Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Does Techno-Optimism Have a Place in US politics?
The Alphabet Inc. campus, also known as Googleplex, Mountain View, CA.
But the 1970s detente era saw the second act of Kahn’s career, that of a futurist. At the very time the professional long-term forecasting industry was taking a pessimistic turn fueled by environmental catastrophism, this thinker of dark, unthinkable thoughts stood out as a sunny purveyor of techno-capitalist optimism. Rather than a few minutes before nuclear midnight, dawn was always just breaking in a world of abundance led by a recharged Reaganite America, a view he distilled in his 1983 book, “The Coming Boom.” (Liberals were dismissive and, it turns out, wrong. The period from 1983 through 2007 has been called The Long Boom because of its strong and steady economic growth. It was also the period that saw the rise of Silicon Valley as the nation’s and world’s tech core.)
That same year, just a few months before his death, Khan joined with several other right-of-center thinkers in assailing the eco-pessimist “Global 2000 Report” that had been commissioned by the Carter administration. Anyone who had read another Kahn book, “The Next 200 Years,” would hardly be surprised at Kahn’s reaction. He and his co-authors argue that “because of the evolution of knowledge and technology, resources are increasing rather than fixed. More technology and more capital are vital. … Enough resources will be available at reasonable costs so that reasonable rates of growth can be achieved. … Current levels of absolute poverty will decrease almost everywhere. Thus, in this view, all things considered, the long-range outlook is quite good.”
It is a view of futurism and future-oriented thinking that has little to do with central planning and detailed blueprints for creating a better tomorrow. As F. A. Hayek wrote in “The Constitution of Liberty,” “We are as little able to conceive what civilization will be, or can be, five hundred or even fifty years hence as our medieval forefathers or even our grandparents. If we are to advance, we must leave room for a continuous revision of our present conceptions and ideals which will be necessitated by further experience.” And this from British physicist David Deutsch in his 2011 book, “The Beginning of Infinity”: “Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.”
Is there a place for such pro-growth, future-oriented, techno-optimism in American politics today? A brief survey of both left and right makes one skeptical. On the right, there’s an unhelpful economic nostalgia for the pre-Information Age economy of the 1950s and 1960s. On the left, too much of its environmentalism embraces scarcity rather than abundance.
Neither left nor right are explicitly championing the idea that faster technological progress, innovation-driven productivity, and economic growth need to be a national priority which deeply informs policy. That, at the same time leaders should provide explanation and vision as to why such a goal will enrich American society.
As MIT historian Leo Marx has written: “The initial Enlightenment belief in progress perceived science and technology to be in the service of liberation from political oppression. Over time that conception was transformed, or partly supplanted, by the now familiar view that innovations in science-based technologies are in themselves a sufficient and reliable basis for Progress. … Does improved technology mean progress? Yes, it certainly could mean just that. But only if we are willing and able to answer the next question: progress toward what? What do we want our new technologies to accomplish?”
Published in Economics, Science & Technology
James,
Economic science tells politicians this:
You must not infer that politicians need to implement policies to make this happen. To the extent that they try to, they will prevent it from happening.
What they need to do is simply to defend and protect the property rights of the citizens, and make them feel secure that they can keep the fruits of their innovations and private investments, from now on, and not confiscated by the politicians.
Do you understand the difference?
Given that our latest technological breakthroughs — or, at least, the ones most visible to us in our day-to-day lives — have played a part in wrecking civilization and making us all lonely and miserable (looking at you, social media), I’d say . . . no.
Then again, I don’t like new things. I like old things. I am a conservative, after all.
Because politicians have no idea how to do that. Its not about ideology, its about world view and background. They have to respond to every crisis – real or imagined – with a 12 point plan to address it. When most of the time they should be doing the hardest thing – nothing.
I suppose I am a Techno-Optimist. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, but our food production capability has been on a dramatic upward curve for perhaps two millennia. It is not something to bet on, but we can waste a lot of money betting against it. Same with energy and computer capacity.
Cautious optimism and rational risk-taking are what separate winners and losers. Well, and luck of course.
The left, for all their doom-mongering, are highly invested in solar and wind power, and believe that tomorrow’s output can be achieved by things today. Perhaps the optimism or pessimism is free-floating and any attachment to technology, Gaia, socialism, etc. is a matter of convenience rather than an opinion even superficially considered.
The technological revolutions of the last two centuries were fueled by the exploitation of readily available and increasingly dense fuels. Technical advances in the industrial revolution allowed the exploitation of coal rather than wood, coal effectively being wood energy in condensed form. In the 20th century, further technical advances allowed the exploitation of oil in place of coal, oil being an even more dense energy than coal. A crucial factor was that cheap, abundant energy was just lying there ready to be exploited. Those were the days when Jed Clampett could go hunting, miss the rabbit, and up from the ground came a bubbling crude. Those days are well over.
Something missed by the futurist visions on the 50’s and 60’s that imagined us routinely travelling to the moon and beyond by now was the tremendous expenditure of energy required not only for the travel itself, but for the construction of the infrastructure necessary to make it happen. For another technological revolution to happen like the industrial and oil revolutions, another cheap and readily exploitable source of energy needs to be found. An oil-based economy just doesn’t have the energy to make it happen (just as a wood-based economy could not power the industrial revolution). That’s what the last 50 years have proven.
But we are at the end of the line as far as increasingly dense carbon-based energy goes. Thus the technological revolutions since the dawn of the hoped-for “space age” have been largely restricted to the cyber area: The internet takes a lot less energy to construct and maintain than a space station.
It may be necessary for us to transition to so-called green energy, but we should understand that green energy is less dense than oil and so can’t power a technological revolution or, perhaps, even sustain the energy requirements of our current civilization. Nuclear energy is a dense source, but it requires a huge investment in time and capital, both material and political, to become viable. That makes if very different from the original exploitation of coal and oil, which were sitting there ready-to-hand.
It’s not just technology that drives progress: It is technology married to an energy source that makes the exploitation of that technology economically feasible. It isn’t the technology, it’s the energy that is the real problem right now.
The huge ‘investment in time and capital’ required by nuclear is largely a function of political hostility. France has managed to build sufficient reactors to generate something like 70% of its energy consumption (just about the only aspect of a European country’s policies that American ‘progressives’ do not view as superior to American policies!)
Original exploitation of oil & coal…to begin with the first of these major energy sources, coal: most of it was underground and required huge human effort to access and to remove. Problems of water in the mines could not be solved until the Newcomen steam engine made continuous pumping possible. Transport of the coal to where it was needed was very limited unless sea or rivers were adjacent to where it was needed, until railroads were developed. A lot of invention, capital investment, and just plain human effort was required in order to make coal a viable energy source on a large scale.
That’s why I said it takes a great deal of material and political capital to exploit. The fact that we wish this wasn’t so doesn’t change the fact. My point is that techno-optimism depends crucially on cheap, exploitable energy. Which we are rapidly becoming short of, for both natural and political reasons.
Sure. But people had been mining coal since ancient times and knew how to do it. There were technical problems, but ones that were rapidly solved and coal exploited. The energy source was there and they were able to quickly exploit it.
Do you disagree with the point of all this, that we don’t have a readily available, cheap energy source that can power the next civilizational breakthrough?
The Industrial Age in its full development required orders of magnitude increase in the power available per person, which increase was supplied mainly by the steam engine. (*Some* mechanization/industrialization would have happened anyway, with preexisting power sources…the original mechanized spinning machine, after all, was called the Water Frame, reflecting the source of its motive power.) But I doubt that we need anything like that ratio of further increase today: there is plenty of additional capacity available in fossil fuels, solar can in some locations provide a useful supplement, and nuclear is available when the political will emerges. If fossil fuel costs do get to a certain point, countries that embrace nuclear are going to have a huge competitive advantage over those that do not.
Space travel being a bit of a wild card: Doubt that it will be a significant factor in energy use *unless* the economics of non-terrestrial mining really turn out to be favorable. If they do, and space travel begins driving overall fuel demand up significantly, then again, nuclear-friendly countries are going to have an advantage in that field as well.
I do.
Therefore, you have no basis for claiming that there is too little energy available. You think you know what you cannot possibly know.
How can you say that after I just offered to sell you my cold fusion plans for $599.99?
re energy and productivity: one person using a Spinning Jenny (introduced 1765) could produce as much yarn as about 8 people using traditional spinning wheels. But like the spinning wheel it replaced, the Jenny was powered purely by manual energy. Further increases in productivity *did* require nonhuman energy sources, either water or steam, later electricity.
NC and CNC machine tools (numerically controlled and computer numerically controlled), introduced starting mid-1950s, greatly improved the productivity of manually-operated machines. The manually operated machines were already using nonhuman energy sources, originally steam or water but by then almost always electricity, to turn their spindles and/or workpieces. I doubt if the energy consumption per piece made was significantly higher for an NC or CNC tool than for a manual one, but the labor productivity was much higher.
The cut-and-sew process of apparel production has remained stubbornly resistant to automation; this many be changing. A company called Softwear Automation has introduced robots which can produce a whole range of products, ranging from t-shirts to mattress covers…see my post here…as in the CNC case, I doubt if the Sewbots use significantly more energy per piece than a manual sewing factory; they may use less if worker commuting and heating/cooling of the facility is taken into account.
My point is that productivity improvements are not always about more energy use; sometimes, they rely on the improved ‘skills’ of mechanism and electronics.