Almost every "unforeseen" disaster caused by new tech was actually predicted by history books decades ago.
April 10, 2026
Original Paper
The Harm Blindness Framework: A Practical Application Methodology for Stakeholder Harm Prevention in Technology Development
SSRN · 6268878
The Takeaway
We often excuse tech giants by saying they couldn't have known the consequences of their inventions. An analysis of 5,000 years of history shows that 95% of technological harms have direct historical parallels that were simply ignored by the people in charge.
From the abstract
Technology development consistently produces preventable harm to stakeholders who were identifiable at the time of key decisions. This paper introduces the Harm Blindness Framework, a checkpoint-based methodology designed to surface stakeholder impacts during development rather than after deployment. The framework operationalizes consultation of historical precedent through structured analysis at four decision points: ideation, design, testing, and launch. Validation against 161 historical cases