What Cigarettes Can Teach Us About the Risks of Breakthrough Technology

In cigarettes, we’ve invented a deadly vice that is immune to natural selection and our own reasoning. They’re not the only product we’ve built with those characteristics.

The series “Guidance Systems” discusses technologies that seem to improve our lives by offering us new choices, while in fact shaping or removing our ability to decide things for ourselves.

At the age of 14, Sean David imagined becoming a doctor. “I wanted to be Marcus Welby,” he remembers. So in the year after graduating college, he began to work in a hospital any way he could. He became an orderly, scrubbing out surgical theaters after each procedure.

“You go in, you pick up all the biological waste and dispose of it. You put this sudsy soap on the floor and mop and hose it down, go room to room,” he remembers. “The orthopedic cases were really rough, they use hammers and saws, they leave a lot of stuff behind.” But he was building his mental capacity for observing, up close, the failures of the human body, and he says the work was satisfying, in its way.

Then, in 1991, his supervisor found him as he was wheeling a bucket between rooms, and took him aside. “Your…