The Bleeding Edge. Bob Hughes
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biological species, an abandoned technology can lie dormant for centuries and be resuscitated rapidly when conditions are right. With living things, there is no going back; the fossilized remains of extinct species, like ichthyosaurs and pterodactyls, can’t be resuscitated when the climate is favorable again. Darwinian evolution must plough forward, the only direction available to it, and create completely new creatures (dolphins, birds) based on the currently available stock of life forms (mammals, reptiles). But with technology we can always go back if we want to. For once, the arrow of time is under our control. Or should be.
Comparing Darwinian and technological evolution reveals an anomaly in the kind of innovation we see around us in the present computer age: here, technologies apparently can effectively disappear from the common pool, the way dinosaurs and other extinct species have done. Fairly large technologies can disappear abruptly, as soon as a feeling spreads among those who control their manufacture that the market for them might soon disappear, or even might become less attractive.
Or a technology may deliberately be kept out of the common pool, by someone who patents it in order to suppress it. Yesterday’s ideas may survive in documents, and for a while in human knowledge and skill, but they soon become very difficult to revive. ‘The show moves on.’ Premises and equipment are sold, staff are laid off and all the knowledge they had is dispersed; investors pull out and put their cash elsewhere; and products that once used the technology either die with it, or are laboriously redesigned to use alternatives. These extinctions help to create the determinist illusion that technology follows a single ‘best’ path into the future but, when you look at what caused these extinctions, fitness for purpose seldom has much to do with it.
No technology ought ever to die out in the way living organisms have done. It seems perverse to find Darwinian discipline not merely reasserted in a brand-new domain that should in principle be free of it, but in a turbo-charged form, unmitigated by the generous time-scales of Darwinian evolution. This market-Darwinism comes at us full pelt within ultra-compressed, brief, human time-frames. Where there should be endless choice, there is instead a march of progress that seems to have the same deterministic power as an avalanche.
But this is a fake avalanche. Every particle of it is guided by human decisions to go or not to go with the flow. These are avalanches that can be ‘talked back up hill’ – in theory and sometimes even in practice. Even in the absence of such an apparent miracle, deviation always remains an option, and is exercised constantly by the builders of technology. Indeed the market would have very little technological progress to play with if technologists did not continually evade its discipline, cross boundaries, and revisit technologies long ago pronounced dead. This becomes more and more self-evident, the more our technologies advance.
ARE SOCIETIES TECHNOLOGIES?
Brian Arthur begins to speculate on the possible range of things that might be called ‘technology’. He observes that science and technology are normally paired together, with science generally assumed to be technology’s precursor, or its respectable older brother. Yet he points out that human technology evolved to a very high level for centuries and even millennia before science existed, as we now understand it. And then he asks, is modern science a technology? It is a technique that, once discovered, has evolved in much the same way as specific technologies have done.
Taking this argument further, human nature is part of nature; we have various ways of exploiting it to particular purposes and, as we learn more about how people function, those ways become more and more refined.
Exploiters of humanity are avid students of human nature: they are eagle-eyed at spotting ways of coercing people to do things they do not wish to do and quick to adopt the latest research for purposes of persuasion. They know that human nature is what we make it. They make it fearful and obedient. We, however, know that human nature can be better than this. We know that human nature can take almost any form – but we also know, roughly at least, what kind of human nature we want. Should we not devise societies that will help us to be the kinds of people we aspire to be?
A key part of any Utopian project should be to discuss widely and think deeply about the human natures we want to have and the ones we do not want to have, and to devise the kinds of social arrangements that will support and reward those characteristics.
HUMANITY BEGAN WITH TECHNOLOGY
Economic policy is driven by an assumption that technology is something hard, shiny and baffling that emerged in the cut-and-thrust of late 18th-century northern Europe, and has since spread throughout the world from there, bringing a mix of great benefits and serious challenges that we take to be an inevitable concomitant of progress. It’s further assumed that the vehicle for this revolution was the capitalist company.
Taking Brian Arthur’s definition of technology as ‘a phenomenon captured and put to use’, it’s pretty clear that technology is a lot bigger than that, and a lot older than that. It’s now becoming apparent that the people of so-called ‘primitive societies’ were and are great and pioneering technologists – and none of today’s technologies would be conceivable without what they achieved (so the ‘giants’ whose assistance the great Isaac Newton modestly acknowledged were themselves ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’: the Human Pyramid itself).
Richard Rudgley, an anthropologist, has described the scale of these discoveries in a book published in 1998, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age.11 Long before the first cities appeared, leaving their large and durable remains for the first archeologists to ponder over, humans in all parts of the world were developing highly efficient tools and techniques for making tools, had elaborate cuisines, were great explorers and expert navigators, artists and students of the natural world, including the sky. They even practiced surgery. We know this because evidence has been found in prehistoric remains from all over the world, of the challenging form of cranial surgery known as trepanning (to relieve pressure on the brain caused by blood clots); one of the few forms of surgery that leaves unambiguous skeletal evidence. It is reasonable to assume from this that they also knew many other kinds of surgery.
Martin Jones, a pioneer of the new techniques of molecular archeology, makes the point that humans are not even viable without at least minimal technology, such as fire. In his book Feast: Why Humans Share Food, Jones says that ‘human evolution may have something to do with reducing the costs of digestion’.12 Humans have relatively small teeth and jaws, and our guts are not long enough to cope well with a diet composed entirely of uncooked food. Cooking also neutralizes the toxins in many otherwise inedible plants, increasing the range of foods humans can use. All of this requires highly co-operative sociality – which is in turn facilitated by the large, anthropoid brain that became possible through reduced ‘metabolic expenditure’ on jaws and guts: a self-reinforcing feedback cycle that, at a certain point, produced the intensely sociable, essentially technological, highly successful human species. Humans, their technology and their distinctive social order all seem to appear simultaneously in the archeological record 100,000 or more years ago.
TECHNOLOGY EMERGES FROM EGALITARIAN KNOWLEDGE ECONOMIES
Throughout nearly all of their first 100,000 or so years, the dominant characteristic of human communities has been egalitarianism, and we can work out a lot about how these egalitarian societies functioned not only from the physical evidence they have left, but also from modern people who live radically egalitarian lives: today’s hunter-gatherer and foraging peoples. Many of these communities have brought the art of egalitarian living to a level of impressive perfection, and have independently developed many of the same social mechanisms for maintaining equality – particularly significant because they are so widely separated from each other, on the furthest and least-accessible margins of all the inhabited continents in the world. One of these characteristics, which almost everyone who meets them comments upon, is an unshakeable commitment to sharing knowledge. To borrow a useful phrase, they are the ultimate ‘knowledge economies’.
But there is much more to this than ‘sitting around all day talking’, which is