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Technological Innovation and Public Policy
Gilman, Glenn
13/3  (Spring 1971): 13-24

Distinction between inventory and innovation as far as technology is concerned, is widely assumed to interest only semanticists. Whatever can be produced will be produced is a technological maxim. After Hiroshima, the freedom of technology to invent whatever world it happened to invent was taken as the underlying law of modem life. The forward thrust of technology is seen as inevitable, all-pervasive, and self-directing. Whether joyfully or with resignation, it is assumed rather generally that "whatever technology can do, technology will do. It is assumed rather generally-but not completely. The publisher of the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science warns that "no longer must it be taken for granted that `when invention has made a break-through there is no cultural force which can stop the forward thrust." The authors of a searching study of the sources of modern invention suggest that forces already present retard the very rate of inventive breakthrough itself, that: "though there now may be more people with the knowledge and training that may be a prerequisite for invention, they are used in ways which make it less likely that they will invent.

 

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