“There’s this concept of the precautionary principle, which says that whenever society is making a decision around the deployment of a technology, it should look closely at the possibility of a negative result. The opposite argument, the proactionary principle, says that as long as you can show that a good outcome will happen, then go ahead and do it. What struck me was that there’s room for another approach and I started to call it the reversibility principle. Taking in both arguments around precaution and proaction, the best strategy when deploying a new technology is to design that technology from the outset in a way to maximize the potential to pull back if you recognize a potentially critical problem.”

Jamais Cascio, Environmental and Ethical Futurist