What Technology Wants (15 page)

While the census of human minds may decrease, we can build artificial minds, maybe even in the billions. Perhaps these artificial minds are all that is needed to keep prosperity expanding. To do so they would need to not only keep producing ideas, but also consuming them, just as humans do. Since they aren't human (if you want a human mind, make a baby), this prosperity and progress would likely look different from that of today.

Rather than depending on expanding the number of human minds, maybe progress can keep advancing by bettering the average human mind. Perhaps with the aid of always-on technologies or genetic engineering or pills, the potential of individual human minds increases, and this increase propels progress. Perhaps we increase our attention span, sleep less, live longer, and consume more, produce more, create more. The cycle spins faster with fewer but more powerful minds.

We might have it all wrong. Maybe prosperity has nothing to do with increasing numbers of minds. Maybe consumption has no part in progress. We simply figure out how to increase living quality, choices, and possibilities with fewer and fewer people (who live longer and longer). It's a very green vision, but also very alien to our current system. If every year there are fewer people as my potential audience or my potential customers, I have to create things for a different reason than growth in audience or customers. A nongrowth economy is hard to imagine. But stranger things have happened.

Our population plunges to small remnants, which in desperation breed madly and prosper. World population oscillates up and down.

 

If the origins of prosperity lie solely in growth of the human population, then progress will paradoxically temper itself in the coming century. If the origins of progress lie outside population growth, we'll need to identify them so that on the other side of the population peak, we can continue to prosper.

I tell the story of progress's rise as one driven by human minds, but I haven't yet mentioned the crucial fact that humanity's use of energy follows the same upward curves. The accelerating progress of the last 200 years has indisputably been fueled by an exponential increase in cheap, abundant energy. It is no coincidence that the takeoff in progress at the dawn of the industrial age began exactly when humans figured out how to harness coal power instead of, or in addition to, animal power. One could look at three rising curves in the 20th century—human population, technical progress, and energy production—and be convinced that both people and machines were eating oil. The curves fit each other that well.

Tapping into cheap energy was a major breakthrough in the technium. But if the discovery of compact energy was the key insight, then China would have been first to industrialize because the Chinese figured out their abundant coal could burn at least 500 years before Europe did. Cheap energy was a huge bonus, but stockpiles of energy were not enough. China lacked the science that was key to liberating that energy.

Imagine humans had been born on a planet without fossil fuels. What would have happened? Could civilization have progressed very far burning wood only? It is possible. Maybe highly efficient wood and charcoal technology beyond what we presently have could have nurtured a population increase sufficiently dense to invent science and then, solely powered by wood, go on to invent solar panels, or nukes, or whatever. On the other hand, a civilization floating on oceans of oil, yet without science, would not progress anywhere.

Progress follows the rise of minds, which then causes an echoing rise in energy. Abundant, cheap fuel found easily around the planet enabled the Industrial Revolution and the current acceleration of technological progress, but first the technium needed science to unlock the transforming power of coal and oil. In a coevolutionary dance, human minds mastered cheap energy, which expanded food for increasing numbers of human minds, which propelled more technological inventions, which consumed more cheap energy. This self-amplifying circuit produces the three rising curves of population, energy use, and technological progress, the three strands of the technium.

The evidence for the rising curve of technological progress is deep and wide. The data fills volumes. Hundreds of scholarly papers record substantial improvements across the board in matters we care about. The trajectories of these measurements generally point in the same direction: up. Their accumulated weight elicited this famous prediction by Julian Simon a decade ago:

His reason is worth repeating: He is betting on a historical force that has maintained its trajectory for many centuries.

Nonetheless, experts wield three arguments against the notion of progress. The first is that what we think we are measuring is completely illusionary. By this reckoning we are measuring the wrong things. Skeptics see massive deterioration in human health and loss of human spirit, not to mention degradation of everything else. But any objection to the reality of progress must confront a simple fact: Life expectancy at birth in the United States increased from 47.3 years in 1900 to 75.7 years in 1994. If this is not an example of progress, then what is it? In at least one dimension progress is not illusionary.

The second objection argues that progress is only half real. That is, material advances do occur, but they don't mean very much. Only intangibles like meaningful happiness count. Meaningfulness is very hard to measure, which makes it very hard to optimize. So far anything we can quantify has been getting better over the long term.

The third objection is the most common today. It posits that material progress is real but is too costly as produced. On their better days, critics of the notion of progress would agree that in fact things are getting better for humans but that they do so by destroying or consuming natural resources at an unsustainable rate.

We should take this argument seriously. Progress is real, but so are its consequences. There is real, serious environmental damage caused by technologies. But this damage is not inherent in technologies. Modern technologies don't have to cause such damage. When existing ones do cause damage, we can make better technologies.

“If we go on as we are, it'll be very difficult to sustain things,” says science author Matt Ridley. “But we won't go on as we are. That's what we never do. We always change what we do and we always get much more efficient at using things—energy, resources, etc. Just take land area for feeding the world. If we'd gone on as we were, as hunter-gatherers, we'd have needed about 85 Earths to feed 6 billion people. If we'd gone on as early slash-and-burn farmers, we'd have needed a whole Earth, including all the oceans. If we'd gone on as 1950 organic farmers without a lot of fertilizer, we'd have needed 82 percent of the world's land area for cultivation, as opposed to the 38 percent that we farm at the moment.”

We don't go on as we are. We address the problems of tomorrow not with today's tools but with the tools of tomorrow. This is what we call progress.

And there will be problems tomorrow because progress is not utopia. It is easy to mistake progressivism as utopianism because where else does increasing and everlasting improvement point to except utopia? Sadly, that confuses a direction with a destination. The future as un-soiled technological perfection is unattainable; the future as a territory of continuously expanding possibilities is not only attainable but also exactly the road we are on now.

I prefer how biologist Simon Conway Morris puts it: “Progress is not some noxious by-product of the terminally optimistic, but simply part of our reality.” Progress is real. It is the reordering of the material world that is made possible by flows of energy and the expansion of intangible minds. While progress is carried forward by humans now, this reorganization began long ago, in biological evolution.

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As the seventh kingdom of life, the technium is now amplifying, extending, and speeding up the self-organized progress that propels biological evolution through the aeons. We might think of the technium as “evolution accelerated.” Therefore, in order to see where the technium is going we need to discern where evolution itself is headed and what is pushing it in that direction.

I make the case in this chapter that the course of biological evolution is not a random drift in the cosmos, which is the claim of current textbook orthodoxy. Rather, evolution—and by extension, the technium—has an inherent direction, shaped by the nature of matter and energy. This direction introduces inevitabilities into the shape of life. These nonmystical tendencies are woven into the fabric of technology as well, which means certain aspects of the technium are also inevitable.

To follow this trajectory we must begin at the beginning: the origin of life. Like a robot that builds itself, the mechanism we call life slowly self-assembled four billion years ago. Ever since that seemingly improbable self-invention, life has evolved hundreds of millions of improbable creatures. But how improbable are they really?

When Charles Darwin was working out his theory of natural selection, the eye worried him. He found it very hard to explain how it could have evolved bit by bit, because the eye's retina, lens, and pupil seemed so finely perfected toward the whole and so utterly useless at less than whole. Critics of Darwin's theory of evolution at the time held the eye out as a miracle. But miracles, almost by definition, happen only once. Neither Darwin nor his critics appreciated the fact that the cameralike eye evolved not just once—miracle though it may seem—but six times over the course of life on Earth. The remarkable optical architecture of a “biological camera” is also found in certain octopuses, snails, marine annelids, jellyfish, and spiders. These six lineages of unrelated creatures share only a distant, blind common ancestor, so each lineage gets credit for evolving this marvel on its own. Each of the six manifestations is an astounding achievement; after all, it took humans several thousand years of serious tinkering to cobble together the first working artificial camera eye.

But does the six-time independent self-assembly of the camera eye signal a supreme degree of improbability, sort of like tossing six million pennies in a row heads? Or does the multiple invention mean that the eye is a natural funnel that attracts evolution, like water in a well at the bottom of a valley? And then there are the eight other types of eyes, each of which has evolved more than once. Biologist Richard Dawkins estimates that “the eye has evolved independently between 40 and 60 times around the animal kingdom,” leading him to claim, “it seems that life, at least as we know it on this planet, is almost indecently eager to evolve eyes. We can confidently predict that a statistical sample of [evolutionary] reruns would culminate in eyes. And not just eyes, but compound eyes like those in an insect, a prawn, or trilobite, and camera eyes like ours or a squid's. . . . There are only so many ways to make an eye, and life as we know it may well have found them all.”

Are there certain forms—natural states—that evolution tends to gravitate toward? This question has immense bearing on the technium, because if evolution displays an attraction to universal solutions, then so will technology, its accelerated extension. In recent decades science has discovered that complex adaptive systems (of which evolution is one example) tend to settle (all other factors being equal) into a few recurring patterns. These patterns are not found in the parts of the system, and so the structure that appears is considered both “emergent” and dictated by the complex adaptive system as a whole. Since the same structure will appear again and again seemingly from nowhere—like a vortex that instantly appears among water molecules in a draining tub—these structures can also be considered inevitable.

With some perplexity biologists file in the bottom drawer of their desks an ever-growing list of identical phenomenon that have kept reappearing in life on Earth. They are not sure what to do with these curious cases. But a few scientists believe these recurring inventions are biological “vortices,” or familiar patterns that emerge from the complex interactions in evolution. The estimated 30 million species coinhabiting Earth are running millions of experiments every hour. They constantly breed, fight, kill, or mutually alter each other. Out of this exhaustive recombination, evolution keeps converging upon similar characteristics in far-flung branches in the tree of life. This attraction to recurring forms is called
convergent evolution
. The more taxonomically separate the lineages, the more impressive the convergence.

Old World primates have full-color vision and an inferior sense of smell compared to their distant cousins the New World monkeys. These spider monkeys, lemurs, and marmosets all have a very keen sense of smell but lack tricolor vision. All, that is, except the howler monkey, which, in parallel to the Old World primates, has tricolor vision and a weak nose. The common ancestor to the howler and the Old World primates goes very far back, so howlers independently evolved tricolor vision. By examining the genes for full-color vision, biochemists discovered that both the howler and Old World primates use receptors tuned to the same wavelengths, and they contain exactly the same amino acids in three key positions. Not only that, the diminished olfactory senses of both howler and apes was caused by the inhibition of the same olfactory genes, turned off in the same order and in the same details. “When similar forces converge, similar results emerge. Evolution is remarkably reproducible,” says geneticist Sean Carroll.