[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Future of Technology

[Bill Totten]

MuseLetter #189 (January 2008)

Reprint of MuseLetter #99 (April 2000)

by Richard Heinberg

http://globalpublicmedia.com (January 10 2008)

This month, due to extraordinary circumstances, it is not possible to
send a new piece of writing. This is a great disappointment to me, and I
assure you that, beginning next month, MuseLetter will resume
publication of fresh material. Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy the
essay below, one of my favorites from recent years.


This morning I was awakened at 6:30 by a robot; - not a wheeled
electronic valet named "Robbie" bringing me orange juice and toast, but
an automated fax machine dialing my phone number and beeping expectantly
into my answering machine, hoping to provide me with some helpful
advertisement. While I won't go so far as to say the experience ruined
my day, it nevertheless cost me some sleep and provoked me to reflect
somewhat darkly on our species' present and future relationship with
technology.

Before I even get started I can hear some readers thinking, "There goes
Heinberg again, spreading his paranoid negativity. Why doesn't he ever
look on the bright side? I bet he isn't even going to mention all the
existing and potential benefits of technology. He's just going to spend
the next four thousand words whining about how rotten machines are and
how they're going to make our lives even worse in the future. Meanwhile
there he sits, using his computer and printer to tell us how computers
are ruining us."

Guilty as charged. I'm paranoid, negative, and sometimes hypocritical
(at least in my writings on technology; I try to be cheerful and
optimistic in my personal life). In my defense I would merely point out
that I'm not alone. On my desk sits the April issue of Wired magazine (a
publication I don't often read) featuring a lengthy cover article by
Bill Joy - cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems - titled
"Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", in which the author ruminates on the
likelihood that 21st-century technology will cause the extinction of
biological humans. The article is not as systematic and clear-headed an
analysis of the relationship between society and machines as one might
expect from, say, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jeremy Rifkin, Chellis Glendinning,
Jerry Mander, or Theodore Roszak; nor does it ring with the sagacity of
Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine (1971). But for the Wired
audience, Joy comes across as a latter-day, high-tech Jeremiah railing
against the blindness of his colleagues in building a monster neither
they nor anyone else can control.

The new technologies that Joy finds most likely to change our lives in
the 21st century are genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics
(GNR). He writes:

[B]ecause of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular
electronics - where individual atoms and molecules replace
lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies,
we should be able to exceed Moore's law rate of progress for another
thirty years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in
quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today
... As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative
advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in
genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These
combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world,
for better or worse: The replicating and evolving processes that have
been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human
endeavor.


Joy discusses inventor Ray Kurzweil's prediction, published in the
latter's The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), that we will gradually
replace ourselves with robotic technology, and eventually be able to
"download" our consciousnesses into immortal computers. "But if we are
downloaded into our technology", asks Joy, "what are the chances that we
will thereafter be ourselves or even human?" His fear is that "On this
path, our humanity may well be lost".

Joy reminds us that:

The nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) technologies used in
20th-century weapons of mass destruction were and are largely military,
developed in government laboratories. In sharp contrast, the
21st-century GNR technologies have clear commercial uses and are being
developed almost exclusively by corporate enterprises. In this age of
triumphant commercialism, technology - with science as its handmaiden -
is delivering a series of almost magical inventions that are the most
phenomenally lucrative ever seen.

However, the new non-military technologies could have disastrous
unintended consequences even more awful than the intended effects of
20th-century "NBC" weapons: genetic engineering combined with
nanotechnology could lead to self-replicating robots the size of
bacteria - too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - that might
show up as a "gray goo" efficiently disassembling and obliterating all life.

Joy freely acknowledges that his own work (which centers on making
computer software more reliable) is at least tangentially complicit in
these developments. He is disturbed by the direction of events in which
he is participating, but not disturbed enough to abandon ship. He
advocates more public discussion, more conferences. "In the end", he
says, "it is because of our great capacity for caring that I remain
optimistic we will confront the dangerous issues now before us".
Ironically, perhaps, some of the best writing in the article is
contained in a lengthy quote from Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber - who,
despite obvious ethical failings, at least maintained a minimally
hypocritical relationship with technology by actually practicing the
primitivist, Luddite lifestyle that his writings implicitly preached.
Joy, in contrast, is tortured, guilt-ridden, and unable to offer any
realistic solution to the potential horrors he illuminates.


The Technological Cornucopia

Joy's article is being discussed widely by the techno-intelligentsia,
mostly in dismissive terms - if James Pinkerton's recent syndicated
Newsday op-ed piece (titled "Fearful Scientists Let Science Down") is
any indication. According to Pinkerton, Joy should spend less time
warning about technology's apocalyptic potentialities (which should be
"the province of theologians and doomsday cultists") and devote more
attention to doing what scientists do best - solving problems. If
technology presents humankind with novel dilemmas, says Pinkerton, then
it is up to the technologists to give answers.

Okay, let's give the technoids their due. They do solve problems, after
all. Just how might 21st-century technologies get us out of our current
jams? I have written extensively elsewhere about the perils of
biotechnology. But what of its promise? Millions of children in India
and Bangladesh suffer from vitamin A deficiency; researchers are now
perfecting a genetically engineered strain of rice rich in that
micronutrient. Other genetic scientists are hard at work finding cures
for genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs syndrome and sickle-cell anemia.
Further ahead, it will be possible in principle to solve the problems of
world hunger and topsoil loss by engineering bacteria to produce all
necessary human nutrients, in limitless quantities, in vats. As the
human lifespan is extended by redesigning future generations to be
healthier and more disease-resistant, we will at the same time be able
to replace organs more easily with spare parts grown in pigs genetically
tailored to produce perfect transplants.

If biotechnology offers the hope of life extension, the marriage of
biology with computer science points the way toward immortality. While
it might be interesting to make clones of, say, Einstein or Mozart, the
genetically gifted duplicates would not necessarily develop the same
talents as the originals. But suppose we could preserve more than just
the genes of future geniuses; what if we could (as Kurzweil puts it)
download their thought processes, their very consciousnesses, into
hyperpowerful computers? Imagine what the Dalai Lama or physicist
Stephen Hawking might achieve if, instead of living a mere eighty years
or so, they - or their digitized minds, at any rate - could still be
around a millennium from now, adapting to new cultural trends while
building on past accomplishments? Imagine a world in which the sorrows
of death and loss were things of the past.

Today we face the prospect of eventual shortages of essential materials.
With a growing population, there just won't be enough of everything to
go around. Absent technology, there are only two options: population
reduction (most likely through starvation, war, or pestilence), or a
widening of the income gap between rich and poor so that a tiny minority
of the human population enjoys the dwindling reserves of resources while
everyone else maintains an increasingly tenuous hold on existence. With
nanotechnology, microscopic self-replicating robots could synthesize,
atom by atom, any substance we need from virtually any raw material
whatsoever. Hence no shortages; no more wealth disparities.

Tomorrow's high technology could be much friendlier to the environment
than today's. Currently we derive most of our energy from fossil fuels,
whose burning releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In the
future, bioengineered hyperefficient microorganisms will produce
limitless quantities of hydrogen - a fuel whose combustion produces only
pure water as a byproduct. At the same time, giant satellites will
collect sunlight, convert it to electricity, and beam it down to Earth.
Endangered species will be cloned or otherwise genetically preserved
until some future time when computer-driven nanobots will have
replicated their now-disappearing habitats. Meanwhile, designer microbes
will eat all our toxic wastes. What if these new technologies are
incapable of undoing - quickly enough - the damage we've already caused
to our planet's life-support systems? Perhaps other technologies could
help us make the best of a tragic situation: we (a few of us, at any
rate) could colonize other planets, making a fresh start. In these new
Edens we would apply the wisdom gained from examining our mistakes back
on Earth. Using nanobots, we could terraform even minimally hospitable
worlds, manufacturing all the oxygen, water, and food we could ever
need. And, when those planets faced threats (the death of our Sun,
collisions with comets, more human failures), the population could set
out for still newer colonies.

In short, it is difficult to identify a problem for which no
technological solution can be imagined.


The Limits to Invention

The key word in the previous sentence is "imagined". In the paragraphs
above I mentioned no objections to the technological vision of the
Rapture (oddly, while Pinkerton draws a parallel between Bill Joy's
technophobic dystopia and religious apocalypticism, he completely
ignores the well-demonstrated roots of techno-utopianism in the
Christian search for redemption in the transformation of nature; see
David Noble's The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the
Spirit of Invention, 1998). However, there are many such objections,
which center on the observations that (a) most technological "solutions"
entail unintended negative consequences; (b) some technologies simply
don't work as promised; and (c) we may be incapable of funding the
development and implementation of the technology along the lines envisioned.

In 1900, futurists who took the automobile seriously tended to see it as
a plaything, or perhaps as a solution to the problem of horse feces
clogging city streets (this was indeed a serious predicament in places
like New York and Chicago). Those futurists were right - up to a point.
The automobile did solve the dung dilemma, but of course it created
pollution problems of its own (exhaust fumes, discarded tires, rusting
heaps of obsolete dream machines). Think of the unintended consequences
of agricultural petrochemicals and asbestos insulation. The robot that
woke me up this morning provides yet another illustration: I'm sure the
pioneers of robotics saw their work as leading to the reduction of human
toil; but "toil" can sometimes imply "rewarding work" or "human
accountability". In this instance, I would have preferred hearing a real
human being on the other end of the phone line (I was unable to tell the
automated fax machine what I thought of it, nor to ask it not to call me
again). But at least these inventions did something they were intended
to do, even if they did other less-desirable things as well. What about
plain technological failures? Biofuels offer a telling example. Their
purpose, of course, is to provide an energy source, hopefully a cheap
one. Even if we leave aside all discussion about the unintended negative
effects of biofuels production, the fact remains that it has utterly
flunked its basic assignment. Taking into account the energy costs of
growing crops and crushing or distilling them into fuels, they have so
far often proven to be a net energy sink rather than a source. We can
afford to produce them only in an energy environment dominated by
abundant and cheap fossil fuels.

Will the 21st-century technologies work as promised? Will they have
disastrous side effects? Surely we Cassandras should be permitted our
doubts.

Biotech and nanotech promise to overcome the basic survival constraints
of the human species. Their advocates imply that we will no longer be
dependent on soil, or conventional sources of water or energy. How
realistic are such promises? Suppose we could synthesize a complete
human diet out of biochemicals produced by genetically engineered
bacteria. Is it likely that humans would thrive on such a diet? Or might
the biochemists' understandings of what humans actually need to eat for
health maintenance fall short? Recall efforts since 1945 in replacing
plant nutrients in topsoil with petrochemicals: we managed to increase
yields-per-acre dramatically, but the nutritional quality of our food
has faded even as poisons have accumulated in our bodies. Living soil
has proven to be irreducibly complex and irreplaceable by synthetic
substitutes. Isn't the same likely to be true of traditional foods? How
can we adequately replace something we don't fully understand?

The holiest of grails for the new technologists would be a substitute
for fossil fuels. Given a cheap, abundant source of concentrated energy,
the process of invention can continue almost endlessly - or, at least,
until inventions' side effects do us in. Without such an energy source,
the invention process will grind nearly to a halt (at least for machines
that require lots of energy for their construction or operation). Now,
it may indeed be possible in principle to engineer microorganisms to
give off hydrogen, and we could theoretically reorganize human society
around this new energy source. But there is a problem. The energy
investment required to fund that reorganization has to be made in the
coin of the current energy source - that is, fossil fuels. The energy
costs of research, development, and retooling our social infrastructure
to run on hydrogen will be considerable, and the transition will require
a minimum of twenty years - assuming the enthusiastic support of oil
companies, other industries, and politicians. To "bootstrap" the
transition (funding it primarily with energy derived from the new
source) would delay it by several more decades. But we don't have many
decades of leeway. With global oil production likely to peak around
2010, there simply won't be enough energy available to fund much longer
the existing needs of the social-political-industrial infrastructure of
modern civilization, let alone to provide for a wholesale redesign and
replacement of that infrastructure. It's true that technology sometimes
exceeds our expectations. A few prominent scientists in the 1890s stated
that all important inventions and discoveries had already been made. The
events of the 20th century proved their judgment laughable. On the other
hand, promised technological transformations often fail to occur.
Aerospace futurists of the 1960s and 1970s universally believed that by
the year 2000 humankind would have based permanent colonies on the Moon,
and perhaps Mars as well (recall Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space
Odyssey). That clearly has not happened; in fact, the likelihood that we
will ever station colonies beyond Earth orbit is now in doubt. Why has
our expectation of technology been scaled back so radically in this
instance? The simple answer is, it costs too much. For the time being,
putting a permanent human colony on the Moon costs too much in dollar
terms: the politicians who control purse strings cannot be cajoled into
lavishing tens of billions on the space program when a lesser amount
spent building prisons will generate far more campaign contributions.
But soon Moon colonies will cost too much in energy terms: the millions
of tons of fuel needed to loft to Luna a dozen people, along with all
their needed accouterments, will be unavailable.

In the late 19th century humankind discovered the extraordinary energy
bonanza present in fossil fuels. We have used oil to revolutionize
transportation, agriculture, medicine, and commerce. Its concentrated
power has helped us create a lifestyle in which the typical American now
has roughly 300 "energy slaves". It has enabled us to extract resources
more quickly and thoroughly than ever before, and to subjugate (through
trade, debt, and military intimidation) the whole of what has come to be
called the Third World. Its use in agriculture and medicine has led to
dramatic increases in human population. It has also permitted us to
expand and intensify our means of killing, so that wars have become more
horrific than ever.

If, from the beginning of the last century, we had managed this energy
subsidy better, we might have used it to fund the development of a
modest, nonpolluting, sustainable energy regime that would carry us many
centuries into the future. But we didn't. We have spent the past decades
guzzling and wasting energy on a scale never before imaginable. Now
there isn't enough left to fund a large-scale transition to another,
less concentrated energy system; and the political and economic power
centers built around the existing profligate energy complex are
discouraging even the attempt.

Recently [in 1999] oil prices rose dramatically as the result of a
temporary cut in production by the OPEC nations; financial mavens
reassured us that there was nothing to worry about because energy now
represents only a small part of the overall economy. Information and
high tech account for more dollar-flow than does gasoline. The
economists forgot that, in the final analysis, it's all energy. Without
fuel, computers cannot be manufactured or delivered; biotech scientists
cannot even get to work, much less plug in their polymerase chain
reaction machines. We will recover from the recent gasoline price hike,
but our oil dependency and refusal to conserve make the longer-term
picture less rosy.

Can biotechnology make us immune to all diseases, smarter, stronger,
more beautiful? Can artificial intelligence render the human brain
obsolete? In principle, perhaps. Given a few more decades of cheap,
concentrated energy, we might accomplish all sorts of wonderful,
frightening things. But there may be limits.


What Is Technology For?

These practical limits may finally force us to confront philosophical
issues we should have been contemplating all along. Are machines for
people to use? Or are people primarily useful as inventors and
custodians of machines? These questions seem ridiculous on their face.
Of course machines serve people and not the other way around. But is
that really true?

To answer, we would first need to think about what humans actually want
and need. We require not just food, water, and shelter, but the time and
opportunity for rewarding social interactions. For the sake of our
psychological health we need to confront challenges that are within our
power to overcome. We need to feel a sense of connection with, and
belongingness in, the world around us - both the social world and the
natural world.

One could well argue (as I have done in other essays) that those basic
needs are actually met better in extremely low-tech gatherer-hunter
societies than in modern industrial nations. The point is arguable.
However, assuming for the moment that at least some basic human needs
are not well addressed by the technological society, then what real
purpose do the machines serve? Clearly, the high-tech regime suits well
the requirements of a complex social system in which a minority of the
population seeks to siphon wealth from the majority while capturing a
maximum of resources and energy from nature.

Rather than machines serving our needs, it seems that we are often
regimented to the requirements of our tools. We schedule our lives
around clocks, build our houses to suit our automobiles, and jump to
respond to beepers and cell phones. We become increasingly dependent
upon the technological system, and in our dependency we surrender
incrementally our freedom and spontaneity. Just as our ancestors in the
early Neolithic domesticated animals to perform agricultural work, we
have, in a profound sense, domesticated ourselves.

Are all tools therefore pernicious? I tend to agree with Mumford, who
held that, while every tool changes its user, some do so in ways that
are especially pernicious. He distinguished what he called
"authoritarian technics" from "democratic technics": the former term
refers to machines or systems of machines that cannot be designed,
built, or controlled by individuals or small groups acting spontaneously
and autonomously, systems that require and reproduce dependency and
obedience. The nuclear reactor furnishes a useful example: its
construction entails hierarchically organized armies of experts, and the
wastes it produces require that future generations organize further
teams of experts and armed guards in order to prevent pollution from
escaping and to ensure that fissile materials don't fall into the hands
of terrorists. By accepting the nuclear reactor, we also accept that our
society must perpetually be characterized by secrecy and the domination
of an administratorexpert class. By "democratic technics", Mumford meant
the tools that any individual or small community could use to directly
meet its needs or express its artistic spirit. The "democratic"
alternative to the nuclear reactor might be a windmill, which a family
or community could use to do heavy work (grinding, pumping, lifting, et
cetera). Democratic tools often require more skill on the part of the
end user (it's harder to build and operate a home-based power system
than to flip a switch connected to a nuclear power grid), but entail
less dependency and more satisfaction.


What Machines Will Survive?

For the next decade or two at least, we are likely to see a bifurcation
and polarization in technologies. On one hand, the development of
powerful new tools like the ones Bill Joy has written about will
continue. On the other, we'll see the emergence of many new "appropriate
technologies" - simple, elegant machines that do more with less, while
requiring more muscle-power and attention from the user. Already the
discerning democratic technician can, with a bit of effort and a few
basic tools, build for herself a simple hand-cranked refrigerator, a
solar oven, or a composting toilet. Photovoltaic panels currently
require fossil fuel-fed factories for their manufacture. It is
conceivable that, in the near future, improvements in design could
permit construction of small-scale, decentralized, solar-powered,
worker-owned PV factories.

As appropriate technologies become ever more efficient and affordable,
they will offer an increasingly attractive alternative to the mega-tech
system on which most of us have become uncomfortably dependent. But
optimistic visions of a quiet, peaceful, and happy transition are
probably hopelessly unrealistic. The promoters of biotech, nanotech,
artificial intelligence, and the current oil-coal-gas regime will not
simply fold their tents and go away. In the near future, most people in
the industrial world are likely to continue to become ever more addicted
to that regime. Some time in the first half of this new century, the
lights will begin to fade. The energy for the technological society will
begin to run out. What will happen then? That's anybody's guess. No
computer can tell us. In all likelihood, those who will already have
adopted appropriate technologies will have a leg up. But the high-tech
world will not simply disappear over night. Nuclear waste will be with
us for millennia. New bioengineered mutant species could continue
breeding and alter ecosystems forever. Moreover, the gasoline won't
disappear all at once: as the supply begins to dry up, what's left will
likely be commandeered by military and police forces, and by wealthy
techno-barons. Heaven knows what Dr Strangelove-like mischief will be
unleashed by such characters in the last days of the technological society.

Meanwhile, what can any of us personally do in the cause of
techno-sanity? To the degree that we are dependent on the current energy
regime, we are all complicit in its depredations. The only solution
therefore is to reduce our dependence, and thus our complicity, by
conserving energy and making a personal transition to appropriate
technologies.

However, this personal solution is by itself insufficient to prevent
significant harms that may result from some of the authoritarian
technologies now being designed and implemented. More people need to be
alerted to the increasingly compromised position in which their
dependency is placing them, and to the side effects of the authoritarian
megamachine. Thus there is the requirement for activism of all sorts -
from opposition to genetically modified foods to journalistic analyses
of global trade agreements. Many people who are doing this necessary
work will be unable immediately to put much effort into building
alternative, off-grid dwellings, and may have to continue using
computers and jet transport, at least in modest ways. The range of
activities necessary to achieve a minimally disruptive transition to a
post-high tech world is such that there is simply no room for purist,
holier-than-thou attitudes on the part of specialists in any of the
various alternatives movements. The degree of our success will likely
hinge on the degree to which we are able to work together and honor one
another's contributions.

I will not be here a century from now to see whether events have
fulfilled my predictions. My consciousness will not have been downloaded
into a robot. My body will not have been gene-enhanced to extend its
longevity. Neither will I be pestered by automated telemarketers.
Mortality does have its rewards.

© 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Post Carbon Institute

Post Carbon Institute is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization

http://globalpublicmedia.com/richard_heinbergs_museletter_the_future_of_technology

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