By Filippos Papapolyzos

December 14, 2020

vik4graphic

Here is a thought that some people might relate to. Having been a student for the largest part of my existence, I have written countless essays about a plethora of subjects that, in one way or the other, relate to technology and/or society. I simply cannot count the number of times that I have resisted the temptation to start an essay with a phrase of the type “We live in an age of booming technological growth”. Could there be a more obvious fact? Since the late 90s, we have seen many technological advancements spanning from fully-remote telesurgery equipment to Machine Learning enabled toasters. 

Moore’s Law

In fact, humanity has been staying on track with Moore’s law, which predicts that “the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.” In other words, by 2030 we will have roughly 32 times the computing power we have today. In October 2019, Google’s Sycamore quantum computer managed to solve a complex problem that would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years to compute, in just 200 seconds. One can only imagine what is set out for us.

Technological Determinism

Technology seems like an unstoppable force and if you are like me, you often feel a mix of awe and horror in front of its lightning-fast ability to transform humanity. Possibly, this stems from a realization that how we act and think is in full conversation with the tech tools in our pockets and in our homes. Ergo the name of the UK TV show “Black Mirror”. The importance of technology does not exist only in what we see on our screens when they are on but also in what we see in their reflection. It is not so much a technology’s content that is significant rather than its mere property as a tool. As Marshall McLuhan puts it when talking about the invention of the railway:  "The railway [...] created totally new kinds of cities [...] This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environment, and is quite independent of freight or content." The mere passing of the railway through a city was enough to completely change it, no matter what the train cars transported.

The school of thought that sees technology as the ultimate shaping force of society is better known as “Technological Determinism”, a reductionist philosophy with close ties to Marxism. In 1847, Karl Marx wrote that "The Handmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist" thus nodding to how technological change affects social organization but preserves inequality. Sadly, this seems to be the case in many of the technological applications today. We see more computing power going into AI toasters and the like than we see going into solving important world issues such as ensuring clean water for everyone.

Scarcity, choices, and Moore’s Law’s equivalent for historical change

Technology has the potential to mend human society, to better living conditions for the many rather than the few, to restore the balance between nature and us which we have so upset. We should strive for fair, equitable technology. Should we choose to accept the possibility of technology being unstoppable or not, we still maintain the capacity of diverting its stream to irrigate our most precious crops.

Life is going to be increasingly different in the future, changing faster and in shorter time windows. In 1999, Ray Kurzweil came up with the analog of Moore’s Law for historical progress, “The Law of Accelerating Returns” , in which he explains how the “rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time” as an effect of technological revolutions building up on each other. It took tens of thousands of years for the wheel to be created but we’ve gone from Alan Turing’s Enigma machine to having handheld digital computers in less than 70 years. As Kurzweil notes, “the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries.” 

Under the aforementioned philosophical assumptions, accelerating technological progress will roughly translate to accelerated historical change. It is very likely in that respect that in the rest of this century, we will see as much history “happening” as we’ve seen in history textbooks up to this day. The fundamental problem of our universe, which has baffled economists since day 1, is scarcity. We do not have unlimited resources so choosing where to allocate them is a decision that will be of increasing gravity. It is, therefore, up to us to decide whether the historical change that is bound to take place will be for the better or the worse.

An interesting side note

An interesting side note: The perception of ourselves and our mental capacities has always been projected on our tools. Computers are modeled on brains and brains are reasoned about as computers. We use the example of Machine Learning algorithms to model and reason about how we think. When the first digital computer was created in 1946, the ENIAC, people started conceptualizing the brain as a digital computer. Half a century prior to that, Freud conceptualized the brain as a steam engine and demonstrated his theory of psychodynamics. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates had a similar “hydraulic” understanding of how the brain works, influenced by the technologies of his time, such as the water wheel. One can only wonder what the next metaphor for the brain will be.