IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 18

Table 1. (Un)anticipated (Un)Intended Consequences.
Consequences

Anticipated

Unanticipated

Intended

"Known knowns." Positive, negative or perverse
consequences on society.

Invalid category. A consequence cannot be intended but
unanticipated. For this reason this is often referred to
as the "Unknown knowns." That which we intentionally
refuse to acknowledge that we know.

Unintended

"Known unknowns." Opportunity to curb negative
or perverse consequence(s) before it/they happen.
Equally, unintended consequences that are
anticipated and beneficial and can have positive
impacts on society.

"Unknown unknowns." Usually these unanticipated and
unintended consequences have significant negative
consequences on society. Very few of these have
positive impacts because of their unpredictability.

fraudulent, or at times detrimental and
even dangerous.
It is a paradox that today we
think of disruption as an intentional action intended to trigger market
forces and spur adoption of new
technologies. Contrarily, unintended consequences do not have a purposeful intentionality about them.
Quite often, the creator of an innovation does not attempt to steer the
adoption and use of their product in
the direction that eventually results.
This leaves us only to ponder "after
the fact" that the consequences
were unintended by the creator.
In fact, there would be nothing
stopping the rest of society from
speculating as to what some of
these unintended consequences
might be prior to commercialization.
The former United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld,
brought the idea of "known knowns"
to prominence when he answered
a question at a U.S. Department
of Defense (DoD) news briefing
on February 12, 2002, linking the
distribution of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) with the Iraqi
government [5]. He constructed
three contexts, saying:

"Reports that say that something
hasn't happened are always interesting
to me, because as we know:

practice in what we know, what we
do not know, and what we cannot
know, he failed to address what we
do not like to know [9].
If we take these underlying concepts and integrate them to the technological realm as in Table 1 we get:
1) The known knowns are those
things that are anticipated consequences that history has taught
us might happen in a given context. For example, some members
of society may not be able to
afford new technologies and so a
digital divide between the haves
and have-nots sets in with the
increasing number of consumer
technologies introduced into the
market (i.e., difference between
mobile phone, smart phone, smart
watch, microchip implants) [10].
2) The known unknowns are again
things that can be predicted, but
often by applying good judgement and common sense principles about the possibilities. For
example, the introduction of consumer products like the Hello
Barbie, Alexa, DropCam, and
Nest devices that have been
deployed with significant social,
privacy, and security problems
that will inevitably create some
benefit, but even greater drawbacks in unknown effects. Some
would go so far as to say that
these types of consumer products
may have perverse impacts on

1) There are known knowns; there
are things we know we know.
2) We also know there are known
unknowns; that is to say we know
there are some things we do not
know.
3) But there are also unknown
unknowns - the ones we don't
know we don't know. And if one
looks throughout the history
of our country and other free
countries, it is the latter category
that tend to be the difficult ones"
[6] (numbering added).
The idea of unknown unknowns
was created by Joseph Luft and
Harrington Ingham with the development of the Johari window in
1955 [7], which was centered on
understanding the self and our relations with others. It was a concept
that was widely used in NASA with
respect to decision-making and risk.
While Rumsfeld referred to three
categories, some philosophers such
as Slavoj Žižek have proposed
a fourth category of the "known
unknowns." Žižek writes that these
are: "the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we
pretend not to know about, even
though they form the background of
our public values" [8]. German sociologists Daase and Kessler [9] point
out that while Rumsfeld emphasized
the cognitive frame for political
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