Grasp, Don?t Fear Technology (Ron Goforth Commentary)

Google “risk aversion” and find the wonderfully illuminating explanation: “The von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility hypothesis claimed that the utility of a lottery could be written as U = x? supp(p) p(x)u(x) where we referred to U: D (X) as the expected utility function and u: X ? R as the implied elementary utility function.”

From a less technical perspective, risk aversion is readily understood by both intuition and personal experience. “Why take the chance? Something might go wrong. I might lose money. I might get hurt, get sued, or lose face.”

We pass laws and promulgate regulations to limit our collective risk and liabilities. We encourage the government to protect us from ourselves and from the risks we might otherwise take. Helmet laws were easy, what with bike riders being a minority. And now the no-umbrellas rule for the stadium is grudgingly accepted even on rainy game days as we counter the perceived risks of terrorism.

Unfortunately, the perception of risk associated with technology has become a bugbear of national scope. NASA won’t fly the Shuttle in a manned mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in large part in response to the public perception of the risk — even though the astronauts themselves are ready, even eager, to go. In the meantime, a NASA van drives off a cliff in California, causing the death of several NASA personnel. But vans are not linked in the public perception with tech risks, so a prohibition against traveling by van is unlikely.

“Technology” in all its various guises is so foreign to many people that they avoid even considering it, seeing it instead as being too complex, too arcane, and too rapidly changing to understand, much less comfortably deal with. Many individuals and numerous organizations therefore preclude any involvement with technology as too risky to touch. On top of that, when we are successful in other endeavors (e.g., real estate), why run the risk of getting involved with technology?

Technology, by the way, is really just the application of scientific and engineering principles to the solution of practical problems. It may be low-tech (holding the muffler on the family clunker with bailing wire). It may be embedded or conventional tech (high-energy capacity batteries for cell phones). Or it may be high-tech (production of human cancer vaccines in Chinese hamster ovary cell cultures).

Recently, a local headline proclaimed “Technology Drags Down Area Ranking.” To be more accurate it should have read “The Lack of Technology … “

Rankings aside, for sustainable economic prosperity, we need a burgeoning technology-centric and knowledge-based enterprise community in Northwest Arkansas. This is pointed out by virtually everyone who objectively examines our present circumstances.

Given our present national aversion to risk, can we recapture the (appropriately) risk-taking spirit that made American entrepreneurship and enterprise the envy of the world? Can we do this in arenas where we have not yet completely lost our competitive advantages in the global economy, namely in the creation of technology-centric and knowledge-based enterprises? While these are issues for the whole country, we must recognize and act on opportunities that exist here in Northwest Arkansas and channel some of our presently abundant fiscal resources into these potential contributors to sustainable economic development. Borrowing a mantra of the environmental activist, perhaps we should “think globally, act locally.” Or at least, we should know the competition and take advantage of our unique opportunities.

Some genuinely technology-visionary leaders, willing to lead by example and perhaps to put some personal skin in the game, might get us started. However, to idly wait in the hopes of someone miraculously appearing to save us all is to indulge in wishful thinking. Hardly the behavior of the realistically risk adverse …

(R. R. (Ron) Goforth is president of Fayetteville’s Beta-Rubicon Inc., a firm that specializes in independent technology assessment, management and due diligence services for investors, private-sector enterprises, and public agencies. Beta-Rubicon may be contacted through www.beta-rubicon.com.)