What Technology Wants (13 page)

There is a price to pay for that growth. As vibrant and dynamic as cities are, their edges can be unpleasant. To enter a slum you need to walk down shit lane. There is human excrement rotting on the sidewalk, urine flowing in the gutter, and garbage piled up in heaps. I've done it many times in the sprawling shantytowns of the developing world, and it is no fun—and less so for the residents who must endure this every day. To compensate for this outer contamination and ugliness, the inside of squatter housing is often surprisingly soothing. Recycled material covers the walls, color abounds, and knickknacks accumulate to create a comfy zone. Sure, one room will house far more people than seems possible, but for many, a slum dwelling offers more comfort than a village hut. While the pirated electricity may be unreliable, at least there
is
electricity. The single water spigot may have a long line, but it might be closer than the well at home. Medicines are expensive but available. And there are schools with teachers that show up.

It is not utopia. When it rains, slums turn to mud cities. The ceaseless call for bribes for everything is dispiriting. And there is the embarrassment that squatters feel about the obvious low status of their homes. As Suketu Mehta, author of
Maximum City
(about Mumbai), says, “Why would anyone leave a brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the East to come here?” Then he answers: “So that someday the eldest son can buy two rooms in Mira Road, at the northern edges of the city. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Discomfort is an investment.”

Then Mehta continues: “For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn't just about money. It's also about freedom.” Stewart Brand recounts this summation of the magnetic pull of cities by activist Kavita Ramdas: “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children.” The Bedouin of Arabia were once seemingly the freest people on Earth, roaming the great Empty Quarter at will, under a tent of stars and no one's thumb. But they are rapidly quitting their nomadic life and hustling into drab, concrete-block apartments in exploding Gulf-state ghettos. As reported by Donovan Webster in
National Geographic,
they stable their camels and goats in their ancestral village, because the bounty and attraction of the herder's life still remain for them. The Bedouin are lured, not pushed, to the city because, in their own words: “We can always go into the desert to taste the old life. But this [new] life is better than the old way. Before there was no medical care, no schools for our children.” An eighty-year-old Bedouin chief sums it up better than I could: “The children will have more options for their future.”

The migrants don't have to come. Yet they come by the millions from the villages or the deserts and scrublands. If you ask them why they come, it's almost always the same answer, the same answer given by the Bedouin and slum dwellers of Mumbai. They come for opportunities. They could stay where they are, as the Amish choose to do. The young men and women could remain in the villages and adopt the satisfying rhythms of agriculture and small-town craft that their parents followed. The seasonal droughts and floods are eternal. And so is the incredible beauty of the land and the intensity of family and community support. The same tools work. The same traditions deliver the same good things. The immense satisfactions of seasonal toil, abundant leisure, strong family ties, reassuring conformity, and rewarding physical labor will always pull our hearts. If everything were equal, who would want to leave a Greek island, or a Himalayan village, or the lush gardens of southern China?

But the options aren't equal. People of the world increasingly have TV and radio and trips into town to see movies, and they know what is possible. The freedom in a city makes their village seem a prison. So they choose—very willingly, very eagerly—to run to the city.

Some argue that they had no choice. That those who arrive in the slums are forced against their desire to migrate to the city because their villages can no longer support farmers. That they leave unwillingly. Perhaps after surviving for generations selling coffee, they find that global markets have shifted and dropped the price of their coffee to nothing, sending them either back to subsistence farming or onto the bus. Or perhaps technological development, such as mining for coal, is poisoning their land, lowering the water table, and stirring their exodus. In addition, as technological improvements in the form of tractors, refrigeration, and roads to transport goods reach the farthest fields, fewer farmers are needed, even in developed countries. Massive deforestation to produce lumber for housing and construction, or to clear land for new farms to feed the cities, also forces indigenous people out of their wild homelands and traditional ways.

Truly, there is nothing as disturbing as the sight of indigenous tribesmen, say in the Amazon basin or in the jungles of Borneo or Papua New Guinea, wielding chain saws to fell their own forests. When your forest home is toppled, you are pushed into camps, then towns, and then cities. Once in a camp, cut off from your hunter-gatherer skills, it makes a weird sense to take the only paid job around, which is cutting down your neighbors' forest. Clear-cutting virgin forests counts as cultural insanity for a number for reasons, not least that the tribal people ousted by this habitat destruction cannot go back. Within a generation or two of exile, they can lose key survival knowledge, which would prevent their descendants from returning even if their homeland were to be renewed. Their exit is an involuntary one-way trip. In the same way, the despicable treatment of indigenous tribes by American white settlers really did force them into settlements and the adoption of new technologies they were in no hurry to use.

However, clear-cutting is technologically unnecessary. Habitat destruction of any type is deplorable, and stupidly low tech, but also not responsible for the majority of migrations. Deforestation is a minor push compared to the tractor beam-like pull of the flickering lights that have brought 2.5 billion people into the cities in the last 60 years. Today, as in the past, most of the mass movement toward cities—the hundreds of millions per decade—is led by settled people willing to pay the price of inconvenience and grime, living in a slum in order to gain opportunities and freedom. The poor move into the city for the same reason the rich move into the technological future—to head toward possibilities and increased freedoms.

In
The Progress Paradox
Gregg Easterbrook writes, “If you sat down with a pencil and graph paper to chart the trends of American and European life since the end of World War II, you'd do a lot of drawing that was pointed up.” Ray Kurzweil has collected an entire gallery of graphs depicting the upward-zooming trend in many, if not most, technological fields. All graphs of technological progress start low, with small change several hundred years ago, then begin to bend upward in the last hundred, and then bolt upright to the sky in the last fifty.

These charts capture a feeling we have that change is accelerating even within our own lifetimes. Novelty arrives in a flash (compared to earlier), and there seems to be a shorter and shorter interval between novel changes. Technologies get better, cheaper, faster, lighter, easier, more common, and more powerful as we move into the future. And it is not just technology. The human life span increases, the rate of infant mortality decreases, and even the average IQ inches upward every year.

If all this is true, then what of long ago? Long ago there was not much evidence of progress, at least how we now visualize it. Five hundred years ago technologies were not doubling in power and halving in price every 18 months. Waterwheels were not becoming cheaper every year. A hammer was not easier to use from one decade to the next. Iron was not increasing in strength. The yield of corn seed varied by the season's climate, instead of improving each year. Every 12 months you could not upgrade your oxen's yoke to anything much better than what you already had. And your own expected longevity, or your children's, was approximately the same as it had been for your parents. Wars, famine, storms, and curious events came and went, but there was no steady movement in any direction. There appeared to be, in short, change without progress.

A common misconception about human evolution is that historic tribes and prehistoric clans of early Sapiens achieved a level of egalitarian justice, freedom, liberty, and harmony that has only declined since then. In this view, the human inclination to make tools (and weapons) has only introduced trouble. Each new invention unleashes new power that can be concentrated, wielded asymmetrically, or corrupted, and therefore the history of civilization is one long devolution. By this account, human nature is fixed, unyielding. If that is true, then attempts to alter human nature will only lead to evil. So in this view, new technologies generally erode the innate sacred human character, and can be kept in check only by keeping technology to a minimum in strict moral vigilance. Therefore, our relentless propensity to create things is a kind of species-level addiction, or a self-destroying frivolity, and we must always guard against succumbing to its spell.

The reality is the opposite. Human nature is malleable. We use our minds to change our values, expectations, and definition of ourselves. We have changed our nature since our hominin days, and once changed, we will continue to change ourselves even more. Our inventions, such as language, writing, law, and science, have ignited a level of progress that is so fundamental and embedded in the present that we now naively expect to see similar good things in the past as well. But much of what we consider “civil” or even “humane” was absent long ago. Early societies were not peaceful but rife with warfare. One of the most common causes of adult death in tribal societies was to be declared a witch or evil spirit. No rational evidence was needed for these superstitious accusations. Lethal atrocities for infractions within a clan were the norm; fairness, as we might think of it, did not extend outside the immediate tribe. Rampant inequality among genders and physical advantage for the strong guided a type of justice few modern people would want applied to them.

Yet all these values worked for the first kinds of human communities. Early societies were incredibly adaptable and resilient. They produced art, love, and meaning. They were very successful in their environments because their own social norms were successful—even though we find them intolerable. If these earlier societies had had to rely on our modern conceptions of justice, harmony, education, and equality, they would have failed. But all societies, including aboriginal cultures today, evolve and adapt. Their progress may be imperceptible, but it is real.

In all cultures prior to the 17th century or so, the quiet, incremental drift of progress was attributed to the gods, or to the one God. It wasn't until progress was liberated from the divine and assigned to ourselves that it began to feed upon itself. Sanitation made us healthier, so we could work longer. Farm tools made more food for less work. Gadgets made our homes more comfortable for tinkering with new ideas. The more inventions, the better. There was a tight feedback loop as increased knowledge enabled us to discover and manufacture more tools, and these tools allowed us to discover and learn more knowledge, and both the tools and the knowledge made our lives easier and longer. The general enlargement of knowledge and comfort and choices—and the sense of well-being—was called progress.

The rise of progress coincided with the rise of technology. But what pushed technology? We had thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years of human culture, steadily learning, passing on information from one generation to the next—but no progress. Sure, new things would occasionally be discovered and slowly disseminated, or rediscovered independently, but whatever improvement one might measure over centuries in the old days would be very small. In fact, the average farming peasant who lived in 1650 followed a life that was nearly indistinguishable from that of the average farming peasant who lived in 1650 B.C.E. or 3650 B.C.E. In some valleys of the world (the Nile in Egypt, the Yangtze in China) and in some particular places and times (classical Greece, Renaissance Italy), the fate of citizens might rise above the historical average, only to descend when a dynasty ended or the climate shifted. Before 300 years ago, the standard of the average human's life was fairly interchangeable anywhere in time or place: People were perennially hungry, short lived, limited in choices, and extremely dependent on traditions simply to survive to the next generation.

For thousands of years this slow cycle of birth and death crept along, when suddenly—
boom!
—complex industrial technology appeared and everything started moving very fast. What caused the boom in the first place? What is the origin of our progress?

The ancient world—particularly its cities—enjoyed many fabulous inventions. Societies slowly accumulated such marvels as arch bridges, aqueducts, steel knives, suspension bridges, water mills, paper, vegetable dyes, and so on. Each of these innovations was discovered in a trial-and-error fashion. Once found, by hit or miss, they were disseminated haphazardly. Some marvels could take centuries to reach another country. This nearly random method of improvement was transformed by the tool of science. By systematically recording the evidence for beliefs and investigating the reasons why things worked and then carefully distributing proven innovations, science quickly became the greatest tool for making new things the world had ever seen. Science was in fact a superior method for a culture to learn.

Once you invent science—which allows you to quickly invent many things—you have a grand lever that can propel you forward very quickly. That's what happened in the West starting approximately in the 17th century. Science catapulted society into a rapid learning. By the 18th century, science had launched the Industrial Revolution, and progress was noticeable in the growing spread of cities, increasing longevity and literacy, and the acceleration of future discoveries.