Tech Leaders Can Do More to Avoid Unintended Consequences

Creators and entrepreneurs want to build products that will “change the world.” And often they do, but not in the way they imagined.The failure to predict the unintended consequences of technology is deeply problematic and raises thorny questions. I like the term “unconsidered consequences,” because it puts the responsibility for negative outcomes squarely in the hands of investors and entrepreneurs.Merton outlined five key factors that get in the way of people predicting or even considering longer-term consequences: ignorance, short-termism, values, fear, and error—assuming habits that worked in the past will apply to the current situation. TikTok landed its billionth user in 2021, just four years after its global launch—half the time it took Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram to achieve the same milestone, and three years faster than WhatsApp. When the time frame of consumer adoption is compressed from decades to months, it's easy for entrepreneurs to ignore the deeper and often subtle behavioral changes those innovations are introducing at an accelerated rate.Entrepreneurs will often tell themselves the story that they’re still in the “novelty” or “sandbox” phase, when in reality millions of people are using their product. It’s reflected in the fact that big tech companies’ original mission statements, such as “Don’t be evil” (Google) or “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Facebook), are used well beyond their expiration date—sometimes even years after the founders have been forced to acknowledge not only the severe shortcomings of their innovations, but the serious consequences of those shortcomings.Simultaneously, most entrepreneurs are largely focused on accelerating the speed of their growth. Of course, this system isn’t perfect—there are gaps and loopholes—but it’s time to have more protective standards on tech products with throttling reach, which are arguably far more ubiquitous than most medications.Unintended consequences can’t be eliminated, but we can get better at considering and mitigating them.The responsibility for unconsidered consequences is a complex problem. Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the internet, published a letter on the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web in which he pointed to the “unintended negative consequences” of the web’s design, including “perverse incentives” from ad-based business models that many tech giants like Google and Facebook use, which reward “clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation.” As unanticipated consequences become apparent, it’s up to entrepreneurs to implement, upgrade, or completely rethink the business models and structural mechanisms they have in place to reduce the negative impacts.An unconsidered consequence is different from an undesired outcome. “If your product or service is being used by less than 10,000 people you should be bound by different regulations than if your user base is bigger than a nation state,” says Raskin. Raskin has set up his own “Doubt Club,” a forum for a group of entrepreneurs who are working on noncompeting ideas to share doubts about their product, company mission, or metric.