From: Russell Blackford (RussellBlackford@bigpond.com)
Date: Fri Sep 07 2001 - 18:09:59 MDT
Tim said
>So, I've given it some time, and so far I have not been pointed to any
>quantitative sources on the reported overall technological acceleration.
>
>I don't know whether this means that there are no such sources, but it does
>appear to mean that those here who believe in this acceleration have taken
>it as an article of faith, rather than on empirical or reproducible
grounds.
Tim, I think this is too harsh. I'd say most of us seldom take things "as an
article of faith", ie believe something with no rational basis for the
belief, such as accepting a proposition because some holy man or holy book
says it's true.
We may not always be *correct*, but that's a different issue.
In the case of "quantitative sources on .... overall technological
acceleration", you are asking too much.
I'd say we all believe there was a massive acceleration from the 17th
century through to the mid-20th century, not based on "faith" but on our
knowledge of history. We know that the economic and technological base of
society could change very little for entire lifetimes previous to that era.
Human thought in any society you care to name was dominated by a pastoral
concept of time in which there was nothing new under the sun and everything
moved in cycles. "Oh Mutability, oh perfect wheel!" The only idea of a
one-way movement in history was that found in the eschatologies of certain
religions (mainly but not only Christianity).
Of course, there could be massive changes brought about in a life time as a
result of conquest, dynastic rivalry, plague, exploration, the revival of
classical learning (those folks in antiquity knew so much more than we did,
so it was thought), and *occasional, specific* technological innovations,
but there was no real concept of technological progress because the rate of
technological change was almost unobservable to most people.
The scientific revolution of the 17th century started to change this and the
industrial revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries even more
so. By the 19th century, changes in the economic and technological bases of
society were observable on a dramatic scale within individual lifetimes.
Wearing my hat as a literary scholar, I would point out how this led to
important cultural reflections in the 19th century, including the rise of
science fiction, as it started to make sense to imagine a technologically
different future, and the rise of fantasy as it made sense to long for an
idyllic life *in reaction to* the physically ugly technological changes of
the time. The beautiful art of the pre-Raphaelites (of which I am a great
fan - its luddite underpinnings are largely irrelevant to our period, and
made good sense in its own period) cannot be understood except against that
backdrop. It is interesting to read the work of William Morris, Thomas Hardy
and H.G. Wells in the 1890s to see how they all show this pressing awareness
of change - though expressing it in completely different ways.
During the first 60 or 70 years of the 20th century, technological change
continued to happen quickly.
All my knowledge of science, history, art and literature converges to tell
me this. It's not a matter of "faith".
When you want a quantitative measure, you are asking us to come up with the
impossible. There is no accepted unit in which we measure the pace of
technological change. We have to argue about it essentially in the way I've
done above. If you don't accept this style of argument you are guilty of the
intellectual crime of premature reductionism (I've got nothing against
reductionism; the problem as I've explained elsewhere and as Lee Corbin also
explained in an excellent post a few weeks back is *premature*
reductionism - it's a bit like the problem of premature ejaculation). In
that case, I can't help you.
FWIW, however, you can measure such things as the increasing maximum speed
of transportational devices, increasing speed and power of communications,
etc. There are plenty of sources which deal with these crude surrogate
measures of the pace of technological change.
The only issue is whether the pace of change slowed down in the last few
decades of the 20th century, perhaps from the mid-1960s, as Zubrin has
argued.
Since we don't have an agreed unit, this issue is very difficult.
Zubrin looks at the changes that took place from 1906 to 1966 and compares
them with what happened from 1966 to 1996. I quote from his _The Case for
Mars_:
"Compared to these changes, the technological innovations from 1966 to the
present seem insignificant. Immense changes should have occurred during
this period but did not. Had we been following the previous sixty years'
technological trajectory, we today would have videotelephones, solar-powered
cars, maglev (magnetic levitation) trains, fusion reactors, hypersonic
intercontinental travel, reliable and inexpensive transportation to Earth
orbit, undersea cities, open-sea mariculture, and human settlements on the
Moon and Mars. Instead, today we see important technological developments,
such as nuclear power and biotechnology, being blocked or enmeshed in
controversy - we are slowing down."
I think that this position is arguable, though I also think that Zubrin
tends to fudge. For example, motor cars and aircraft, electricity and the
internal combustion engine were invented before 1906, but he puts them in
the 1906-1966 period. What actually happened during that period was a
tremendous development and proliferation of those technologies. To play
fair, we would need to include the development and proliferation from 1966
to 1996 of technologies that were initiated earlier, but Zubrin also tends
to put these in the 1906-1966 period. Once that point is acknowledged, it
seems apparent that electronic and biomedical technologies produced immense
change in the later decades of the 20th century.
Zubrin also has a fixation with technologies that have a direct macro-level
presence in our environment: big things that become part of the landscape,
such as air and space vehicles, movie screens, lit up cities, nuclear
reactors. Although he does mention antibiotics and expresses regret at the
controversy enmeshing modern biotechnology, he largely forgets technologies
that are hidden away in the recesses of our homes, offices or vehicles, or
our bodies themselves - which is where I see technology increasingly headed.
Most glaringly, he omits to mention that the contraceptive pill was invented
in the early 1960s (analogously to powered air vehicles in the early 1900s).
Thereupon, the rapid development and distribution of powerful contraceptive
technology largely overturned the Western world's sexual mores. I don't know
why this extraordinary change is so often overlooked by thinker about the
future (interestingly, Arthur C. Clarke, arguably the greatest such thinker
of all in recent decades, predicted something of the sort in _Childhood's
End_ in the early 1950s, but he has never discussed it in the various
editions of _Profiles of the Future_).
Leaving sex out of it (though why would anyone wish to do so <g>?), a
reading of any modern work in the fields of medicine or bioethics will show
how modern biomedical technology has transformed clinical practice,
rendering our traditional ideas of life and death themselves problematic,
and challenging us to recast some of our most basic ethical principles.
Peter Singer has written extensively on this.
In that light, the "faith" that many of us could be accused of having, that
the next 30 years from the point when Zubrin was writing - i.e. the years
from 1996 to 2026 - will see the development of unprecedentedly powerful
biotechnologies based on human genome research etc, seems quite realistic.
However, until we start to use our genetic knowledge to morph our bodies in
outwardly spectacular ways - growing ourselves fins, spines, additional
limbs, or modified skins of some kind - advanced biotechnology will not
alter the streetscape, let alone the landscape, in the way that would seem
necessary to attract Zubrin's attention. Still, it would be naive to deduce
from this that the effects of the coming genomic and proteonomic revolutions
will be isolated or trivial.
As I mentioned above, computers are assigned by Zubrin to the period from
1906 to 66 - more specifically, the period from 1936-66 - notwithstanding
that the development of computer technology by the mid-60s was in what now
seems a primitive state. If the development of electricity and the internal
combustion engine is to be assigned to the 1906-36 period, the development
of digital information technologies must fairly be assigned to 1966-96.
During that time, computers became faster, smaller, more flexible, more
powerful - and almost ubiquitous. We are not confronted with giant
mainframes lumbering about the streets like dinosaurs, but the tools we use
are computerised, and the world is linked and moulded by computerised
systems of transport and communication.
Zubrin's account of what "should" have happened in recent decades lists the
following among the technologies that were never developed:
"videotelephones, solar-powered cars, maglev . . . trains, fusion reactors
[and] hypersonic intercontinental travel". But such a list contains
preconceptions of what the future (seen from the mid-1960s) should have
been. Perhaps some of these marvels will yet come to pass <g>. Solar-powered
cars would make sense environmentally, and the technology is improving to an
impressive degree. More apparent since the 60s, however, has been an
enormous increase in the detailed sophistication of motor cars from the
uncomfortable, unreliable creatures I remember from 30 years ago when I
commenced driving. Modern cars, with their wonderful electronics and
materials and their built-in computer technology show remarkable
consideration for our needs. The damn things are almost alive, dominating us
subtly, like lovers or designer drugs.
As for Zubrin's videotelephone example, the telephone is not, in any full
sense, an extension of our capacity for direct, face-to-face
communication... it is not truly an extension of our presence. It is
actually an *alternative* to that; it is a device that makes intimate
communication possible, not only when we are physically separated, but when
physical presence would be inconvenient. With a phone, we can communicate
early in the morning before making ourselves appear human, during the day at
the office when we may be bad tempered and red-faced, late at night from the
informal comfort of our bedrooms.
It is likely that prototype videotelephones did not catch on for these sorts
of reasons (I've seen some more precise accounts that suggest this, but I
don't have any URLs handy at the moment). Anyway, if I can project my
presence into your home or office or vehicle, I would rather wait until the
technology lets me provide some computer-massaged idealisation, rather than
the real me, in whatever irrelevant state of dress or undress, activity or
sloth I find myself. Video conferencing does find uses in situations where
telepresence is relevant and desirable. I have sometimes used it for simple
court hearings. But that is just the point: technologies find their own
uses. In retrospect, it is unsurprising that the miniaturisation of the
telephone and its integration with fax and the Internet have proved to be
higher priorities than augmenting it with the dubious convenience of video.
As we work through Zubrin's list, and react to it, it becomes apparent that
we have been developing our technologies to make our environments and even
our bodies more convenient, comfortable, comformable to our wills. This is
the transhumanist trajectory, folks. We control our fertility by various
effective methods that are now available, shaping our lifestyles
accordingly. In the home, the car, the factory and the office, we have more
and more sophisticated electronics. Often we ask ourselves how we coped at
all without word-processing, photocopying, and fax machines - and without
scanners, PowerPoint projectors, e-mail and access to the Web. As anyone
knows who works, as I do, in labour relations law, job classifications and
duties have become unrecognisable from the perspective of the mid-60s.
Industry has been transformed by computer-aided design and manufacture.
Technological innovation has taken paths different from what would have been
expected if, as Zubrin puts it, we had "been following the previous sixty
years' technological trajectory". That does not necessarily mean we are
slowing down.
To sum up, I think there are powerful arguments that there was a massive
technological acceleration from, say, 1610 (Galileo observes the moons of
Jupiter) to 1969 (the moon landing). After the mid to late 60s, there are
arguments available, most compellingly put by Zubrin, that the pace of
technological innovation has actually slowed down. However, I think I can
show (as I've attempted above) that Zubrin's argument contains holes.
None of the arguments uses a simple measure of technological change in some
agreed unit - though, up to a point, you can use surrogate measures such as
the physical speed of our devices. I suspect that Damien B and Robin Hanson,
among others here, would be in a good position to extract some of the data
on various surrogate measures of the rate of technological change and,
hence, whether it is accelerating.
But the arguments really do demand a lot of philosophical reasoning, relying
on consilience of inductions, etc. To insist on arguing in a different way,
especially if it is supposed to be the entirety of the argument, is to
commit the fallacy of premature reductionism. The issue is *not* about
"faith".
I hope this helps clarify the issues, even if I don't convince Tim.
Cheers
Russell
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