Is it inevitable that societies exploit useful technologies?

In some applied areas of psychology— particularly engineering psychology, human factors psychology, and related areas—a common underlying assumption is that it is inevitable that people will seize upon useful new technologies and exploit them with dispatch, though some have suggested more complex points of view (Davis, 1993). In turn, useful technologies transform human societies (Woolgar, 2009). It is easy to provide examples that confirm this assumption. Furthermore, it is difficult to list counterexamples, which serves to further fix the assumption in the minds of those researchers who are at the intersection of humans and technology. There is a good reason why it is difficult to list counterexamples. Consider that for us to agree that a technology is useful at the larger level of the whole society (rather than just specialized uses that have little impact on the larger society), that technology needs to be demonstrated to have been used at a societal level or else there is no way for us to know that it is, in fact, useful at that level. Obviously, if the technology has been used successfully—again, this is a prerequisite for us to know that it is useful—it would seem to be a tautology that the technology has been used successfully! Is there a way out of the tautology? Is there a way to test, independently, whether a technology is useful and whether it has been used? A consideration of history suggests a possible way out. An advantage of studying the history of different cultures is that they can serve as naturally occurring “control” conditions for each other. For example, historians credit two technological innovations with being responsible for much of the history of Western Civilization. One of these is the popularization of the stirrup in the medieval centuries in Europe, which significantly altered mounted warfare by greatly reducing the likelihood of a rider falling off of his horse while fighting, increasing the force and variety with which mounted riders could strike blows, increasing the efficacy of shock tactics, and others. Some authorities have even gone so far as to credit the stirrup with being largely responsible for the advent of feudalism (e.g., White, 1962):