Fred Commoner is a technical consultant, mathematician, computer scientist, and inventor, specializing in risk analysis and safety engineering.

A new kind of technology

Investigations of engineering disasters routinely find that problems in “organizational culture” are central causes of tragic events.  This was the conclusion on the loss of two NASA space shuttles, the Chernobyl explosion, Hurricane Katrina, and the explosion at West Virginia's Upper Big Branch Mine.  This was also the verdict on the Deepwater Horizon blowout and the triple-meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.

Thus, part of the essential infrastructure of the devices we invent, build and depend upon are the beliefs, habits and attitudes of the people who work in, and regulate, the many industries on which modern life depends.  People are a part of technology.  Maybe even the most crucial part.

Devices won't work for us if people don't know how to make them work.  Smoke-detectors, voting machines, nuclear reactors and huge oil rigs can and do fail if the people responsible for them don't understand what to do, and what not to do.

Technology is itself the product of human creativity.   In this new century, however, we have seen with poignant and disturbing clarity that there is another kind of human creativity of which we are in seriously short supply.  This new kind of inventiveness, if and when we find it, will help us educate ourselves and each other in the wise and balanced use of technology.

It is my hope that my own inventions, and the inventions of others, will be of value in preventing and containing future disasters.  More than that, however, I hope that new developments in the “technology of thoughtfulness” will lead our world to new ways of thinking and a new kind of organizational culture that gives safety and caution their rightful place in the planning and implementation of the many projects humanity chooses to undertake.

(Adapted from “BP oil spill, Katrina show that we need a technology of thoughtfulness”, by Fred Commoner, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, Friday July 08, 2011.  pdf )

Ironstone Communications, Inc.

Fred Commoner is the CEO of Ironstone Communications, Inc., a Massachusetts non-profit corporation.

Education

A.B. with highest honors, Mathematics, Harvard University 1975.

Graduate work in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Churchill College, Cambridge

University 1976-78.

Honors

Marshall Scholarship for graduate study in England, 1975.

Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard 1975.

Ranked 6th nationally in William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition 1974.

Robert Fletcher Rogers Prize, Harvard Undergraduate Mathematics Colloquium 1974.

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Last updated September 15 2017.

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