We Need To Stop Treating Technology Like It’s Foolproof
In a recent Discourse piece, Vanessa Brown Calder argues that if the government were to subsidize in vitro fertilization, a technology intended to assist people to conceive, the result could paradoxically be fewer babies. Why? For starters, because IVF is not a 100% effective technology. Actually, the success rate for an IVF patient is more like 30%, according to an average of doctors’ estimates. And, as Calder notes, the chance of success diminishes over time: “According to data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, IVF procedures result in a baby about 50% of the time for women younger than 35, but less than 8% of the time for women older than 40.”
Calder’s piece makes the point that the way we think about technology can have unintended consequences. A theoretically beneficial policy, such as subsidizing IVF to encourage and produce more births, can backfire if we trust the technology too much. In this case, many of us may end up waiting too long to have children because we think we can always turn to IVF when we’re ready. This argument got me thinking about how we view technology in general, specifically that we sometimes tend to over-rely on technology and think much of it as 100% effective when it’s not. After all, the light always comes on when we flip the switch, doesn’t it?
Sometimes the technology itself is the problem, as when generative AI “ hallucinates” information that has no basis in fact. As it turns out, few technologies, especially new ones, are foolproof.
