Technopessimism1 TECHNOLOGY THEN AND NOW: WHY THE TECHNOPESSIMISTS ARE WRONG. Joel Mokyr Departments...

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TECHNOLOGY THEN AND NOW:WHY THE TECHNOPESSIMISTS ARE WRONG.

Joel MokyrDepartments of Economics and HistoryNorthwestern University

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A new wave of Technopessimism is upon us.

They are, on the whole, serious scholars and sources:•Jan Vijg, a Dutch-born molecular biologist in his The American Technological Challenge: Stagnation and Decline in the 21st Century•Tyler Cowen in his The Great Stagnation•My esteemed colleague Robert J. Gordon in his “Is U.S. Economic Growth over? Faltering Innovation confronts the six Headwinds”. NBER Working paper series, 18315 (Aug. 2012). •The Economist (Jan. 12 issue).

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Innovation pessimismHas the ideas machine broken down?

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There are three brands of techno-pessimism:

One school says, if not quite that “everything that can be invented has been invented,” but at least that the low-hanging fruits have been picked and the rest of the new inventions won’t have nearly as radical a welfare effect.

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Another school says that, au contraire, there are lots of things we still can invent, but we won’t.

This is because we are getting too risk-averse, too complacent, too regulated, and our institutions are turning anti-innovative and sclerotic.

So, much like ancient Rome and Qing China, we are a once-dynamic world in decline.

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And finally there are those who think that the new brave technology actually will come, but that it will eliminate our jobs and turn us into a Player Piano kind of dystopia in which all labor is replaced by machines and robots and humans will become marginalized.

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Let me first deal with the Gordon-Cowen argument

They are NOT alone. Many feel disappointed. Peter Thiel has famously remarked “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

To which I would reply: wait till you need a hip replacement, buddy.

The Economist sided (cautiously) with the optimists, but it did so (mostly) for the wrong reasons.

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Is the world running out of ideas?

Perhaps the low-hanging fruits have been picked: running water, chlorination, electricity, etc?

But science and technology’s main function in history is to make taller and taller ladders to get to the higher-hanging fruits. They are just as juicy.

Moreover, these trees keep sprouting new fruits, if only we give them proper care.

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Economic Historians should not make predictions.

That said, from a purely technological point of view, I would expect the rate of technological change to accelerate over the next decades, even if it would be foolhardy to be more specific than that.

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Why is this?

Because of the particular dynamic of “useful knowledge”

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Historians of technology have pointed out that the two mutually affect one another in complex ways.

Derek Price and Nathan Rosenberg have noted that technology affects science as much as the other way around. It did so through what Price called “artificial revelation.”

Science depends on technology no less than technology on science: we were not hard-wired to see microbes, to watch the moons of Jupiter, to store terabytes of information in our brains and do 54 petaflops of calculations: tools and machines we build do this for us.

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Throughout modern history, the tools and instruments devised to do science have determined how fast

science would advance.

The best-known examples are of course the telescope and microscope, but there are many others. Let me give you a few lesser-known examples from the era before and during the Industrial Revolution to drive the point home.

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Robert Boyle’s famous airpump, built in the late 1650’s, which showed once and for all that contra Aristotle, nature did not abhor a vacuum, and thus paved the road for atmospheric (steam) engines.

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Laplace’s calorimeter

Calorimeter: first used in the winter of 1782-83, by Antoine Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace, to determine the heat evolved in various chemical changes; calculations which were based on Joseph Black’s prior discovery of latent heat.

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Another example: Alessandro Volta, 1745-1827

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Volta’s “pile” (1800)

Volta’s battery provided chemists with a new tool, electrolysis, pioneered by Humphry Davy. He and other chemists were able to isolate element after element, and fill in much of the detail in the maps whose rough contours had been sketched by Lavoisier and Dalton.

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In our own age, technology has continued this trend in spades.

Scientists have arsenals of tools that we could not have dreamed of even a few decades ago, measuring, observing, calculating, modelling, creating laboratory experiments in physics, microbiology, and nanochemistry that nobody thought off a few decades ago, let alone in 1800.

Here is one example that I just heard about this summer:

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Adaptive optics:

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1. These are two images of the planet Uranus, one using an ordinary telescope, the other one in which the blurring caused by atmospheric distortions are corrected.

2. Adaptive optics technology sharpens images by changing the shape of telescope mirrors up to 1,000 times per second.

3. It is believed to have more potential than Hubble’s telescope (and a lot less expensive).

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Another example how technology helps science:

Automatic Gene sequencing machine, first developed at CalTech in 1986 by Dr. Leroy Hood’s laboratory.

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A last example: synchotron

A synchrotron is a stadium-sized machine that produces many beams of bright X-ray light.

Synchrotrons provide flexible, powerful methods for learning about the structure and behavior of matter at the molecular and atomic level.

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The significance of ever-growing artificial revelation:

The implication is simple: if the positive feedback loop between technology and science is getting stronger all the time, science will continue to expand at ever faster rates, and it is plausible that technology itself will do the same, even if we cannot tell in which directions and how fast .

It is hard to see this dynamic system ever settling down on an equilibrium.

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My second reason for being a techno-optimist is similar but not quite the same

Here is a simple argument:

What is the total social useful knowledge that an economy has access to?

Answer: it is the union of all individual sets of useful knowledge.

Corollary: some very important pieces of knowledge are only possessed by very few extraordinarily smart individuals (most of them at CalTech).

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This does not matter as long as those who need this knowledge have access to it.

1. But access can be costly. What determines access costs?

2. Among many factors, clearly the cost of storing information and searching through it figure highly.

3. In the past, the most important advances in search-engine technology were these:

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Paper

Chinese manufacturing of paper, woodcut from Ming dynasty era (c 1400)

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Printing Press and moveable type, invented by Pi Sheng ( 1st half,11th c.)

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But knowledge needs to be organized if access is to be fast and cheap.

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Encyclopedias and technical “lexicons.”

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If there is anything where we have made progress in the past two decades, it is access technology.

We no longer deal with “data” H we have “meta-data,” amazing quantities of information that can only be accessed with sophisticated searchware. We can search for extremely small needles in gargantuan haystacks.

This has political and commercial applications that have been discussed in recent weeks ad nauseam.

But it has also enormous implications for further technological advances.

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Access matters…

1. First, any inventor must be sure she is not re-inventing the wheel and that nobody else has already done this.

2. Second, many inventions are recombinations and analogues of existing technological components and devices. Again, finding out easily and cheaply what is out there makes the process easier.

3. Third, despite what some people believe, a lot of technological progress still depends on “trying every bottle on the shelf.” Modern storage and access creates very large shelves and many bottles (think: petabottles).

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Anyone engaged in research can access vast banks of knowledge and data. Cloud technology is just getting started. We measure storage now not in megabytes but Zettabytes (a million petabytes) and Yottabytes (1000 Zettabytes) (WHO makes up those terms? --- there is also “Brontobytes”).

We can also consult experts half a globe away in the blink of an eye through email, facebook, skype and what not.

So access costs have declined sharply for both codifiable and “tacit” knowledge.

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Fourth, technology normally advances best if it can rely on the results of best-practice science, both to know what works and (equally importantly, what does not).

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So if everything is so good, why is everything so bad?

Answer: it is not.

It’s just that in technology the results often are unexpected and take forms that are not easily measured by the criteria and measures of the technological ancient regime.

Imagine an Englishman at a party celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first steam engine.

That would be in 1762.

He would ask: “What has that machine done for us? Made a lot of noise, emitted a lot of smoke and stench, and pumped some water out of a few coal mines. Big Deal.”

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We don’t know what the adoption lags are today, probably less than then, but the really BIG results usually arrive toward the end when the technology is fully mature.

Most of the disruptive and life-changing effects of digitalization have not been fully felt.

The Digital Age will be to the Analog Age what the iron age was to the stone age.

And we can’t even imagine what the Post-digital Age will look like. No more than Archimedes could imagine CERN.

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1. Today we measure progress by measures such as GDP and it’s derivative, TFP. These were designed for steel-and-wheat economies.

2. The digital age, largely based on a service economy, needs other measures, that are far more sensitive to the constant appearance of new goods and services, incessant improvement in their quality and capabilities.

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But given the ever-more rapid development of access technology and better scientific “instruments”, it seems hard to somehow avoid the conclusion that we are in for an ever-lasting rate of technological progress.

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Is this the good news or the bad news?

Here is Mokyr’s theorem: Technological progress is never Pareto superior. There are always losers. And we rarely compensate them.

I am not the first to argue this: Schumpeter spoke of “creative destruction.”

So there will be losers. What we gain as consumers, viewers, patients, and citizens, we may lose as workers.

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What will the workplace of the future be like?

Here are three things to keep in mind:

First, the “factory”, which arose in the Industrial Revolution is slowly being phased out. We will work, wherever, whenever it suits us. Workplace and commuting will slowly disappear. Three-dimensional printers will make whatever assembly line shopfloor workers were making.

We’ll miss the water cooler human interaction, but there is always social networks.

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Second, robotics will be everywhere. These Robots will not be anything like the iron humanoids that follow the Asimov rules of robotics. Most of them will be nothing more than little chips connected by A.I. to sensors. But they will drive our trucks, perform open-heart surgeries, pick our tomatoes, walk our dogs, and cook our meals.

But: only if we want them to. That, by definition, is a welfare improvement.

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So, what will WE do?

Third, the post-digital age may be the Age of Leisure.

Remember that practically the entire leisure industry, from videogames to spectator sports, to radio, tv, movies was a product of the twentieth century. That’s because the workweek (in Europe) fell from 3,000 hrs a year to 1,500 hrs.

If robots do all the production, there will be far more leisure.

Will we be bored and feel unproductive? Some will, some won’t. Just like now…

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But remember that historically we have always had a “leisured class”

Roman patricians, Chinese Mandarins, Medieval knights, Eighteenth-century Russian landlords.

It’s just that these were a small minority. They did things even if they did not have to.

Just like tenured professors doing research. And their graduate students playing videogames.

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Thank you

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