> demanding that Le Corbusier would have to ask at every step "how could my design, supposedly built on sound principles, have negative consequences?" This is

> demanding that Le Corbusier would have to ask at every step "how could my design, supposedly built on sound principles, have negative consequences?" This is a good point, and I'm very much in favor of that. The man himself seems to have been much more fond of questions like "how can I force people to accept a version of this design that uses round numbers for elegance?" I think the proposal made me jumpy because I have so many bad associations with asking technologists to explain the consequences of their work to others. It calls to mind things like The New Digital Age, which seemed totally devoid of introspection (and frankly stupid or even malicious in a lot of places) but was a huge hit with people making important choices about investment and regulation. I'm still very hesitant about things like the mention of public funding boards using these assessments to shape their decisions, but I appreciate your point about preemptively looking for possible negative outcomes. Something like a medical attitude that considers failures and negative events separately could potentially make a lot of sense. We live in a world where the UK police are using facial-recognition software which provides 95% false positives, and it would be nice to at least have an academic framework for talking about how that's not just ineffective but actively bad.