Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, PDF - Dss-edit.com

curves: DATAR, the RATP, Paris, before you know it the whole world.Yet it's still contemporary twenty years later! The diagnostic hasn'tbudged: everything has only gotten worse, in cities. And in the center,in what has become the center, resting at the heart of the mechanism:kinematics, continuous transportation. A peaceful revolution desired byall. And you'll never again have to change trains or wash your car. Carsfor everybody. No, the importance of Bardet's innovations can't beoverestimated. I don't like the word, but Bardet is a genius. Unfortunately,we can't interview him. I've talked to his wife: he's very old,and too ill to answer any questions.""Still, he blew it," I thought. But I kept my opinion to myself.Justice and young engineers with no memory are hard on projectsthat fa il.The ultimate defect of projects-they die-takes us back to theirbeginnings: they were condemned from the start because some crazyengineers had mistaken dreams for reality. The verdict is clear: PersonalRapid Transport systems died because they were not viable. But biologicalmetaphors are as dangerous for technological organizations as they arefor living organisms. You can't say that PRTs died because they weren'tviable, any more than you can say that dinosaurs, after surviving formillions of years, died out because they were doomed or ill-conceived.Aramis died-in 1 987-and its accusers claim that it was nonviable fromthe beginning, from 1970. No: Aramis was terminated in 1970, and theexplanation makers were kicking a dead horse when they claimed that ithadn't been feasible from the start and that they themselves had beensaying so all along. Blessed are the lesson givers, for they will always beright-afterward . . . Don't ask them for immediate opinions on the Con·corde, or the future of computers, or aerotrains, or superconductivity, ortelephones. You'll get the answers only ten or twenty years later, and they'llsay they knew all along that the project was not viable. No, Aramis isfeasible, at least as feasible as dinosaurs, for life is a state of uncertaintyand risk, of fragile adaptation to a past and present environment that thefuture cannot judge.The innovations produced by people like Bardet, Petit, Boeing, Otis,AN EXCITING INNOVATION