Profectus is an excellent new online magazine featuring essays and interviews on the intersection of academic literature, public policy, civilizational progress, and human flourishing. The Spring 2022 edition of the magazine features a “Progress Roundtable” in which six different scholars were asked to contribute their thoughts on three general questions:
What is progress?
What are the most significant barriers holding back further progress?
If those challenges can be overcome, what does the world look like in 50 years?
I was honored to be asked by Clay Routledge to contribute answers to those questions alongside others, including: Steven Pinker (Harvard University), Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress), Matt Clancy (Institute for Progress), Marian Tupy (HumanProgress.org), James Pethokoukis (AEI). I encourage you to jump over the roundtable and read all their excellent responses. I’ve included my answers down below:
Almost every argument against technological innovation and progress that we hear today was identified and debunked by Samuel C. Florman a half century ago. Few others since him have mounted a more powerful case for the importance of innovation to human flourishing than Florman did throughout his lifetime.
Chances are you’ve never heard of him, however. As prolific as he was, Florman did not command as much attention as the endless parade of tech critics whose apocalyptic predictions grabbed all the headlines. An engineer by training, Florman became concerned about the growing criticism of his profession throughout the 1960s and 70s. He pushed back against that impulse in a series of books over the next two decades, including most notably:
The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976), Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (1981), and The Civilized Engineer (1987). He was also a prolific essayist, penning hundreds of articles for a wide variety of journals, magazines, and newspapers beginning in 1959. He was also a regular columnist for MIT Technology Review for sixteen years.
Florman’s primary mission in his books and many of those essays was to defend the engineering profession against attacks emanating from various corners. More broadly, as he noted in a short autobiography on his personal website, Florman was interested in discussing, “the relationship of technology to the general culture.”
Florman could be considered a “rational optimist,” to borrow Matt Ridley’s notable term[1] for those of us who believe, as I have summarized elsewhere, that there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism, and human betterment.[2] Rational optimists are highly pragmatic and base their optimism on facts and historical analysis, not on dogmatism or blind faith in any particular viewpoint, ideology, or gut feeling. But they are unified in the belief that technological change is a crucial component of moving the needle on progress and prosperity.
Florman’s unique contribution to advancing rational optimism came in the way he itemized the various claims made by tech critics and then powerfully debunked each one of them. Continue reading →
Margaret Talbot has written an excellent New Yorker essay entitled, “The Rogue Experimenters,” which documents the growth of the D.I.Y.-bio movement. This refers to the organic, bottom-up, citizen science movement, or “leaderless do-ocracy” of tinkerers, as she notes. I highly recommend you check it out.
As I noted in my new book on
Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance, “DIY health services and medical devices are on the rise thanks to the combined power of open-source software, 3D printers, cloud computing, and digital platforms that allow information sharing between individuals with specific health needs. Average citizens are using these new technologies to modify their bodies and abilities, often beyond the confines of the law.”
Talbot discusses many of the same examples I discuss in my book, including:
the Four Thieves Vinegar collective, which devised instructions for building its own version of the EpiPen;
e-nable, an international collective of thirty thousand volunteers, designs and 3-D-prints prosthetic hands and arms (and which has, more recently, distributed more than fifty thousand face shields in more than twenty-five countries.);
GenSpace and other community biohacking labs; and
Open Insulin and Open Artificial Pancreas System.
I like the way Talbot compares these movements to the hacker and start-up culture of the Digital Revolution: Continue reading →
On May 3rd, I’m excited to be participating in a discussion with Yale University bioethicist Wendell Wallach at the Microsoft Innovation & Policy Center in Washington, DC. (RSVP here.) Wallach and I will be discussing issues we write about in our new books, both of which focus on possible governance models for emerging technologies and the question of how much preemptive control society should exercise over new innovations.
Of all the books of technological criticism or skepticism that I’ve read in recent years—and I have read stacks of them!—
A Dangerous Master is by far the most thoughtful and interesting. I have grown accustomed to major works of technological criticism being caustic, angry affairs. Most of them are just dripping with dystopian dread and a sense of utter exasperation and outright disgust at the pace of modern technological change.
Although he is certainly concerned about a wide variety of modern technologies—drones, robotics, nanotech, and more—Wallach isn’t a purveyor of the politics of panic. There are some moments in the book when he resorts to some hyperbolic rhetoric, such as when he frets about an impending “techstorm” and the potential, as the book’s title suggests, for technology to become a “dangerous master” of humanity. For the most part, however, his approach is deeper and more dispassionate than what is found in the leading tracts of other modern techno-critics.
I’m currently finishing up my next book. It addresses various strands of “Internet pessimism” and attempts to explain why all the gloom and doom theories we hear about the Internet’s impact on modern culture and economy are not generally warranted. A key theme of my book is that most Internet pessimists overlook the importance of human adaptability in the face of technological change. The amazing thing about humans is that we adapt so much better than other creatures. We learn how to use the new tools given to us and make them part of our lives and culture. The worst situations often bring out the most creative, innovative solutions. Media critic Jack Shafer has noted that “the techno-apocalypse never comes” because “cultures tend to assimilate and normalize new technology in ways the fretful never anticipate.”
In a cultural sense, humans have again and again adapted to technological change despite the radical disruptions to their lives, mores, manners, and methods of learning. As Aleks Krotoski recently points out in her new
Guardian essay, “How the Internet Has Changed Our Concept of What Home Is”: Continue reading →
“I believe that before we evolved language, our communication was more musical than it is now,” says cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen at the University of Reading in England, author of “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body.” Unlike Darwin, Dr. Mithen is convinced that music was crucial to human survival. “Using music to express emotion or build a sense of group belonging would have been essential to the function of human society, especially before language evolved prior to modern humans.”
The discovery of the world’s oldest musical instrument—a 35,000-year-old flute made from a wing bone—highlights a prehistoric moment when the mind learned to soar on flights of melody and rhythm.
Researchers announced last week in Nature that they had unearthed the flute from the Ice Age rubbish of cave bear bones, reindeer horn and stone tools discarded in a cavern called Hohle Fels near Ulm, Germany. No one knows the melodies that were played in this primordial concert hall, which sheltered the humans who first settled Europe. The delicate wind instrument, though, offers evidence of how music pervaded daily life eons before iTunes, satellite radio and Muzak.
…the ability to create musical instruments reflects a profound mental awakening that gave these early humans a crucial edge over the more primitive Neanderthal people who lived in the same epoch. “The expansion of modern humans hinged in part on new ways of storing symbolic information that seemed to confer an advantage on these people in competition with Neanderthals,” Dr. Conard says.
To Dr. Patel, music-making was a conscious innovation, like the invention of writing or the control of fire. “It is something that we humans invented that then transformed human life,” he says. “It has a profound impact on how individual humans experience the world, by connecting us through space and time to other minds.”
If even something as central to our daily lives as music is, in fact the result of technological innovation over time and if technology can, as with music, change the way we think, communicate and build communities, I can’t help but wonder: What will our descendants think thousands of years from now as they look back on the rise of today’s web and social networking technologies? If nothing else, this sense of perspective should make us better appreciate how important the development of communications media really is to the future of the human species.
Impossible as it is to predict how that staggeringly complex process will unfold—
e.g., will Google make us smarter or stupider?—I’ll just humbly suggest that, rather than try to tinker with the future course of the species by trying to fine-tune public policy today to produce the “right” outcome, we would do better to follow the same principle that has guided the medical profession for 24 centuries: First, Do No Harm. In other words, if we don’t know what the effects of regulatory intervention in new media will be in the long-term, we’d be better off to leave well enough alone.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
Margaret Talbot has written an excellent New Yorker essay entitled, “
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.