Here’s a striking little fact. It emerged recently that Big Oil had eerily accurate climate change predictions since…the 1970s. And of course, we know now that it worked assiduously to undermine the fact of climate change — a shadow of denial poisoning our societies to this day. All that’s a tiny example of what I call the Curse of the Industrial Revolution. By Umair Haque
Now, this is a subtle and maybe strange idea, so let me put it to you a different way. See the chart above? It means exactly what the title says: disruptive science is steadily declining. The kind that yields grand breakthroughs, new paradigms, shatters old preconceptions.
Don’t take that in isolation. The context matters, and the context in this case is that suddenly, our civilization hit a turning point. For the first time in centuries, progress came to a halt — and is now going into reverse.
The genesis of all that progress, was, of course, the Big Bang of the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, human beings had wealth, at least some of them, more than ever before, if not all of them, and with that wealth came many, many things. Longer, healthier lives — because now health itself could be a thing people invested in, socially and privately both. Another fruit of the Industrial Revolution was science — now, societies growing wealthy could reinvest those gains, for the first time in history, in pure research, a good that would have seemed like a frivolity to societies mired in the struggle to eke out the next harvest, which required every shoulder to the till.
So. Don’t mistake me when I refer to the “curse of the Industrial Revolution.” I’m not saying that industry didn’t bring with it progress. Quite the opposite. I’m saying that we have hit an inflection point, a great and grave one in all of human history: the Big Bang of Progress is now steadily slowing, plateauing, and then going into reverse. All our social indicators show it. From progress itself in the broadest terms — right down to the finding above, that disruptive, breakthrough science is experiencing a dramatic slowdown, too.
All of this should trouble us. Because of course the slowing and plateauing of progress brings with it the social ills of pre-modernity, too, from fascism to fanaticism to fundamentalism. As people lose confidence, trust, faith in modernity, they yearn for the safety and stability of lost nostalgic utopias. Maybe I will be better off protected from this precarious life by that strongman. Hey — if I accept my place in a hierarchy made of blood and soil, at least I have a stable, secure place, and bonus, I get someone to punch down on and hate, too. It’s no coincidence that as our civilization hits a plateau of progress, there is a tsunami pulling the world backwards, people viscerally, openly longing for everything from theocracy to fascism to fundamentalism, an authoritarian strongman to soothe their fears and tell them what to do, whether in Britain, heartland America, India, China, and beyond.
There’s an unexplored aspect of all this, though. And that’s about technology. Now, let me try to explain this as best I can.
When I say “tech,” what do you — most people — imagine? Don’t think about it, just go ahead and say it. You think, like most people, of social media, or these days, maybe, even of “AI.” I put it in quotes because well, little correlation engines called artificial “neurons” are a far, far cry from biological intelligence, the real thing, which works in profoundly more mysterious and complex ways, right down to the subatomic level. But let’s go with it for a second.
If I say “tech” today, most people will respond with some flavour of AI. But. And there’s a big but here. I wonder if you can see it coming.
Think for a moment about why our civilization is plateauing and going into reverse. It’s because we are becoming unable to supply the basics, the most fundamental basics of all, at the same levels of “growth” that we became accustomed to. Clean air, water, food, energy, medicine, healthcare — within a decade, three at most, all of these things are simply going to become unavailable, to very large numbers, on the trajectory we’re on. There will not be enough to go around. There already isn’t — that’s why prices for basics like food and medicine and energy keep on skyrocketing, with maybe a pause for minor relief here and there.
It should be very obvious why our civilization’s hitting what economists like me would call a “budget constraint” — a hard wall of what we can supply. Climate change and mass extinction. Harvests failing, countries flooding, megadroughts, megafires, megafloods. Good luck supplying the basics the old way like that for much longer, on a civilizational scale. It simply isn’t going to be possible, for example, to feed a planet the old way — with industrial food production — on a planet that’s heated past, probably, about two degrees or so. Too many crop failures, droughts, floods. It isn’t going to be possible, as another example, for much of the planet to even have clean water past say, maybe two and a half degrees or so — glaciers melt, rivers dry up, and the entire planet’s supply of fresh water contracts like a heart attack.
Now. Let’s come back to what the average person thinks of when anyone says “tech.” AI, mostly, maybe apps on your phone. And the incredibly uncomfortable problem here is that tech as we know it can’t help us save our civilization. At least not very much.
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