no help in attempts to understand what some of the possibilities of the future are.

One reason why simple extrapolation of trends is risky is the fact that the growth history of many processes—biological, social, or technological—can be described by an s-shaped or logistic function. If one is observing such a process at a relatively early stage of its maturity, one can easily be misled into believing that the growth process is an exponential one. In the early part of the 20th century, the demand for wood for making railroad cross ties was growing sufficiently rapidly to cause concern among some leaders, including Theodore Roosevelt, that the forests could not continue indefinitely to meet the need and that a timber famine would result. In this case, the worst fears were not realized, and for several unforeseen reasons: Creosote and other wood-preserving techniques were used to extend the life of ties (apparently by a factor of about three), concrete was increasingly used for tie materials in place of wood, especially in Europe, and the rate at which new track was laid was eventually slowed (Ausubel, 1989).

There are these and many other reasons to be wary of projections, forecasts, and predictions, whether based on the extrapolation of trends or anything else. Perhaps one should be especially wary of one’s own projections, given our penchant for convincing ourselves of the worthiness of our own ideas. None of these reasons, however, is a legitimate excuse, in my view, for not trying to understand, as best one can, what the possibilities for the future appear to be and how one might help shape things for the better.

My intention is to focus on anticipated problems (read problems here to include opportunities as well as troublesome difficulties) and then to ask how human factors research might contribute to their solutions, rather than to use the human factors research that is being done as the point of departure and then to look for future problems to which it might be applied. One risk of this approach is that of identifying problems for which such research has little if anything to offer. In fact, I do not limit attention only to problems for which experience indicates clearly that human factors research can be relevant. I assume, rather, that there are ways in which such research could be useful in addressing societal problems that the profession has not yet realized, and that they are more likely to be realized in the future if the community is actively seeking to identify them than if it is not.

Inasmuch as the impetus for this exercise came from an activity of the U.S. National Research Council, the focus is more on the United States than on any other country, although attention is also given to international and global issues. I have noted some research studies from the human factors and applied psychology literature that relate to various aspects of the problem areas discussed, but I have made no attempt at a comprehensive review of the relevant work. I do believe, however, that the studies cited are broadly representative of the relevant research that has been undertaken in the past few years and/or that is currently under way.

Projections, forecasts, and predictions were gathered from a variety of sources, which I identify when possible. In addition, I have not hesitated to include my own quite unauthoritative guesses. Whatever their origins, they are, for the most part, fairly conservative; that is, they are quite plausible, at least in my view. In their entirety, they are offered more as a stimulus to thought than as a serious attempt at forecasting. The time scale is the next few decades, 30 years at the outside in the vast majority of cases. The emphasis is on possibilities; the intent is to identify what could happen rather than to say what will happen. For convenience I have organized these thoughts under a few specific headings. There is a certain arbitrariness about these groupings: Many observations could as easily been put under some other heading.

When trying to anticipate what the future could hold, it is probably useful to remind ourselves how often people who have attempted to look ahead have been quite wrong. Each of us, undoubtedly, has a set of favorite prognostications that looked a little silly after the fact. The following are some of mine:

• In 1876, William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, decided not to buy the rights to the telephone patent, with the comment: “What use could this company make of an electronic toy?” (S. Aronson, 1977).
• About 10 years later, in 1885, Arnold Morley, then Postmaster-General of Great Britain, told Parliament “the telephone could not, and never would be an advantage which could be enjoyed by the large mass of the people” (quoted by Marvin, 1988, p. 101).
• Late in the 19th century, Sir John Erichsen, a British surgeon, described the abdomen as “forever shut from the intrusions of the wise and humane surgeon.” In 1930, George Moynihan, another British surgeon, judged it to be impossible to perfect surgery beyond its then-current state (Medawar, 1984).
• The 19th century Scottish mathematician and physicist, William Thompson (Lord) Kelvin ruled out the possibility of flight in heavier-than-air craft (Hardin, 1985). Early in the 20th century, the American astronomer Simon Newcomb did so, too: “The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be” (quoted in Clarke, 1962).
• In 1926, American radio pioneer Lee DeForest made the following assessment of the prospects for the commercial exploitation of television: “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need Waste little time dreaming.” This pronouncement (p. 207) is one of many compiled by Cerf and Navasky (1984) in a compendium that makes for delightful, but somewhat sobering, browsing.
• As late as 1936, Ernest Rutherford ruled out the possibility of the use of nuclear energy, at least in this century (Eiseley, 1970).

Inventors of technologies that have changed the world typically have not foreseen the eventual uses of their inventions. Marconi, for example, saw radio not as a means of broadcasting speech and music to a wide audience, but as a wireless analogue to the telegraph and, in particular, as a means of providing point-to-point communication between one ship and another and between ship and shore. The American corporations that initially invested in radio also failed to see its potential as a qualitatively new form of communication and, treating it like a wireless telegraph, nearly went out of business as a consequence. The idea of using radio for broadcasting, in the modern sense, grew out of the activities of amateur ham operators whose numbers increased rapidly during the first decade or so of the 20th century. The amateurs used the radio for one-to-one communication, and many of the turn-of-the-century predictions about the future of radio assumed this to be the natural and continuing mode of operation. By the second decade of the century, however, amateur stations had begun to broadcast music and speech, and some of these stations became commercial in the 1920s (Douglas, 1986). As late as 1922, however, Thomas Edison predicted that the radio craze would die out in time (Cerf & Navasky, 1984).

Similarly, the pioneers of computer technology saw their creation, for the most part, as a device for mechanizing the arithmetic operations that were then being performed by cadres of human “computers.” The then-current ideas regarding what these machines could do came primarily “from looking at the new invention strictly in the context of what it was replacing: calculating machines and their human operators” (Ceruzzi, 1986, p. 194).

These examples of views of the future were all too conservative in some way. One can easily find examples of views that erred on the side of extravagance as well. Often in the past, inventions and other scientific developments have prompted visions of idealistic and utopian change. The July 1899 issue of Scientific American carried the following prediction of how motor cars would affect urban life once mass production had brought their price low enough for people to acquire them: “The improvement in city conditions by the general adoption of the motor car can hardly be overestimated. Streets clean, dustless and odorless, with light rubber-tired vehicles moving swiftly and noiselessly over their smooth expanse, would eliminate a greater part of the nervousness, distraction and strain of modern metropolitan life” (Dubos, 1970, p. 95).

Most of us today, being sensitive to the automobile’s contribution to air and noise pollution and aware of the nervousness, distraction, and strain that can be caused by the all-too-common urban traffic snarl, are likely to see only irony in this turn-of-the-century vision, but we should give the motor car its due. Citing some calculations made by Montroll and Badger (1974), and some plausible assumptions about a horse’s per diem travel range and its solid and liquid waste generation, Ausubel (1989) has pointed out that a horse emits roughly 940g of waste per mile, to the ground, whereas an automobile puts out only about 5g (composed of .25g of hydrocarbons, 4.7 of carbon monoxide and .4 of nitrous oxides) to the air.

There were many utopian visions, stimulated by the discovery in the middle of 20th century of the possibility of harnessing nuclear energy, of “power too cheap to meter,” and of atomically powered airplanes and personal vehicles (Del Sesto, 1986). Work on the development of a nuclear-powered aircraft was carried on seriously for some years between 1946 and 1961, and was terminated by President Kennedy only after expenditures of more than $1 billion. Nuclear enthusiasts saw the potential benefits of nuclear energy but failed to foresee the problems—such as safety hazards and the disposal of radioactive waste—that would be encountered in attempting to realize that potential (Corn, 1986).

More generally, there was a good deal of utopian visionary writing late in the 19th century and early in the 20th based on what appears to have been an implacable faith in science and technology, coupled with a model of human nature not yet tarnished by two world wars and the major economic depression in between. Segal (1986) pointed out, for example, that “between 1883 and 1933, twenty-five individuals published works envisioning the United States as a technological utopia” (p. 119). Although most of the writers of these utopian visions were obscure, their values were representative of mainstream American thinking and in particular of the “belief in the inevitability of progress and the belief that progress was precisely technological progress” (p. 121).

Attempting to forecast the country’s energy needs, or the way the needs would be met, has proved so far to be a particularly risky enterprise. According to a prediction by the Atomic Energy Commission in a 1962 report to the President on civilian nuclear power, by the year 2000, 30% of the demand for energy in the United States would be supplied by fission reactors. A report from the Interdepartmental Energy Study Group, issued in 1964, asserted “no ground for serious concern that the nation is using up any of its stock of fossil fuel too rapidly; rather there is the suspicion that we are using them up too slowly (A. M. Weinberg, 1988–1989). We are concerned for the day when the value of untapped fossil fuel resources might have tumbled and the nation will regret that it did not make greater use of these stocks when they were still precious” (quoted by A. M. Weinberg, 1988–1989, p. 81).

Thus one easily finds examples of past views of the future that were much too conservative in specific respects and examples of others that were, in retrospect, too radical. My sense however, is that, especially during recent years, we have been more often surprised by the ways in which technological advances have out-distanced our imaginations than by the ways they have lagged behind them. In any case, if the past gives us any clues at all as to what the future holds, the one thing that we can be quite sure of is that there will be surprises. No matter how carefully we try to anticipate all the possibilities, some of the most significant developments are very likely to be those that no one foresees. As C. Evans (1979) has pointed out, Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shocks which was published in 1970, painted a sufficiently radical picture of the near-term future that the book was criticized for being sensationalist, but he missed completely what has turned out to be among the most sensational of all developments—the microprocessor—and it came along within a very few years of the publication of the book.

In short, projections are just that; they can, and often do, prove to be wrong. We should, in keeping with Kay’s admonition, be especially wary of projections that are based on simple extrapolations of past trends. None of the numbers in this book that refer to the future should be taken as more than somebody’s opinion as to what is likely to happen. Before using any of them as the basis for decision making, one should have thought deeply enough about them to have an opinion of one’s own as to their plausibility. Even numbers that are intended to represent historical data should not be accepted completely uncritically. The techniques by which such numbers are developed or derived are not error-proof; they often involve assumptions that are not made explicit, and different sources sometimes report different numbers for the same variables.

If the point needs illustration with a concrete example, a recent study by the National Research Council’s Committee on National Statistics revealed that the number of scientists and engineers in the United States in 1984 was 1.9 million, 3.7 million, or 6.1 million, depending on whether one used the figures of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Science Foundation, or the Bureau of the Census (Citro & Kalton, 1989). The discrepancies stemmed from various differences in counting policies—whether to count people with degrees in science or engineering who were working as managers or people with degrees from foreign institutions—and in sampling and measurement techniques. The Committee’s study provides an unusual opportunity to compare estimates from three sources and it points up the importance of looking critically at the counting or estimating processes that produce any number on whose accuracy one wishes to depend.

Sometimes what appear to be discrepancies may be the result of sampling over nonidentical time periods or from different populations. What population is being described is not always clear in the way numbers are reported; counts that underlie unemployment statistics, for example, may or may not include unemployed people who, for one reason or another, are not actively looking for jobs. Despite these caveats, my general sense is that, although there are some discrepancies in the historical data in what follows, they do not, for the most part, negate the major points that are made.

There are, of course, many possibilities for the future that could have truly profound effects, should they occur: a world-wide economic depression, the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life, a natural disaster of global magnitude (such as collision with a sizable meteor), or an AIDS-like world-wide epidemic caused by a new virus transmittable by casual contact. Although such possibilities cannot be ruled out, no attention is paid to them here. Discussion of every imaginable event that could affect the future in a major way is clearly impossible and would not be very useful in any case; attention is limited here to what seem to me to be both reasonably likely possibilities and possibilities about which something can be done. My selection of topics ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• Preface Page
• Chapter 1 Looking Ahead
• Chapter 2 Economics, Industry, and Productivity
• Chapter 3 Energy
• Chapter 4 Environmental Change
• Chapter 5 Education and Training
• Chapter 6 Transportation
• Chapter 7 Space Exploration
• Chapter 8 Biotechnology
• Chapter 9 Information Technology
• Chapter 10 Person-Computer Interaction
• Chapter 11 Work
• Chapter 12 Decision Making and Policy Setting
• Chapter 13 Quality of Life
• Chapter 14 Epilogue
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index