Are We Getting Somewhere?
Reassessing progress in the 21st century
If there are axioms in Silicon Valley, at the top of the list must surely be the belief that we’re making onward and upward progress. Spend any time in a non-catatonic state in any cafe or popular hangout on University Ave in Palo Alto, or in Sunnyvale, Menlo Park, or Mountain View, and you’ll quickly realize you’re in a culture that’s entirely focused on the future, and thinks technology, or “technoscience” is what counts, and not much else. (Full disclosure: I was an entrepreneur in Palo Alto, and to be fair, obsessing about the future is what entrepreneurs do. But this is not what I mean here.) The mindset is ubiquitous. Even advocates of what I’ve called “Fearesome AI” (as opposed to “Dreamy AI”), who worry about the existential risks of AI run amok, are really just the flip side of the exponential progress coin. They’ve bought into the myth of exponential progress, too. Techno-futurists and increasingly a confused media and public simply take for granted that we’re on a rocketship to technological wonders, which somehow also equates to a theory of history and human progress writ large.
One terrible consequence of this pervasive thinking (besides being totally wrong, as I’ll explain) is the short shrifting of all things historical. As Renaissance thinkers like Petrarch well knew, the past is a treasure trove of not just human folly but human greatness. Chronicalled in the past are civilizations surviving and thriving for millenia, and artistic and engineering feats that in some cases remain unrivaled today. So, why are we so cocksure about 21st century progress? Can anyone today write like James Joyce or Leo Tolstoy, or Virginia Wolf? Who rivals Leonardo Da Vinci in their understanding of figure and form? Where are the orators like Cicero? The essayists and humanists like Montaigne? The philosophers like Plato, or Aristotle, or Lucretius or Epicurus? Or, for that matter, Alan Turing and John Von Neumann? We have our own talents, to be sure, but this doesn’t cancel the great talents of the past, or somehow render them obsolete and otiose. Yes, we do build on the past. But we also learn from it.
Alas, the ahistorical bubble we’re currently living in not only doesn’t look back but seemingly can’t look back, as if it would stall progress and mire us in bigotry and irrelevance rather than provide insight, knowledge and wisdom. It’s a profoundly simplistic and troubling view. We are not just building “on top of” the past like legos, we must continuously return to it to get our own bearings. There’s a cyclical nature to progress. In this spirit, I’ll be developing the theme of “the return,” or as the Italian Renaissance thinker Giambattista Vico called it, the ricorso. (My next book is titled The Return: Why the 21st Century Looks Like the Past (so far), Not the Future We Wanted. More on this in future posts.)
Winston Churchill famously remarked—or is credited with the remark—that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Turns out, he was speaking to us. We find ourselves burdened again with problems we thought we’d already worked out, and troubles we thought we’d left behind. New thinking—a new theory of history—is required.
I address the question of progress in my recent piece in American Affairs Journal, “Back to the Fifties: Reassessing Technological and Political Progress.” Here’s a relevant selection. I hope you enjoy.
Progress: Linear and Exponential?
The belief that we’re headed somewhere better—making progress—is remarkably durable. The myth of linear “onward and upward” progress grew out of the Enlightenment. Auguste Comte systematized it in the nineteenth century. Comte seems to have imagined progress (to use an anachronistic metaphor) proceeding like an escalator or elevator, rising through barbarism and ignorance to utopia—a succession through stages, from religion to philosophy to science, to a finally mature “technoscience.” Comte’s vision lies behind the inveterate optimism of techno-utopians today, who are confident that science and technology are the essential tools for making a better world. But whereas previous visionaries invoked scientific discovery and core technological invention as a panacea, today’s techno-culture focuses almost exclusively on improvements to an old discovery, the digital computer.
The computational metaphor—a totalistic view of humans as computers—pervades Silicon Valley, which treats words like “technology” and “reason” as synonyms for digital computing. Vaclav Smil, who in 2010 was selected by Foreign Policy as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” provides an alternate vision of the future in his latest book, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure. His book, out this year from MIT Press, brings needed attention to more fundamental and pressing problems than the reductio of the computational metaphor.
The list is long: feeding an increasingly undernourished world, reducing the application of synthetic fertilizers, “safe, effective, and environmentally friendly refrigerants” (which still contribute to climate change), vastly better battery performance—multiplying current lithium‑ion battery power by ten would still leave us with a quarter of the energy contained in a kilogram of kerosene—and “securing adequate supplies of food, water, energy, and material needed to lead healthy lives with decent life expectancies.” (We might also add, as Smil notes, better treatments and cures for dozens of categories of cancer.)
Our tunnel vision, he argues, imperils awareness and scrutiny (and funding) in these other areas. It has also distorted modern notions of progress, which many technophiles today believe to be exponential. Exponential progress means we’re going “onward and upward” not like an escalator but like a rocket, accelerating off a launching pad toward some fantastic destination in space. Exponential progress would likely seem dubious and Panglossian even to Enlightenment optimists like Voltaire. It’s a distinctively modern idea.
Failure to Launch
It’s also not true. As Smil and many others have noted, the American media routinely herald as “breakthroughs” even minor developments in applied disciplines like AI and other high-tech gadgetry. The constant drumbeat of world-changing developments no doubt buttresses claims about rocket-fast progress. But there’s ample evidence today that digital technology itself is no longer exponentially progressing—even though it is the one area where the exponential view is most likely to hold true. As with many other distortions and fallacies popular today, the line between fact and fiction continues to blur.
The case for techno-scientific progress typically hinges on very real advances in microchip performance. The eponymous Moore’s Law, attributed to former Intel chief Gordon E. Moore, states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit (the fastest computer chip then) roughly doubles every year, while the cost is cut in half. Moore’s Law has held steady for decades since Moore first voiced it in 1965; today’s computers are roughly 1.75 billion times more powerful than the computer that guided the Apollo capsule to the moon. Unfortunately, Moore’s Law is an exception to progress which in other areas remains stubborn and stalled. It’s also coming to an end.
As Smil notes, the final total of the single-processor transistor count on computer chips ended up higher than predicted by Moore’s Law between 1993 and 2013. But it slowed from 2008 to 2018, with a beginning best count of 1.9 billion and an ending count of 23.6 billion. If Moore’s Law were a law, the 2018 count should have been 60 billion. Between 2015 and 2018, the growth rate was just 4 percent. As Smil puts it, “the end is clearly in sight.”
Beyond computer chip and storage performance increases, the case for exponential progress gets exceedingly murky. While the tech media has taken absurdly bold and optimistic stances on even nominal advances in anything digital, the actual inventions and innovations of the twenty-first century are more sobering. Many of the scenarios bandied about in the filter bubble of high-tech haven’t happened and often seem implausible and unwanted anyway.
Read the rest at American Affairs Journal. I would also like to thank all my subscribers. It’s encouraging to see the resonance of ideas and the growth of the Colligo community, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Next week: Twenty-first Century Megamachines
Have a fulfilling and wonderful rest of the week
Erik J. Larson
Terrific article really.
iPhones getting better while the rest of the world gets worse can hardly be described as the inexorable upward march of progress. We need so much more imagination.