“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.
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Discord Invitation
Friday 22 November 2024
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 316
Permutations of Devolved Industrial Production
…in which I discuss a taxonomy of technologies, the electromechanical era, the replacement thesis, retrograde replacement, gunsmithing, reverse engineering, roundabout production, the ENIAC in your future, and hope for the future in technological complexity…
Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/permutations-of-devolved-industrial
Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/permutations-of-devolved-industrial-production-b43485423a08
The Better is the Enemy of the Transformative
Building Better Worlds.—When the earliest inventions that shaped the modern world—essentially, the low-hanging fruit of industrialization—were introduced, the scope and scale of their efficacy was unknown; it was not fully understood that a new world was being created. Now, in retrospect, we can identify the crucial technologies (e.g., electric lighting), and the role these crucial technologies serve have become a particular problem to solve more efficiently if we can. If the problem can be solved in a better way, the bootstrap technology can be abandoned, as we are now abandoning incandescent lighting for LED lighting. But when the original bootstrap technology was introduced, it was not solving a problem; it was looking for an application, with no guarantee that any application existed. Now that the world has been changed, we can consciously seek to maintain, modify, or extend this world brought into being by technology, doing so through better technologies consciously developed to further a known and familiar world. The technologies being introduced today may serve these goals, or they may be the foundation of some new world, yet to be born, which will replace the world we know today. The hurdle to do this, to change the world through technology, is higher than when the technological world came into being, as there is no more low-hanging fruit of industrialization. But if there are still transformative technologies yet to be built, they may yet create a new world, unknown and unfamiliar to us today, which will, in its turn, be the occasion of conscious upkeep and improvement. The extant world is the application for a better technology, but a transformative technology creates a new world.
Relative Positions of Science and Technology
Science and Technology.—Science and technology today, during the modern era, closely track each other, since they are locked in a spiral in which scientific discoveries provide the basis for new technologies, and new technologies advance scientific discoveries. Nevertheless, the two may alternately outpace each other when one lags behind while the other pushes ahead. When science has outpaced technology, we are left with ideas of what is possible, but are unable to effectively act upon these ideas. When technology has outpaced science, we are given powers we do not fully understand and thus we cannot effectively control or exploit them. Both are failures of efficacy, but subtly different forms of failure. Without a way to quantify and compare science and technology it is difficult to judge whether the one or the other is ahead at the moment, but if we look at forms of failed action that plague us at any given time, these failures action will betray the relative positions of science and technology.
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The Ghost of Technologies Past
For more than a dozen years I used a tractor feed dot matrix printer to print business checks, until my old printer (almost exactly like the Panasonic pictured below) gave out and I had to turn to a laser printer as my daily business printer. I still have some tractor feed checks left over that I occasionally use. So today I went into my bank and had one of these tractor feed checks with me, and the young man who was the teller was unfamiliar with tractor feed printers. Once I gave a brief explanation, I then started in on dot matrix printers, but then I stopped myself and said, “I guess only old people like me know about these obsolete technologies.”
In the moment it seemed a little fantastic to me that someone would be unfamiliar with dot matrix tractor feed printers, but I have also heard that young people have no idea why the “save” icon on most computers looks the way it does (i.e., like a compact floppy disk). The years pass, and formerly familiar technologies increasing populate imaginations and museums, but fall out of regular use.
When those individuals have passed away who used these technologies in their every day life, they will live on only in museums and perhaps old videos that seem increasingly quaint over time.
Our Technopunk Future
Technology is older than civilization. It is worthwhile to pause and reflect on this. We have been a technological species for longer than we have been a civilized species, and for far longer than we have had a technological civilization. But the fact that we sometimes refer to contemporary civilization as being “technological” implies that our relationship to technology has changed. This is accurate.
Our relationship to technology has changed in a material sense in terms of increasing rapidity of technological development and the cheapness and ubiquity of technology today. Our relationship to technology has changed in an intellectual sense in terms of technology now being conceived in the context of science and engineering, and also due to a change in our relationship to time.
Up until the renaissance, all human civilizations were backward-looking, finding their meaning, value, and purposes in the past. For a brief time during the renaissance, as brief as the present moment itself, western civilization lived in the moment. Since then, from the early modern period to the present, we have been orientated toward the future, and increasingly so as our consciousness of the future has grown. This is the source of the oft-remarked sense of progress that has marked the modern era, which is a symptom rather than a cause. It is also frequently a source of despair, because we look to the future and sometimes we see nothing in which we can invest our hopes.
This change in our relationship to time, and our placing technology in the context of science and engineering, has transformed our age-old relationship to technology. Because of our changed relationship to the future, we do not construct our future by referencing the past, but rather we look for trends in the present and extrapolate them in order to try to understand how and why the future will be different from the present. Even if we know that unprecedented events will shape the future in unpredictable ways, so that we cannot accurately construct the future, we know that it will be different both from the past and from the present.
This way of thinking about the future has been retroactively applied and has yielded steampunk, which is a vision of the future in terms of an extrapolated early industrial technology. In retrospect, knowing how technologies, when scaled, can transform our way of life, we can see how scaled up steam-driven technologies could have transformed our way of life. Instead, these steam technologies were preempted by more sophisticated technologies, in particular, electrical technologies.
Beyond steampunk, the next iteration of this conception is something that I have called tubepunk (and as soon as I came up with the term I discovered that others had already used it, so I know my usage is not unique). An application of tubepunk can be found in my post Counter-Factual Weapons Systems from a few years ago, in which I speculated on the possibilities of more sophisticated weapons systems that might have come about if WWII had gone on for a longer period of time. Instead, the new weapons systems that emerged during the war were brought to maturity during the Cold War, but these mature capabilities were implicit in the newly introduced weapons systems.
The same is true today, though our technologies are primarily driven to development by market forces rather than by war. This driver has a selective effect, both in terms of what technologies get developed and how they are brought to market. We can extrapolate the development of our present technologies into the future and construct a future very different from the present, even though we don’t know about the unprecedented changes that will inevitably shape the future in ways that we cannot predict.
However, as our consciousness of the future continues to increase and hence to improve, there may come a time in history when we see the implicit possibilities in a technology even as that technology is introduced, as we proceed to extrapolate and scale up this technology in a way that we have not scaled up newly introduced technologies in the past. One of the reasons what we did not realize a fully steampunk future or a fully tubepunk future is that we were unable to grapple fully with the future consequence of our technologies. Another reason is that the financial resources have not been available to fully exploit a new technology. As we have seen, our changed relationship to the future has begun to change our ability to extrapolate the possibilities of new technologies.
This is one of things I was trying to do in my recent Hybrid NTR/HET Spacecraft post – pushing our known technologies to the limits of near-peer development, how far can we go? Could we send a fission-powered spacecraft to the stars? We have already launched the Voyager spacecraft beyond our solar system, though it will be tens of thousands of years before it passes close to another star; if we built something more substantial and aimed it at some particular star, how closely could we approximate interstellar travel with technologies that we know? I think we could get closer that we suppose. A few stages of nuclear thermal rockets powering Hall effect thrusters, with a reactor that can last for thirty or forty years is not beyond our contemporary technology. If the money were available, we could start building something like this today.
Alternatively, if technological development slows down, and there are fewer instances of technological preemption, a technology may come to maturity and experience a technopunk-like development in which a standard technology becomes the building block for iterations and extrapolations that take it far beyond its initial scope. Thus there are two distinct historical pathways that could lead to a technopunk future.
A technopunk future is closer than we realize, and it may catch up with us one of these days.
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Two Forms of Technological Soteriology
Recently in Easter and the Brotherhood of Mankind
I discussed the close coupling of eschatology and soteriology in the
western tradition. This is something that I have been meaning to address
for a long time, but I haven’t had the words for it as yet. (The words
are still inadequate, but I hope the idea came through nevertheless.) In
the course of this exposition I noted that science presents us with a
grand cosmological eschatology, but no associated soteriology. I
received a comment on that post from
Gregor L. Hartmann, who rightly pointed out that transhumanist hopes for
a life everlasting (albeit technologically embodied) constitutes a
technological soteriology.
In another essay, Technologies of Life Extension, I reviewed a range of different possibilities open to the transhumanist for life extension, which implies that transhumanism
is not one, but many. And, even beyond the many different possible
forms of life extension, there are many different possible forms of life
enhancement (something I touched upon in
Transhumanism and Adaptive Radiation).
So I’ve thought a lot about how transhumanism could transform the life
of the individual ways, but I had initially failed to see this as a form
of soteriology consistent with and predicated upon scientific
civilization and a scientific conception of the cosmos.
Now
another form of technological soteriology has occurred to me, perhaps as
obvious as the example of transhumanism, and that is simply for the
individual to identify himself or herself with the project of
elaborating the scientific conception of the cosmos. This can take a
form as adventurous as becoming an astronaut and exploring new worlds,
or a form as intellectual as continuing to elaborate the scientific
vision of the cosmos and the place of human beings within it. In other
words, there are many forms of technological soteriology even within the
idea of identifying oneself with cosmological eschatology.
Since the project of science is essentially infinitistic, the soteriology of coupling one’s life, or the life of one’s species, to the scientific project, is also infinitistic. This observation brings out a contrast that hadn’t previously thought of: perfections are usually conceived as finite goods, and the role of the idea of perfection in traditional soteriologies is prominent (and has a political parallel in Comte de Maistre). While perfection may be a distant goal, if an individual attains perfection, they have arrived at their destination, and there is nothing further than remains except to continue to exist in this unchanging perfection (which would be one way to describe eternity in heaven).
The
soteriology of identification with cosmological eschatology admits of
no unchanging perfection. Scientific exploration and discovery can
continue without end, as can the elaboration of scientific knowledge
based upon this exploration and discovery. This infinitistic ideal
possibly differentiates technological soteriology from its finitistic
alternatives more definitively than only ontological commitments of the
finitistic or infinitistic worldviews.
Another point: the
soteriology of identification with cosmological eschatology is equally
valid for the individual or for the species, so that this soteriology
can offer the same hope to both the individual seeking to identify with
the scientific project and an entire species that seeks to identify with
the scientific project. That hope is the possibility of making a real
contribution to the scientific enterprise, and so securing a permanent
legacy for oneself or one’s species. Also, this soteriological
conception is not limited to the contributions of a single species or a
single kind of conscious: even an artificial consciousness could
contribute meaningfully to the scientific project, and so receive in
turn the meaning that derives from participation in a great enterprise
that transcends not only the individual, but also possibly transcends a
civilization and even a species.
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The Oldest Lesson of New Technology
It is no news that the word “revolutionary” has come to be greatly overused, and that every technological innovation is declared to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. But even if consumers seeking an experience of community are willing to sleep outside a store at night in order to be the first to purchase a new product when it becomes available in the morning, the world is not revolutionized by these devices, however compelling they may seem to their users. The world has already been revolutionized by technology.
From an historiographical standpoint, what is compelling about new technologies is not any one innovation, but the whole of technological growth as an historical phenomenon. We call this historical phenomenon the industrial revolution, and it began in England in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and continues today around the world. The whole unfolding of technological development is one great movement of history, and from the perspective of some distant future, it will be seen as such.
The two hundred years or so of industrial revolution that we have experienced is still far shorter than the thousands of years over which the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution occurred, and shorter than the hundreds of years that buffered the transition between the medieval and modern worlds. The whole period of industrialization, then, from steam engines to microprocessors, is one great transition, and not several. And what it is a transition toward we still do not know, because the world of technological maturity has not yet been revealed to us.
We like to think of ourselves today as qualitatively different from other eras of history, but those individuals living in the nineteenth century whose lives were daily being disrupted and preempted by innovations such as the telegraph, communications cables under the ocean, railroads, and steamships certainly thought the same thing about themselves. And they were right to think so.
Instead of thinking in terms of particular technologies and particular devices that employ particular technologies, we should be thinking in terms of classes of technologies, and when we think in terms of classes of technologies we immediately see that the oldest lesson of new technologies is that new technologies are added as a new stratigraphic layer over the top of existing technologies, only rarely making earlier technologies extinct, and much more often simply adding to the diversity of available technologies.
Written language did not render spoke language obsolete; printed books did not cause the extinction of handwriting; radio did not replace books; film and television did not supplant radio; the internet did not eliminate television, and social media did not suddenly erase earlier expressions of the internet. For those who make even finer distinctions among technologies, tablet computers have not replaced laptops or desktops, they have, rather, offered a wider variety of form factors among which consumers can choose.
A new class of technologies is like technological cladogenesis, and what we have seen is the adaptive radiation of technologies, spreading outward and diversifying. Within each technological clade, we can also find steady microevolution that does tend to render earlier forms extinct, even while the class continues in existence. Bicycles constitute a class of technologies, for example, and while a few individuals ride antiquarian bikes and their replicas, most bicycles used today are the most technologically advanced products of microevolution within the bicycle phylum.
Kevin Kelly has argued in his book What Technology Wants that all technologies continue to existence, however it needs to be noted that many antiquated technologies are kept in existence only by antiquaries who do so for non-economic reasons, and the continued existence of these technologies is demographically insignificant. I am, however, largely in agreement with the spirit of Kelly’s claim, mutatis mutandis according to the account given above. The demographically significant use of technology keeps the most technically advanced instances of each technological phylum alive.
In some cases the emergence of a new class of technologies legitimately deserves to be called “revolutionary,” but we can easily see that the structure of technological revolution became entrenched with the industrial revolution, and ever since then the introduction of new classes of technology has been more of the same kind of historical transition.
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Technologies of Nature
In some earlier posts on my other blog (cf., e.g., Fusion and Consciousness: Technologies of Nature) I discussed the idea of technologies of nature. Really, this is a thought experiment in which we attempt to think about nature within the framework of technological thought. This can be helpful. According to the verum-factum principle of Giambattista Vico, we understand what we have made, and since we have made technology, we therefore understand it.
Nature is often difficult to understand; we find that we have to “reverse engineer” nature in order to come to a point at which it is as though we have made it in order to understand it. Even if we can only adopt this perspective of technologies of nature as a thought experiment, it can potentially clarify some questions and generate new questions and directions of inquiry.
This idea has been on my mind again because I have come to see that the mind is a technology of nature that allows intelligence to be expressed through the medium of consciousness, and, as I recently argued in A Sentience-Rich Biosphere, the mammalian adaptive radiation has meant a sentience-rich biosphere in which consciousness is present throughout a wide range of ecological niches. The ability to express intelligence through the medium of consciousness, then, is a great selective advantage in a sentience-rich biosphere.
How are we to understand this in technological terms, as a technology of nature? Allow me a digression through an explicitly technological question. Recently I asked a question in a SETI discussion forum:
If a technologically sophisticated civilization were to emerge in a radio-loud galaxy (i.e., a radio galaxy), would this drown out the stage of technologically generated EM radiation in the development of that civilization, or would other factors (the directionality of the relativistic jets, or the particular bandwidth of naturally occurring radio emissions from the synchrotron process) make a habitable world within a radio galaxy sufficiently radio-quiet that such a civilization could develop a practicable radio technology?
Paul Carr responded
Would being in a radio-loud galaxy make it impossible to develop microwave technology? Or radio astronomy? My guess is no, but I haven’t done the calculations. Our own history is that we first developed shortwave tech, which won’t be interfered with much by astrophysical sources. We slowly encroached on the shorter and shorter wavelengths, and now pretty much can do anything anywhere in the spectrum.
I elaborated:
Is shortwave technology intrinsically simpler and therefore presumably easier to develop, so that we can describe a likely trajectory of any technological civilization from shortwaves to later development across the EM spectrum, or should we regard this progression as an historical accident? I understand that Jagadish Chandra Bose was experimenting with millimeter length microwaves about the same time others (Tesla, Popov, Marconi) were experimenting with “Hertzian” waves. To extrapolate further, there would be an obvious selective effect if a particular bandwidth was unworkable for reasons of natural radio emissions.
And Paul Carr responded again:
I’m sure you’ve seen a variable capacitor. Simplicity itself. Inductors are just coils. Shortwave is far easier because the long wavelengths don’t make tricky engineering demands or require exotic devices for amplification. You can use simple components that you would learn to make as a result of mastering electromagnetism in the first place.
The relation of this to the brain as a technology of nature is whether the evolutionary development of our brain – from reptilian hindbrain to mammalian limbic system to hominid neocortex – is a series of historical accidents (the kind of contingency that Gould had in mind when he spoke of rewinding the tape of life and playing it forward again), or has this development been constrained by “technological” factors? Is this evolutionary sequence an instance of “simplicity itself”?
Purely from the survival and reproduction view (i.e., from the perspective of natural selection) the most rudimentary part of the brain must be concerned with maintaining a complex organism in a living state (temperature regulation, breathing, heart rate, and so on), and to this basal brain we can progressively add functions of greater complexity until intelligence, or something like intelligence, becomes possible as an emergent from brain evolution.
If I am right about this, one of the crucial questions about human brain evolution, and how it led to the kind of intelligence we have, is whether the limbic system that is responsible for much of our emotional lives is a “logical” next step for brain complexity, i.e., whether this addition provides a significant higher level of functionality for an organism (and whether the limbic system is “simplicity itself”), or whether it is an historical accident, and our emotionally-charged and emotionally-saturated expression of intelligence is a biological outlier, an idiosyncratic result of terrestrial evolution, not likely reproduced elsewhere in the universe.
Although I realize that this is all very sketchy (and I hope that you get my drift), I’m pleased to have made it this far with these ideas, because it is given me a direction for my research, and I am now reading about brain evolution and mammalian evolution with an eye toward clarifying my formulations above. And I find that I typically make the best progress when I read with a specific question in mind. This gives a particular edge to my thinking, as I am looking for answers to specific questions.
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As our technophilia leads us ever deeper into the technological frontier, techno-philosophy must serve an orienteering function within the technium.
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Eureka!
The Role of Insight in Science
In several posts I have discussed the past reputation of futurism, which is marginal at best and laughable at worst, and the attempts by recent futurists to be more circumspect in their predictions precisely because of past overreach in futurism.
Rather than to consign the whole of futurism to the circular file, I suggest that there is something that we can learn from failed past futurisms – and I mean that we can learn something more than caution and risk aversion. If we could fully explore the limitations of predictions and define when futurism goes off the rails, that would be immensely helpful.
I’ve already started to do this, as in my post The Existential Precarity of Civilization I noted that…
“…in the short term, the projected future is almost always correct. We can say within a high degree of accuracy what tomorrow will be like. Yet in the long term future, the projected future is almost always wrong. Here when I speak of the projected future I mean the human future. We can project future events in cosmology with a high degree of accuracy — for example, the coming collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies — but we cannot say anything of significance of what human civilization will be like at this time, or indeed whether there will be any human civilization or any successor institution to human civilization. Futurism forecasting, in other words, goes off the rails in the mid-term future, though exactly where it does so is difficult to say.”
Another interesting limitation on futurism has just occurred to me, though, like the limitation above regarding the mid-term future, this is a limitation that is very broad and still needs to be refined if it is to be a helpful heuristic for forecasting.
I have written many posts detailing what I called the STEM cycle – science driving technology used in engineering producing better instruments for more science – most recently Chronometry and the STEM Cycle and The Interstellar Imperative, and I have noted that the science and technology mutually implicated in the STEM cycle are usually only weakly distinct and only occasionally strongly distinct.
There is at least one respect in which science and technology are strongly distinct, and that is in our ability to predict and project technologies coupled without our near total inability to predict and project new sciences. This requires further explanation (and an historical illustration).
By the late nineteenth century a number of interesting anomalies had appeared in the edifice of classical physics for which classical physics had no explanation. One of the most prominent anomalies was the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which involved splitting a beam of light, having the split beams travel perpendicular to each other, and then recombining the beams and looking for interference patterns.
The experiment was intended to find the luminiferous ether, that is to say, the medium in which light waves were thought to be propagated. But when the beams were recombined there was no interference, which implied that the beams of light traveled at the same speed, so that traveling with the grain or against the grain of the luminiferous ether did not make a difference.
The experiment not only disconfirmed a single idea in physics, it ruled out a whole class of models in which light is propagated in a special medium – the luminiferous ether – and left scientists at the time without a model to explain the propagation of light waves.
The discovery in our own time of the accelerating expansion of the universe is a lot like the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment in that everyone was expecting one result, but the experiment produced a different result. Now cosmologists don’t have an adequate model to explain the expansion of the universe, although many put a brave face on revisions to classical big bang cosmology.
The luminiferous ether was a cipher – a feature of the world posited simply for there to be a medium in which light wave propagated, much as the ciphers of dark matter and dark energy today are posited simply to say that there is something that is the missing mass and something that causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
After Michelson and Morley and before Einstein, science (what Kuhn called “normal science”) went on as before. Almost no one had an idea of the conceptual revolution that was coming. And not merely one conceptual revolution, but two conceptual revolutions: relativity and quantum theory. Similarly, normal science today continues as before, but no one can really yet grasp what direction science will have to go in order to produce a cosmological model that explains the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Until a new scientific idea is formulated, it cannot be predicted in the way that future technologies can be predicted. We can predict the rough outlines of very advanced technologies in the far future – exotic ideas like space travel through engineered worm holes, photo-realism in virtual reality, mind uploading, compact fusion reactors, or high temperature superconductors – but we cannot even provide the rough outlines of the next scientific idea that will revolutionize scientific understanding.
Even if we do not know the exact means by which such advanced and exotic technologies will work – this would require knowledge of the underlying science, which is precisely what is missing – we know the end that we want to achieve, and technologies may be defined in terms of their ends in a way that science cannot be defined in terms of its ends.
Technology is teleological in so far as we know what we want to do, and we try whatever means are available to us in order to achieve these ends. The means by which we achieve our ends change over time, as science, technology, and engineering improve our abilities to act. Thus in so far as we can formulate exotic ideas of what we would like to be able to do – like traveling to the stars, or terraforming entire worlds – we can predict that technologies that will make these abilities possible.
Science, however, is not ultimately based on human agency, but on understanding nature. That understanding does not answer to human agency or human desire. You can wish to solve a problem, and still be utterly incapable of solving it. Of course, if you really wish to solve a problem, and you are willing to spend twenty years thinking about a thought experiment (as Einstein did), you may eventually be successful. (Or you may not be successful, as Einstein in his later years was unable to produce a unified field theory, despite his efforts.)
Until the moment comes, however, the crucial idea that solves the scientific problem cannot be predicted. If the idea could be predicted, many people would be working on it, and someone would find the answer by sheer diligence. But in science diligence is not enough. It was Edison who said that invention is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. He was right, and as a technologist he knew what he was talking about. But this is not true of science.
Galileo understood this difference clearly, and gave a wonderful illustration of it:
“…even in conclusions which can be known only by reasoning, I say that the testimony of many has little more value than that of few, since the number of people who reason well in complicated matters is much smaller than that of those who reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling I should agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning is like racing, and not like hauling, and a single Arabian steed can outrun a hundred plowhorses.” (Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, 1623)
There are many other illustrations of this in other branches of knowledge. For example, mathematicians struggled with the idea of infinity ever since the idea was first formulated, but until the work of Cantor, no one cracked the problem despite more then two thousand years of effort. Once Cantor formulated the ideas of sets, cardinality, one-one correspondence, diagonal proofs, and the like, any child can manipulate these concepts. But without the original ideas, science is stalled and cannot make any theoretical advances, although scientists can continue to make scientific observations.
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