[smacktoward]

The problem is that the up sides of new technologies are typically immediately obvious, while the down sides are subtle and can take a very long time to make themselves evident.

Example: let's make watch faces that glow in the dark by painting them on with radium-based paint! (Which was a real thing: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls)

Up side: everyone can now read their watches in the dark! Hooray! An instantly clear improvement.

Down side: radium is, well, radioactive, so the workers painting the watch faces slowly start having their bones rot and their jaws fall off. It takes a decade for the link to be recognized between these symptoms and unsafe procedures for handling radium-based paint. Nobody really knows how many of the workers employed handling such paint eventually died from related illnesses.