Q: Why does it take five men to put in a light bulb?
A: One to hold the bulb, and four to turn the ladder.
Or try this one: I’m in a room with a blank wall, a nail, a hammer, and a lovely framed painting with a wire on the back for hanging. I have all the tools needed to nicely decorate the room. But the tools in themselves do not represent a solution to the blank wall problem.
See, I could just as easily use the hammer to smash the glass in the picture frame, then take some shards of glass along with the sharp nail and the hammer (and maybe the wire, too) and go threaten some guys to come in and paint some pretty pictures on my wall. That’s one solution to the undecorated room, though maybe not the optimal one.
The same challenge confronts us when it comes to the use of emerging technologies to solve the many problems of today and tomorrow.
Take, for example, this comment from reader Lindsey Abelard on my recent article about “Making the Best of a Messy Real World”:
I have read Mike Treder’s blog, which is devoted to the concept of molecular manufacturing. If the kind of molecular manufacturing that his blog advocates is possible, would that not make the old O’neill scenario of space colonization possible? If so, it seems to me that the best way to protect the Earth would be to promote this kind of space colonization once the relevant molecular manufacturing is possible and get as many people to migrate into space and turn the Earth into a giant park. Yet, Mike has never talked about space colonization on his blog. This makes no sense to me. What he and many others seem to forget, it was the people involved in the L-5 Society who first came up with the idea molecular manufacturing.
The kind of molecular manufacturing that Mike’s blog is devoted to should make the O’neill scenario far cheaper and easier to accomplish than when it was first proposed in the 1970’s. Why is this then not considered an appropriate long term solution to the problem of Earth’s biosphere?
I simply fail to comprehend how someone who so obviously believes in the development of molecular nanotechnology can be so blind to the obvious application of opening up the solar system to human expansion, while preserving the Earth as a park. This seems so obvious to me. How can this not be obvious to Mike himself?
By “Mike Treder’s blog,” I assume the reader is referring to Responsible Nanotechnology, a place where I wrote several hundred articles over about five years. Of course, I left my position as Executive Director of CRN last March to take on the role of Managing Director here at the IEET, and I haven’t written any articles for that blog since then.
However, I get the point: if I expect molecular manufacturing to be so powerful someday—to be such a great tool—why don’t I recognize it as a solution to the problems outlined in the referenced article?
I’ll answer by picking up on a key phrase in the reader’s comment: an appropriate long term solution.
The more I have learned about the development of new technologies in general (and of molecular nanotechnology in particular), the more I have recognized the immense difficulty of applying apparently simple solutions to extremely complex problems. What might seem like an obvious match—take tool A and plug it into to slot B to solve problem C—almost never works out that way in practice.
Instead, what happens is that while we’re waiting for tool A to be developed, slot B changes shape, and problem C grows a lot worse. And what we failed to realize is that, all along, tools D and E were waiting there for us to use but we never picked them up because we were so entranced by the ethereal beauty of emerging tool A.
At least three interrelated factors argue against the hope of finding immediate and obvious answers to the myriad troubles that vex our burgeoning global industrial society:
- Time
- Politics
- Complexity
It takes a lot of time for truly transformative technologies to emerge. Even in these days of “accelerating change,” the Internet took about thirty years to have a substantial social and economic impact (and would have taken longer still if not for the secondary development of the World Wide Web). Early advocates for space expansion boldly predicted we’d have thriving O’Neill colonies by this time, which we don’t. Some proto-transhumanists were sure that life extension technologies would make us effectively immortal within their lifetimes, but many of them are dead now. And meanwhile, we’re still waiting for artificial intelligence to resemble anything close to its half-century-old promises of transcendent superiority. It’s not that these technological visions don’t have value; it’s just that they take a lot longer to achieve than their proponents would prefer.
One reason such things take a long time is that emerging technologies—whether AI or nanotech or genetic engineering—do not emerge into nor from a vacuum. They are developed within a context of political reality, amidst the daily tussle over regulation, funding, and proper usage. They do not and cannot arise fully-grown and pristine, as Venus from the sea, but are hammered out, molded, shaped, and modified through endless discussions in the halls of government, corporate boardrooms, and the public sphere.
Last is the issue of complexity. Not only are the problems we’re trying to address difficult, complex, and ever-changing, so too is the process of creating, refining, and ultimately implementing appropriate and effective solutions.
Imagine, in the image above, that today—January 11, 2010—is at the base of the diagram, and that the branches growing upward represent possible pathways that the future might take. In the initial short period of time, the number of directions that things can go are comparatively few. But as we move further out in time, the range of options and variables will increase, and it will become nearly impossible to predict with any certainty where we might end up—and quite difficult to have any meaningful influence on how things emerge.
Now, complicate that with the reality that we can’t even see all the branches on the diagram. From our limited perspective of the present, our vision is restricted to a small percentage of possible future states. We’re partially blind, hindered by our ignorance of the unpredictable.
That’s why it’s so risky to make specific predictions about the emergence and implementation of new technologies, and why it is a mistake to assume that the development of any particular powerful new tool either a) is imminent, or b) automatically will be applied to solve the obvious problems.
It would be nice if the world worked that way, but it doesn’t.
IEET Blog