Not So Fast

Thinking Twice about Technology

Doug Hill

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780820350301
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

There's a well-known story about an older fish who swims by two younger fish andasks, "How's the water?" The younger fish are puzzled. "What's water?" they ask.

Many of us today might ask a similar question: What's technology? Technology defines the world we live in, yet we're so immersed in it, so encompassed by it, that we mostly take it for granted. Seldom, if ever, do we stop to ask what technology is. Failing to ask that question, we fail to perceive all the ways it might be shaping us.

Usually when we hear the word "technology," we automatically think of digital devices and their myriad applications. As revolutionary as smartphones, online shopping, and social networks may seem, however, they fit into long-standing, deeply entrenched patterns of technological thought as well as practice. Generations of skeptics have questioned how well served we are by those patterns of thought and practice, even as generations of enthusiasts have promised that the latest innovations will deliver us, soon, to Paradise. We're not there yet, but the cyber utopians of Silicon Valley keep telling us it's right around the corner.

What is technology, and how is it shaping us? In search of answers to those crucial questions, Not So Fast draws on the insights of dozens of scholars and artists who have thought deeply about the meanings of machines. The book explores such dynamics as technological drift, technological momentum, technological disequilibrium, and technological autonomy to help us understand the interconnected, interwoven, and interdependent phenomena of our technological world. In the course of that exploration, Doug Hill poses penetrating questions of his own, among them: Do we have as much control over our machines as we think? And who can we rely on to guide the technological forces that will determine the future of the planet?

PART I
THE CLASSIC/ROMANTIC SPLIT

Woe to that revolution which is not guided by the historic sense.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

CHAPTER 1

THE PARADISE WITHIN THE REACH OF ALL MEN

These days you are to witness Examples of my pleasing arts galore. I’ll give you what no man has seen before.

MEPHISTOPHELES TO FAUST

Let me begin by stating the obvious: We live in an era of technological enthusiasm.

It’s not too vast a generalization to say that Americans, along with much of the world, are deeply, passionately in love with the technologies they use in their personal lives. We’re also beguiled by the promises of scientists and engineers who say that, thanks to them, we’ll soon be able to do just about anything we want to do. “At our current rate of technological growth,” said Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, “humanity is on a path to be godlike in its capabilities.”¹

A similar trajectory has been offered by fellow enthusiast Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the breakthrough web browser Netscape, now one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalists. In a Twitter blitz in June 2014, Andreessen shared his vision of a future that is ours for the taking, if only we let the technologists work their magic without the constraints of regulation. When that happens, he wrote, we will enter “a consumer utopia” in which “everyone enjoys a standard of living that Kings and Popes could have only dreamed. . . . Without physical need constraints, we will be whoever we want to be.”²

Often we’re told it will take only a single technology to transform the human condition. “We’re entering an age where the limits to our capabilities to re-make the world around us are limited only by our imaginations and our good judgment,” proclaimed the reviewer of a book on synthetic biology. For Google chairman Eric Schmidt, the engine of our deliverance will be the Internet and the connectivity it provides. “If we get this right,” he said during a conference presentation in 2012, “I believe that we can fix all the world’s problems.”³

Another remedy for all the world’s problems had been predicted a few months earlier by Eric Anderson, copresident and cofounder of a company called Planetary Resources, which plans to mine precious metals from asteroids in outer space. Anderson is certain his project will produce unimaginable wealth, but that’s just the beginning; it will also be the first step toward moving all industry into space, leaving nothing behind but verdant and peaceful landscapes. “We see the future of Earth as a Garden of Eden,” he said.⁴

Such comments evoke a recurrent theme in the American experience: that we can cleanse all our past mistakes by opening a new frontier. Henry Ford had the same expectations for the slew of new technologies coming on the scene during his lifetime, which he said would deliver “a new world, a new heaven, and a new earth.”⁵

Such comments also testify to a more recent wrinkle in utopian visions: that new technologies will be able to remedy the problems created by previous technologies. We see the same faith at work in the conviction of those who believe we’ll come up with some way of reversing the catastrophe of global warming by “geoengineering” the climate of the entire planet. This is a sign that the technology enthusiasts of today are more aware than their predecessors that technology carries risks as well as promise.

For that reason their pronouncements, while still intoxicated and intoxicating, also tend to have disclaimers attached. A leading proselytizer of nanotechnology, Eric Drexler, for example, expects that within our lifetimes or those of our children, nano will place at our disposal a “genie machine” that will be able to assemble, molecule by molecule, pretty much any object we can imagine. “What you ask for, it will produce,” Drexler has written, adding, however, that “Arabian legend and universal common sense suggest that we take the dangers of such engines of creation very seriously indeed.”⁶

One of our more prominent and less restrained technology enthusiasts today is Ray Kurzweil, the inventor-turned-prophet who has captured a seemingly endless amount of media attention in recent years with his predictions of the imminent arrival—in 2045, to be exact—of “the Singularity.” That’s the historical turning point when humans will complete their ongoing merger with machines, creating a race of cyborgs with superpowers and without the annoying limitations of physical corporality.

“The Singularity will allow us to transcend the limitations of our biological bodies and brains,” Kurzweil says. “We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (not necessarily forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach.”⁷

Among the gifts Kurzweil believes the Singularity will bestow:

• By the early 2030s, we’ll be able to live happily and healthily without a host of body parts once considered vital. Bits soon to be obsolete include, Kurzweil says, the heart, lungs, stomach and lower esophagus, large and small intestine, bowel, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid, kidneys, bladder, and liver. The functions of all will be taken over by a variety of techniques and devices, including synthetic, programmable blood; nanobots; various drug and dietary supplements; microscopic fuel cells; artificial hormones and intelligent biofeedback systems. Kurzweil suggests we may want to keep the mouth and upper esophagus because of the role they play in the enjoyable, though unnecessary, act of eating. With suitable improvements, we may also want to hang on to the skin, he said, given its important contribution to sex.⁸

• We’ll be able to immerse ourselves in virtual realities without the bother of connecting to any devices, thanks to nanobots injected into our bloodstreams. These nanobots will interact with biological neurons to create “virtual reality from within the nervous system.” As a result, Kurzweil says, we’ll be able to imagine ourselves as being whomever we want to be, wherever we want to be, with whomever we want to be with, at any time.⁹

• Advances in digital processing will give us laptop computers that possess the intellectual power of “five trillion trillion human civilizations.” As a result Kurzweil believes we will realize the Singularity’s ultimate destiny: the entire universe will become “saturated with our intelligence.”¹⁰

Although I’m not sure what saturating the universe with our intelligence entails, I’m less eager than Kurzweil to find out. As I see it, we’ve already saturated our own planet with our intelligence, and the results can be charitably described as mixed.

While it’s true that the scale and scope of technological expectations have increased as the power and reach of technology itself have increased, the fact remains that utopia is utopia, whenever it’s predicted. In that sense Kurzweil’s expectations are entirely consistent with promises of technological deliverance we’ve been hearing for at least a couple of hundred years, a chorus of joyful proclamations that together amount to a venerable American tradition.

In 1853, for example, an anonymous author in the United States Review proclaimed that, thanks to technology, humankind’s troubles would be ended within fifty years. “Men and women will then have no harassing cares, or laborious duties to fulfill. Machines will perform all work—automata will direct them. The only task of the human race will be to make love, study and be happy.” Another author from the same period concluded, “Vanquished Nature yields! Her secrets are extorted. Art prevails! What monuments of genius, spirit, power!” A third asked, “Are not our inventors absolutely ushering in the very dawn of the millennium?”¹¹

In Technological Utopianism in American Culture, historian Howard Segal reviewed twenty-five works of fiction published between 1883 and 1933, all offering visions of the glorious future technology would surely bring. Their authors shared several basic assumptions. Technological utopia was seen as not only possible but inevitable. The time and place of its arrival—within the next hundred years, usually; in the United States, always—could be accurately predicted, as could its characteristics. “This is a Utopian book,” one author stated in his preface, “but its Utopia is not, as Utopias generally are said to be, in the clouds; on the contrary, it is worked out with much detail in accordance with a natural order of sequence from existing conditions, with every point definite in time and place, true in all fundamental physical features to the best maps, true also to the law of cause and effect and duly regarding the limitations of nature.”¹²

Another similarity the authors of these books shared was a belief that, although the advance of technology would bring challenges of its own, in the end all difficulties would be surmounted by the power of technology itself. “They simply were confident,” Segal writes, “that those problems were temporary and that advancing technology would solve mankind’s major chronic problems, which they took to be material—scarcity, hunger, disease, war, and so forth. They assumed that technology would solve other, more recent and more psychological problems as well: nervousness, rudeness, aggression, crowding and social disorder, in particular. The growth and expansion of technology would bring utopia; and utopia would be a completely technological society, one run by and, in a sense, for technology.”¹³

The first work of extended technological utopian thought to appear in the United States was John Adolphus Etzler’s The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery. An Address to All Intelligent Men, published in 1836. Etzler was a German immigrant and peripatetic reformer; over the course of his career he spent time in Pennsylvania, the West Indies, and England and founded utopian communities in Ohio and Venezuela. His magnum opus proposed that the powers of the sun, tides, waves, and wind be harnessed for the benefit of humankind, and he wasn’t shy about predicting, from his opening paragraph, the wonders his plans would bestow.¹⁴

“FELLOW MEN!” the book begins.

I promise to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor, and without pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, and in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish, without labor, in one year, more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years . . . ; he may lead a life of continual happiness, of enjoyments unknown yet; he may free himself from almost all the evils that afflict mankind, except death, and even put death far beyond the common period of human life, and, finally, render it less afflicting: mankind may thus live in, and enjoy a new world far superior to our present, and raise themselves to a far higher scale of beings.¹⁵

Like many utopians, Etzler discussed the rewards he predicted in considerable detail, but there were gaps in his explanations of how, exactly, he planned to get there. For example, he proposed that a series of mile-long rows of sails, two hundred feet high, be erected on land. If those sails were adjusted by “mechanical contrivance” to accommodate shifts in wind direction, in a single twenty-four-hour day they would be able to produce “80,000 times as much work as all the men on earth could effect with their nerves.” Specifics on the construction and maintenance of the mechanical contrivance or of the sails themselves were not provided, although Etzler did say that the two-hundred-foot height of the sails could be raised, if desired, “to the height of the clouds, by means of kites.”¹⁶

To be fair, Etzler did provide elaborate mathematical calculations to back up some of his proposals; it’s just that from today’s perspective they don’t seem very convincing. Not that they needed to be exact. Etzler insisted that even if his calculations were off, the scale of the powers ready to be exploited in nature would make any errors insignificant. Even so, he was aware that many would fail to take him seriously. “Studious” and “reflecting” minds would readily appreciate his proposals, he maintained. “But there will be also men who are so ill favored by nature, that they slovenly adhere to their accustomed narrow notions, without inquiring into the truth of new ideas, and will rather, in apology for their mental sloth, pride themselves in despising, disputing, and ridiculing what appears novel to them.”¹⁷

However questionable Etzler’s technical predictions may have been, he was correct on that score. One of those who had a hard time taking him seriously was Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, anonymously, a review of Etzler’s book for the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. Titled “Paradise (to Be) Regained,” it was slyly humorous in parts, openly sarcastic in others.¹⁸

“We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world,” Thoreau stated in his opening paragraph. “. . . It is worth attending to, if only that it entertains large questions.” Parodying Etzler’s enthusiasm, he continued, “Let us not succumb to nature. We will marshal the clouds and restrain the tempests; we will bottle up pestilent exhalations, we will probe for earthquakes, grub them up; and give vent to the dangerous gases; we will disembowel the volcano, and extract its poison, take its seed out. We will wash water, and warm fire, and cool ice, and underprop the earth. We will teach birds to fly, and fishes to swim, and ruminants to chew the cud. It is time we had looked into these things.”¹⁹

Thoreau’s basic point was that Etzler’s energies were misdirected. Where the proposals in The Paradise within the Reach of All Men were aimed at reforming the Earth, he said, the man with a transcendental perspective aimed at reforming himself. Etzler’s schemes were therefore as unnecessary as they were grandiose. Thoreau granted that it was possible to imagine a future in which technological advance would make possible any number of improvements in everyday life, but he confessed such dreams left him uninspired.

“It is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about the actual and so called practical,” he wrote. “How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws. How many fine inventions are there which do not clutter the ground?”²⁰

One thing that’s striking about the technology enthusiasts is how successfully they’ve managed, for centuries now, to ignore the reservations of skeptics like Thoreau. Their optimism is irrepressible, even though their promised utopia never seems to actually arrive. Yes, their predictions now come with disclaimers attached, but in comparison to the glories gl...