E-Book, Englisch, Band 04, 236 Seiten
Reihe: Edition NFO
Frameworks for the Future
E-Book, Englisch, Band 04, 236 Seiten
Reihe: Edition NFO
ISBN: 978-3-948580-94-0
Verlag: Next Factory Ottensen
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Edited by Matthias Schrader and Volker Martens. With contributions by Payal Arora, Axel Averdung, Kristina Bonitz, Azeem Azhar, Genevieve Bell, Amy McLennan, Benedict Evans, Daisy Ginsberg, Rafael Kaufmann, Sohail Inayatullah, David Mattin, Miriam Meckel, Léa Steinacker, Thomas Müller, Ramez Naam, Tijen Onaran, Pamela Pavliscak, Ben Sauer, Laëtitia Vitaud, Albert Wenger.
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Albert Wenger
THE GREAT
TRANSITION
Images: Joshua Brown and Youssef Naddam (Unsplash) The year 2020 has laid bare foundational issues in what was supposed to be, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, “The end of history”.1 Market-based economies with democratic governments were shockingly unprepared for a global pandemic, and their responses have further aggravated historically high levels of inequality in wealth and income. In the meantime, the climate crisis is presenting an increasing threat to humanity. As Mark Twain is reported to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” We might ask what the current period rhymes with, and why. This chapter will contend that we find ourselves in a transition that is as profound as that between the Agrarian Age and the Industrial Age. How did this prior transition play out? Every aspect of the Industrial Revolution has been studied, but the details of history are largely distractions. They are like the noise of the daily news cycle that obscures the underlying signal. The goal of a historical examination should rather be to uncover a larger pattern that can help us understand the present. One approach to discerning a pattern is to determine a force that is moving history along. This idea is inspired by classical physics: if you know the force that applies to an object, you can, based on its current position, predict where it will be in the future. This inherently deterministic perspective can be found in thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx and Kevin Kelly, with the former applying it to economics and the latter applying it to technology. 2, 3 My own perspective is informed by a relatively new and somewhat speculative approach to science called “constructor theory”. 4, 5 In essence, instead of subscribing to deterministic laws of motion, it examines possible and impossible transformations. In this view, technological progress changes what is possible. You can’t have an airline industry until you invent the airplane, but once you have airplanes, you can have many different types of airline industries. The same thinking applies to societies as a whole: a new set of technological capabilities enables new forms of living. Earlier transitions This is most easily understood with regard to the earlier transition from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age. Homo sapiens emerged roughly 250,000 years ago as foragers. Their societies were nomadic and lived in small tribes with minimal hierarchies. Humans were promiscuous and followed animistic religious beliefs in which objects and animals were inhabited by spirits. This remained largely unchanged until about 10,000 years ago, when a series of technological innovations occurred that formed what we now think of as agriculture. These included plowing and seeding, irrigation, grain and food storage and the domestication of animals, and made a whole new type of society possible. A group was no longer constrained by the food it found, but rather by how much arable land it controlled. And food surpluses made it possible to have people who didn’t work in agriculture at all but were soldiers, makers or even artists. Agrarian societies were radically different from the forager societies that preceded them. They were sedentary instead of nomadic. They were hierarchical and tended towards monogamy instead of promiscuity, inventing institutions such as marriage. They developed theistic religions with well-defined deities instead of unlimited spirits. In their quest for land, agrarian societies wiped out foraging societies in many parts of the world. Still, it would be misleading to argue that agricultural technology determined the structure of societies in the Agrarian Age. Within these broad outlines, agrarian societies could be dramatically different. Some were inward-looking, while others were aggressively expansionistic. Some were dictatorial, while others had elements of democracy. Now let’s move forward by about 10,000 years to the end of the Agrarian Age. The Enlightenment enabled science to make a series of technological breakthroughs, including steam and electric power, mining and mechanised transportation, and the chemical synthesis of materials. This once again dramatically changed the “space of the possible” for humanity. And once again, the broad outlines of Industrial Age societies changed dramatically. People went from living predominantly in the country to the city, and from living in large extended families to the nuclear family. From farming on commons to owning private property, coupled with the rise of private intellectual property, through copyright and patents. And even religion changed again, from great-chain-of-being theologies to the Protestant work ethic. However, it would be a mistake to think of this, too, as a deterministic change. Because once again, while societies in the Industrial Age shared certain characteristics, they also differed in others, such as the ownership of the means of production (private versus state ownership) and the approaches to economic development (planned versus market-based). Life in the post-war Soviet Union, for instance, was dramatically different from life in the United States, even though both were industrial societies. So again, we can see that a change in technological capabilities allowed for new ways of living. Societies in the Agrarian Age were constrained by arable land, while Industrial Age societies were constrained by capital. Their success depended on their ability to build factories, roads, railroads and mines. They still had to feed their populations, but doing so depended more on factors such as the ability to produce fertiliser than the amount of land that was available. Let’s recap. The pattern of history identified here is that innovation shifts the constraint that defines what kinds of human societies are possible. In the Forager Age, when the constraint was the availability of food, there was little freedom for how to organise, and most tribal societies were similar to each other in size and structure. The invention of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago shifted the constraint from food to land, and more varied societies became possible. The invention of industrial technology a couple of centuries ago shifted the constraint from land to capital, allowing a new set of societies to emerge. In each of these great transitions, the resulting changes were dramatic to the point that few things in society remained familiar. I am not referring here to technological capabilities, but rather to how people lived. Digital technology is often underestimated Three questions arise from this analysis. First, does digital technology represent the same level of change in technological capability for humanity now as in these two prior revolutions? Second, if capital is no longer the binding constraint, what is? And third, what can we learn about how we should approach the transition? Digital technology is often underestimated for the simple reason that a computer is a machine. That often suggests the fallacy that computers are just another type of Industrial Age machine, and that digital technology is nothing fundamentally new but rather calls for an incremental adjustment. Germany, for example, has alluded for years to “Industrie 4.0” – the fourth version of the Industrial Age – which embodies this fallacy. While a computer is a machine, it has two properties that did not exist in earlier machines, and these properties make digital technology radically different from the analogue technology that preceded it: zero marginal cost and universality of computation. These might be understood by looking at a toaster. The toaster is fantastic for making toast, but it doesn’t make coffee; there’s a separate machine for that. A computer, on the other hand, can compute anything if you feed it different software. For example, it can change from a word processor to a video player in a split second. While analogue machines are special-purpose machines that provide a specific functionality, a computer is a universal machine for computation. Now let’s consider marginal cost and return to our toaster analogy. If you want another piece of toast, you need to put another slice of bread in the toaster; if you want to carry out an additional computation on a computer that is already up and running, it is essentially free. This is also true of sending digital information across a network, storing it or displaying it on a screen. For example, YouTube serves billions of video views and each additional view is essentially free; that is, the marginal cost of viewing a video is zero. Again, this is radically different from analogue machines, which have a positive marginal cost. To truly appreciate how radically different digital technology is, consider an example where universality and zero marginal cost come together to enable something magical: free medical image analysis. There is now software that can outperform human doctors at finding cancer cells in a scan of an organ. The programs that do this are able to run on any sufficiently powerful computer (thanks to universality) and can deliver an additional analysis for free (thanks to zero marginal cost). Nothing like this has ever existed before. World After Capital With our prior technological shifts, it is obvious – at least in hindsight – how the constraints on humanity were affected....
