The Social Control of Technology

Collingridge, D. (1980). The Social Control of Technology. St. Martin's Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1980

Link

https://katalog.bibliothek.kit.edu/bib/7812

Cited from

tech_ethics_ai_governance

Cited by

6 citations across 6 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Collingridge Dilemma
  • Early action is cheap but uninformed; informed action is well-targeted but ruinously costly.

Mechanisms

• Collingridge Curve Workshop
  • Its failure mode is being drawn once, framed on a wall, and never revisited, or leaning on optimism about how quickly knowledge will arrive; the Collingridge dilemma is precisely that the neat crossing point resists being known in advance

    This sourceExplains the Collingridge dilemma: consequences are difficult to know while intervention is easy, but control becomes harder after consequences emerge.

• Juncture Early-Warning Dashboard
  • It is the standing answer to the timing bind at the heart of the archetype: early on, a path is easy to change
• Near-Term De-escalation / Long-Term Sustain Gate
  • The irreversibility checkpoint stops it: the specialized cryogenic test stand and its supplier base, once dismantled, would take a decade and a fortune to rebuild — a classic case where acting early is cheap but blind, and acting late is informed but expensive.

    This sourceFrames the control dilemma as early intervention under ignorance versus later intervention after change has become costly and slow.

• Policy and Regulatory Watch
  • Its strength is that it buys preparation time before rules harden — acting on the early side of the Collingridge dilemma, when a change can still be influenced and prepared for even though it is not yet certain.

    This sourceThe Collingridge dilemma holds that early intervention is feasible while impacts remain uncertain, whereas later intervention becomes difficult and costly after entrenchment.

• Staged Reversible Environment Pilot
  • The Collingridge dilemma is why the timing is the whole point

Verification

Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 6 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.

Was it audited? Yes. A second, independent pass read the citation against the article text and recorded a verdict.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 4 other ways.

• https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-social-control-of-technology/oclc/6735425 ×2
• https://archive.org/details/socialcontroloft0000coll ×1
• https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4114351W/The_social_control_of_technology?edition=socialcontroloft0000coll ×1
• https://search.worldcat.org/es/title/16593632 ×1

Registry ID ref:1b904fe483bb · see in the full table