Today, let's think about liability. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
For six hundred years the
Babylonians evolved a body of law. These laws were
carved on a stone during the rule of Hammurabi in
the 18th century BC, and that stone was
rediscovered in 1901.
This so-called "Code of Hammurabi" says little
about punishing murder, but woe betide anyone
guilty of negligence: The surgeon who bungles an
operation loses a hand. The mason whose building
collapses is punished on a sliding scale. If the
owner is killed, the mason himself is executed. If
the owner's son dies, then so must the mason's son,
and so forth. The code isn't for the squeamish. It
specifies punishment by amputation, impalement,
drowning, immolation, and enslavement -- all with
blood-chilling abandon.
Getting things right is a far bigger worry in
today's dense technology than it was 4000 years
ago. Yet we don't threaten to amputate surgeons'
hands or kill engineers' children. And our
resulting technologies are generally pretty safe.
Only one person in ten million dies each year from
structural failures of buildings. Americans flew
ten million commercial flights in 1980 and '81
without a single fatality.
Our equation for preserving safety is different
from Hammurabi's. A world that depends on
technology has to allow some risk. Trying to
function in perfect safety would make technology
hopelessly static and without vitality. So we set
the levels of acceptable risk and then punish the
engineer who's reckless.
Of course, we aren't even-handed about it. We
accept familiar kinds of accidents but impose
extremely high standards on unfamiliar
technologies. For example, we accept thousands of
deaths each year from using coal to generate power
-- deaths from mine cave-ins, emphysema,
coal-trucking accidents, and so on. On the other
hand, our safety record in the nuclear-power
industry is almost perfect, and that's because
death from a radioactive leak is alien. Since we
find it far more terrifying than death in a
trucking accident, we guard more carefully against
it.
The result is that American nuclear-power
construction has been brought to a halt -- by
skyrocketing safety-related costs and by resulting
delays. But coal-fired plants, with their
associated death rates, go right on, and few people
give them a thought.
We have to look clearly at risk. New inventions are
alien, and we never quite know where one will take
us. Threatening to chop off inventors' hands can
only hurt badly-needed development. Yet we can't be
casual about the terrible dangers each new
technology poses. I don't have a Hammurabic formula
for striking these balances; but in a complex world
they have to be struck.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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