[sciborg2]

Technological Superstitions

In a typically cogent article, economist Herman Daly sorts our the law of diminishing returns into three interacting processes. The first is diminishing marginal utility—that is, the more of anything you have, the less any additional increment of that thing contributes to your wellbeing. If you’re hungry, one sandwich is a very good thing; two is pleasant; three is a luxury; and somewhere beyond that, when you’ve given sandwiches to all your coworkers, the local street people, and anyone else you can find, more sandwiches stop being any use to you. When more of anything  no longers bring any additional benefit, you’ve reached the point of futility, at which further increments are a waste of time and resources.

Well before that happens, though, two other factors come into play. First, it costs you almost nothing to cope with one sandwich, and very little more to cope with two or three. After that you start having to invest time, and quite possibly resources, in dealing with all those sandwiches, and each additional sandwich adds to the total burden. Economists call that increasing marginal disutility—that is, the more of anything you have, the more any additional increment of that thing is going to cost you, in one way or another. Somewhere in there, too, there’s the impact that dealing with those sandwiches has on your ability to deal with other things you need to do; that’s increasing risk of whole-system disruption—the more of anything you have, the more likely it is that an additional increment of that thing is going to disrupt the wider system in which you exist.

Next to nobody wants to talk about the way that technological progress has already passed the point of diminishing returns: that the marginal utility of each new round of technology is dropping fast, the marginal disutility is rising at least as fast, and whole-system disruptions driven by technology are becoming an inescapable presence in everyday life. Still, I’ve come to think that an uncomfortable awareness of that fact is becoming increasingly common these days, however subliminal that awareness may be, and beginning to have an popular culture among many other things. If you’re in a hole, as the saying goes, the first thing to do is stop digging; if a large and growing fraction of your society’s problems are being caused by too much technology applied with too little caution, similarly, it’s not exactly helpful to insist that applying even more technology with even less skepticism about its consequences is the only possible answer to those problems.

There’s a useful word for something that remains stuck in a culture after the conditions that once made it relevant have passed away, and that word is “superstition.” I’d like to suggest that the faith-based claims that more technology is always better than less, that every problem must have a technological solution, and that technology always solves more problems than it creates, are among the prevailing superstitions of our time. I’d also like to suggest that, comforting and soothing as those superstitions may be, it’s high time we outgrow them and deal with the world as it actually is—a world in which yet another helping of faith-based optimism is far from useful.

eta: Should've quoted the best part:

That history of relentless economic decline has had a massive impact on attitudes toward the future, toward science, and toward technological progress. In 1969, it was only in the ghettos where America confined its urban poor that any significant number of people responded to the Apollo moon landing with the sort of disgusted alienation that Gil Scott-Heron expressed memorably in his furious ballad “Whitey on the Moon.”  Nowadays, a much greater number of Americans—quite possibly a majority—see the latest ballyhooed achievements of science and technology as just one more round of pointless stunts from which they won’t benefit in the least.

It’s easy but inaccurate to insist that they’re mistaken in that assessment. Outside the narrowing circle of the well-to-do, many Americans these days spend more time coping with the problems caused by technologies than they do enjoying the benefits thereof. Most of the jobs eliminated by automation, after all, used to provide gainful employment for the poor; most of the localities that are dumping grounds for toxic waste, similarly, are inhabited by people toward the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid, and so on down the list of unintended consequences and technological blowback. By and large, the benefits of new technology trickle up the social ladder, while the costs and burdens trickle down; this has a lot to do with the fact that the grandchildren of people who enjoyed The Jetsons now find The Hunger Games more to their taste.

[sciborg2]

Humans Need Not Apply

Short presentation on the likely coming contraction in employment.

See comments for references.

[sciborg2]

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

...In fact, the United States never did abandon gigantic, government-controlled schemes of technological development. Mainly, they just shifted to military research—and not just to Soviet-scale schemes like Star Wars, but to weapons projects, research in communications and surveillance technologies, and similar security-related concerns. To some degree this had always been true: the billions poured into missile research had always dwarfed the sums allocated to the space program. Yet by the seventies, even basic research came to be conducted following military priorities. One reason we don’t have robot factories is because roughly 95 percent of robotics research funding has been channeled through the Pentagon, which is more interested in developing unmanned drones than in automating paper mills...

...For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.

Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we await cures for cancer and the common cold, and the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made to ensure that the new work demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy...

[sciborg2]

The Broken Thread of Culture

A great many of those children won’t live to reach adulthood, and they know it; those who do manage to dodge the stray bullets and the impact of collapsing public health, by and large, will spend their days in the crumbling, crowded warehouse facilities that substitute for schools in this country’s poorer neighborhoods, where maybe half of each graduating high school class comes out functionally illiterate; their chances of getting a decent job of any kind weren’t good even before the global economy started unraveling, and let’s not even talk about those chances now.

When imitating the examples offered by the privileged becomes a dead end, in other words, people find other examples to imitate. That’s one of the core factors, I’m convinced, behind the collapse of the reputation of the sciences in contemporary American society, which is so often bemoaned by scientists and science educators.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson, say, may rhapsodize about the glories of science, but what exactly do those glories have to offer children huddling in an abandoned house in some down-at-heels Miami suburb, whose main concerns are finding ways to get enough to eat and stay out of the way of the latest turf war between the local drug gangs?

[The Sharmat]

Ah, the ironies of luddism propagated over the internet...

[Wilshire]

Ah, the ironies of luddism propagated over the internet...

Ha, yes. "But technology never did anything for ME!" they yelled over the internet, sent in from phones, sitting in air conditioned rooms or cars.

Though it is very true that new things, new technologies especially, are expensive, and lower socioeconomic classes aren't likely to see the benefits of anything "new" for many a decade. That's not much of a surprise, and I'd guess there is a similar gap between every class. "Trickle down technological advancements" if you will. Unfortunately, not everything can be instantly gratifying.

I think idea of science/technology being no use to the average person can be countered fairly simply: Look at some of the poorest countries in the world, your "3rd world" countries, and ask if we threw out all our privileged western technology and science so we were more like them, would life be 'better'? My guess is the most people would say no. Thus a path that leads backwards is unacceptable. Next, we already know that the state of things currently is also unacceptable, so stagnation is unacceptable. This leaves open one prospect, to move inexorably forward.

Maybe I'm wrong, sometimes its hard to see through your own privilege. Maybe that question, if asked to the poorest of the poor in any rich country, would be answere in the affirmative. Maybe they would welcome the chance to bring down the rest of the world to their level. I really have no idea. At any rate, I don't believe the above articles are speaking explicitly of those groups anyway, as they don't make up "the common man" demographic.

This isn't a new superstition. Always the status quo is more comfortable than an unknown future, and the past is romanticized as being better than today. Its a good thing progress has its own inertia.

[SilentRoamer]

For me - the value in science and technology is in the neccessary education that has to be provided for forward momentum. For me this education always outgrows its roots.

A recent example I can think of would be the Ebola situation in Liberia, I mean sure the WHO and world governments played a major factor in stopping/reducing the spread of Ebola but it was mostly stopped by the education of the Liberian people and giving them a basic understanding of Health and Sanitation that we take for granted in the West because we are educated.

Strangely enough, when the outbreak first started, there were massive superstitions from the Liberian peoples, Munrovia (sp) became a dumping ground for the infected and the lack of understanding of Health and Sanitation caused more deaths than anything else. Education shines a light on superstition which ends up being vague enough to not even cast a shadow. All IMO of course.

[sciborg2]

I don't the author is primitivist or a luddite though - The possibility that technology is unsustainable or that there is a religious air about continuous progression of civilization thanks to technology aren't necessarily incomparable with the recognition that certain technologies are useful. Benjamin Cain and even Bakker have talked about how we'll hit a point where technology just caves in civilization. (Which isn't to say the metaphysics of either is right, but IF they are I do think the conclusions follow.)

Of course even if there was hypocrisy that wouldn't be enough to sink an argument - pointing out hypocrisy is just ad hominem after all.

[Wilshire]

Anything is ad hominem if you are thin skinned and squint your eyes enough though. Regardless, I just dont think the above really makes a compelling case, and worse, offers no real alternative. I get that not having a solution doesn't mean there still isn't a problem, but it would have helped me out.