The Assumption Of Technological Progress

I first formulated what I call the Assumption of Technological Progress in a long study called Climate Change And Economic Growth — No Way Out?  I have rarely talked about it on DOTE, so the time to do so is long overdue.

Back in June, 2010 I wrote a post called Technological Progress And The Oil Leak. I was deconstructing some remarks by energy optimist Amy Jaffe of the Baker Institute at Rice Univerity, whose world view was under threat as crude oil poured out of  the Macondo well into the Gulf of Mexico.

Amy's thesis about unconventional natural gas, and indeed all Cornucopian (wildly optimistic) views of our energy future, depend on what I call the Assumption of Technological Progress... Here's the Assumption—

Technological progress marches on. Improvements are always sufficient to meet the requirements of economic expansion, or drive that expansion.

These improvements include, most importantly, industrial civilization's need for energy to fuel growth. For example, net energy returns on investment (EROI) for currently inefficient processes (e.g. biomass to cellulosic ethanol conversions) do not matter because they are based on current science & technology. That situation could change in the future.

Then a miracle occurs...  Source.

In other words, we standardly assume that technology solves all problems. I concluded [ in the No Way Out? paper ] that this usually implicit assumption should be tossed out...

Amy Jaffe explicitly stated the assumption in an interview on the PBS Newshour.

 Well, you know, we, in the American public, we are a big believer that there's a science and technology solution to everything — everything.

So — and it was really amazing that the industry — we were sort of running out of oil onshore, and the industry was able to go out to the depths of the earth, under the sea, and keep us driving around in our cars. So, to sit here night after night and watch all these scientists unable to close a simple pipeline, even though it's a very complex engineering problem, as a layperson, when you sit here and watch the oil just spewing out of this pipeline... It's just this horror movie, like we cannot believe that there isn't a technology to close this pipeline.

And we, as Americans, believe there's a technological solution to everything. And the idea that we're going to have to wait until August for the technological solution, I think it's just got people just gripped in terror.

Amy is so terrified by the prospect that technology doesn't solve all problems that she starts repeating herself.

The alert reader will note that I wrote (back in early 2010) that the Assumption of Technological Progress should be tossed out. That usage was disingenuous. I would never use the word "should" today because my view, then and now, is that technological optimism is built right into Homo sapiens. Perhaps I was offering a fig leaf of hope, but I don't do that anymore. I am far more apt to write text like this, which appeared in my post Techno-Optimists Running Wild!

Human love for technology is second only to our love of money. If humans can replace thousands of fellow humans with some machinery which does the same thing those inferior humans were doing, they'll make that "positive" choice in a heartbeat. More money and machines too? You can't beat that!

Let's face it, technology is the only thing Homo sapiens is good at. The historical record makes it entirely clear that humans can't govern themselves, don't understand themselves, and can't change their own fundamental behaviors. For example, they can't just say No when given the opportunity to apply some technology and destroy the lives of all those fellow (albeit inferior) humans just mentioned. Technology is the solution to all problems, even when a problem does not exist, or the technology itself creates far more problems than it solves. Technology Über Alles.

You can find a theoretical treatment of how technological thinking is built right into human cognition in Steven Mithen's The Prehistory Of The Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. However, I do not base my assumption about technology being a central part of human cognition on any theoretical perspective. I do not formulate theories and then go around trying to find facts or events that support them. (Not that Mithen or any other good scientist does that.)

Rather, I base this explanatory assumption on my observations of everyday human behavior. What do people typically do? Typically, they seek out technological solutions to every problem, problems which are more often than not problems which they themselves created. Thus my reasoning in this case proceeds bottom-up, not top-down. I always reason from observations to theories, not the other way around.

Thus if humans have created (or simply have) a problem which is potentially amenable to technological or technocratic solutions, including economic problems in the social realm, and almost all problems are viewed in that light, they will invariably try to find such solutions to those problems instead of changing their behavior to make a problem disappear or mitigate it. And then, if humans do find and apply those technological solutions, new problems arise from those "solutions".

For example, the third agricultural "Green" Revolution of the mid-20th century appeared to solve humanity's food problems, at least temporarily, but has created many other problems associated with our inability to achieve endless growth.

Thus we typically find that human behavior is technologically oriented by default. I daresay this ineluctable cognitive pattern was already well established when Homo erectus started making hand axes 1.6 million years ago [image above left].

Much follows from this partial formulation of Human Nature. This will be "Technology Week" as I focus on the unwavering faith humans have in the power of technology to save them from themselves.

Bonus Video — the video from my post The Future Is Better Than You Think

 

Comments

[John D]

I guess I can't figure out why people can believe that technology will solve all our problems, when all of our major problems have been caused by technology.

[Wanooski]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2175374/Russian-research-project-offers-immortality-billionaires--transplanting-brains-robot-bodies.html

Here's some tech that will magically save billionaires from dying. That way they go on, staying alive, perpetuating the plutocracy forever and ever and ever. Boy, how's that for a dream come true.

[T E Cho]

Dave,

An important and neglected topic.

Again, the average auto speed limit plateau has not changed in 75+ years, same with jet airplanes. Remember the popular science articles in the 60's claiming 120 mph auto lanes were coming? And so many flying car models, etc.

What law says 'progress' must follow a consistent mathematical curve? What if oil were 15 or 50 miles below the surface instead of a few miles? Sudden progress often is based on chance coincident discoveries and understandings. Such random chance major discoveries are ... Random, with an innate random nature and unpredictable.

[Brian M]

Seems intuitively obvious. What's the old saying, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Well, if the only tool our species really has (or thinks it knows how to use) is that of adding technology, then every problem will look like it needs more technology.

If you buy the idea that additional technology/complexity eventually exhibits diminishing (and eventually negative) returns, and you believe that humans are, either by habit or genetics, predisposed to solve all problems with more technology/complexity, then you kind of have to come to the conclusion that, well, we are good and truly screwed.

The idea of habit vs. genetics may (or may not) be important in the long term. Over the short term, it matters not at all. In either case, the behavior would be the same, given that the habit is based on conditions of growth beyond living memory. However, after the addition of more technology/complexity has sufficiently greased the skids (as in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rMcRJVY1-0) and introduced the living memory of the species to a new set of realities, the difference might matter. If the trait is genetic, humans will continue to try to apply technology/complexity in ways that inevitably, in our new circumstances, both fail and make things worse. On the other hand, if the trait is actually a learned habitual behavior, then enough time in changed circumstance (e.g., decline) might actually lead to changes in behavior that might actually be positive many generations hence.

Of course, this is a purely theoretical question because, as I said, over any short to mid-term time frame, we are probably screwed regardless.

[Joy]

I was living in Silicon Valley in 1998 when Colin Campbell's SciAm article, "The End of Cheap Oil" was published. In that time, in that place, there was a huge cognitive gulf between the techno optimists (most of the people then in the dotcom bubble land) and realists. Now, I am not so sure. Yes, there are professional cheerleaders and propagandists of a shining future who write in elite publications and speak at TED lectures, and some fraction of the 1% will lap it up. Beyond that, in the real world, optimists are an endangered species.

It has been a long time since I encountered anyone in the real world who expects technology to solve anything or the future to be better than the past. Even John and Jane Average here are beginning to do the things the Transition movement would advocate, not out of altruism or ideology, but out of necessity. When a bell pepper costs a dollar, you plant a garden or go without. Even a quarter acre section in town will hold a chicken coop (sans roosters), and I am seeing more of those too. Of course, neo-peasant home agriculture is a sort of technofix itself, but not of the onward and upward variety

[John Theodorou]

Oh goody! Dave serves up yet another helping of cornucopians, with more to come. Yum, they're so tasty!

[Raintonite]

After several long years of reading, prognosticating and trying to draw conclusions about our predicament, this one sentence says it all:

". . . they (we) will invariably try to find such (technological) solutions to those problems instead of changing their behavior to make a problem disappear or mitigate it."

We want and expect the world to change to suit us. We never think we have to change. Tools are mistaken for solutions. The only possible solution is using tools wisely. That means we have to change. We won't.

Common perception is that we only have a short life span and we best use that time to serve selfish interests. Big, shiny techno tools won't hide our superficial aspirations forever. They may indeed beckon our demise totally.