CYCLICAL LUDDISM:

Technopessimism Is Bunk (Joel Mokyr, 7/26/13, NPR)

[T]oday, once again, we hear concerns that innovation has peaked. Some claim that "the low-hanging fruits have all been picked." The big inventions that made daily life so much more comfortable -- air conditioning, running cold and hot water, antibiotics, ready-made food, the washing machine -- have all been made and cannot be matched, so the thinking goes.

Entrepreneur Peter Thiel's widely quoted line "we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" reflects a sense of disappointment. Others feel that the regulatory state reflects a change in culture: we are too afraid to take chances; we have become complacent, lazy and conservative.

Still others, on the contrary, want to stop technology from going much further because they worry that it will render people redundant, as more and more work is done by machines that can see, hear, read and (in their own fashion) think. What we gained as consumers, viewers, patients and citizens, they fear, we may be about to lose as workers. Technology, while it may have saved the world in the past century, has done what it was supposed to do. Now we need to focus on other things, they say.

This view is wrong and dangerous. Technology has not finished its work; it has barely started. [...]

Above all, no scientific research today, from English literature to economics to nanochemistry, is even thinkable without computers. The question scientists most frequently ask about computers is not "what do they do," but "how did we ever do anything without them?" The advances in science will make it possible (among other things) to make even more sophisticated instruments, some of them foreseeable just by extrapolating what we already have, some as unimaginable as the Large Hadron Collider would be to Archimedes.

There is one more aspect of modern research and development that makes it different from anything that came before. In the age of Aristotle, it was still possible for an exceptionally bright individual to know (almost) anything worth knowing. As the body of knowledge expanded, this became impossible given the finite capacity of even the best brains. Scientists began to practice specialization, a division of knowledge, similar in principle to the division of labor so beloved by economists. But the division of knowledge, much like the division of labor, requires organization.

If society is going to make use of the expert knowledge that has accumulated, it needs to ensure that this knowledge can be stored at low costs and that it's accessible. Pieces of knowledge should be retrievable, not just by other scientists building on its foundations, but by engineers, industrial chemists and entrepreneurs trying to apply the science to practical use. The art of finding ever-smaller needles in ever-larger haystacks is itself a critical technology that determines how fast both science and technology can move. Search technology made a huge step forward when the alphabetical organization of knowledge became widespread in the 18th century with the emergence of alphabetically arranged encyclopedias, technical dictionaries and lexicons, as well as well-organized compilations of classified facts (think of the "Father of Taxonomy" Carl Linnaeus).

All of these wonderful developments of the past are dwarfed by the storage and search capabilities of our own age. Throughout history, humans had to struggle with costly and perishable information storage. Some storage technology was durable but costly, such as clay tablets. Others, like papyrus, did not last. Paper and movable type, both originating in China, were huge advances, but books and articles were still expensive.

Today, copying, storing and searching vast amounts of information is, for all practical purposes, free. We no longer deal with kilobytes or megabytes, and even gigabytes seem small potatoes. Instead, terms like petabytes (a million gigabytes) and zettabytes (a million petabytes) are bandied about. Scientists can find needles in data haystacks as large as Montana in a fraction of a second. And if science sometimes still proceeds by "trying every bottle on the shelf" -- as it does in some areas -- it can search many bottles, perhaps even petabottles.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 27, 2013 10:42 AM
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