Techno-solutionism

Techno-solutionism

https://lifeitself.us/2017/09/18/techno-solutionism/ - Techno-solutionism: tech alone can solve our wicked problems

NB: currently only page on site on this topic afaict 2022-01-30 ~rufus.

Source file (keynote)

Inbox

Aug 2017

We will look at two challenges: (1) democracy and (2) climate change.

(1) On democracy, the challenges Tech seeks to address:

  • Populism
  • Lack of political participation
  • Lack of trust in institutions
  • lack of social cohesion…

Tech solutions:

(2) On Climate Change

The challenges tech seeks to address:

  • Fossil fuel cheaper and cheaper
  • Renewable energy still not cost-effective

The Tech solutions:

  • Elon Musk
  • Renewable energy
  • Digitalisation - Dieter Helm Oxford University Professor of Energy Policy: “There will be robots doing lots of things that now rely on oil. Think of cars, a key part of the demand for oil. 3D printing holds out not just the closing of the gap between consumers and producers, cutting into the need for globalisation and all its energy costs. Digital delivery to the final point of consumption may also cut into transport. Then there is the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), cutting a swath through the middle class professions. Add in the marriage of digitalisation, genetics and the biological sciences, and quantum computing to get a sense of the disruption to come.” “ What is very surprising is that no one appears to have thought through what all this means for the energy industries in general and the fossil fuels in particular”. “An electric world is one that will see the gradual displacement of the fossil fuels, starting with oil. Transport is the first target, with electric vehicles already cutting away at the diesel and petrol engines faster than many anticipated. The investments in new electric models, new batteries and new charging networks are regularly in the news”. “Digitization will bring true decarbonisation” ““These are dramatic changes. Everything digital is electric, therefore the future of energy is going to be much more about electricity than it has been in the past. The general trend tells you that if you want to address climate change in particular, or energy usage or energy policy, its electricity you should start with.” “Helm, who is an economist and a former special advisor to the European Commissioner for Energy, said that decarbonisation “is unstoppable” but was highly critical of many decarbonisation policies. “We have spent a lot of money on addressing climate change – but we could do better, and indeed we have to, because we are not making enough global progress on climate change.” He said he was “quite optimistic about how we crack decarbonisation – but not in the conventional way”. “We will not solve climate change with existing technologies. I don’t think technology is going to solve everything, but I do think that it’s a bet that we have no option but to pursue.” http://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2017/03/15/digitalisation-the-deadly-threat-to-fossil-fuels-by-dieter-helm-part-2-of-3/ http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2017/04/digitization-will-bring-true-decarbonisation-says-dieter-helm.html
  • An eco-modernist manifesto: “decoupling human development from environmental impacts”. “The technologies that humankind’s ancestors used to meet their needs supported much lower living standards with much higher per-capita impacts on the environment.Conversely, modern technologies, by using natural ecosystem flows and services more efficiently, offer a real chance of reducing the totality of human impacts on the biosphere” “Urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination are all processes with a demonstrated potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species. Suburbanization, low-yield farming, and many forms of renewable energy production, in contrast, generally require more land and resources and leave less room for nature.” “Looking forward, modern energy may allow the capture of carbon from the atmosphere to reduce the accumulated carbon that drives global warming” “Meaningful climate mitigation is fundamentally a technological challenge. By this we mean that even dramatic limits to per capita global consumption would be insufficient to achieve significant climate mitigation” https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5515d9f9e4b04d5c3198b7bb/t/552d37bbe4b07a7dd69fcdbb/1429026747046/An+Ecomodernist+Manifesto.pdf

Critique:

  • Over optimism with regards to current technologies. There are no real tech solution atm: “ nuclear power is too expensive and risky; meanwhile, solar and wind power both suffer from intermittency, which (once these sources begin to provide a large percentage of total electrical power) will require a combination of three strategies on a grand scale: energy storage, redundant production capacity, and demand adaptation. At the same time, we in industrial nations will have to adapt most of our current energy usage (which occurs in industrial processes, building heating, and transportation) to electricity. Altogether, the energy transition promises to be an enormous undertaking, unprecedented in its requirements for investment and substitution. When David and I stepped back to assess the enormity of the task, we could see no way to maintain current quantities of global energy production during the transition, much less to increase energy supplies so as to power ongoing economic growth. The biggest transitional hurdle is scale: the world uses an enormous amount of energy currently; only if that quantity can be reduced significantly, especially in industrial nations, could we imagine a credible pathway toward a post-carbon future.” from Our Renewable Future
  • The collective action problem: @ COP & international agreements - Dieter Helm on the uselessness of the Paris Agreements (and the difficulty of human coordination mechanism): http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/energy/climate-change/ Dieter Helm: Solving climate change with Economics> rather than Regulation (COP. 21 - international agreements…) ? https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21564815-climate-change-needs-better-regulation-not-more-political-will
  • Climate change is a symptom and the issue is systemic: “Why have environmental writers and advocacy organizations succumbed to tunnel vision? Perhaps it’s simply that they assume systems thinking is beyond the capacity of policy makers. It’s true: if climate scientists were to approach world leaders with the message, “We have to change everything, including our entire economic system—and fast,” they might be shown the door rather rudely. A more acceptable message is, “We have identified a serious pollution problem, for which there are technical solutions.” “If climate change can be framed as an isolated problem for which there is a technological solution, the minds of economists and policy makers can continue to graze in familiar pastures. Technology—in this case, solar, wind, and nuclear power generators, as well as batteries, electric cars, heat pumps, and, if all else fails, solar radiation management via atmospheric aerosols—centers our thinking on subjects like financial investment and industrial production. Discussion participants don’t have to develop the ability to think systemically, nor do they need to understand the Earth system and how human systems fit into it. All they need trouble themselves with is the prospect of shifting some investments, setting tasks for engineers, and managing the resulting industrial-economic transformation so as to ensure that new jobs in green industries compensate for jobs lost in coal mines.” “The strategy of buying time with a techno-fix presumes either that we will be able to institute systemic change at some unspecified point in the future even though we can’t do it just now (a weak argument on its face), or that climate change and all of our other symptomatic crises will in fact be amenable to technological fixes. The latter thought-path is again a comfortable one for managers and investors. After all, everybody loves technology. It already does nearly everything for us. During the last century it solved a host of problems: it cured diseases, expanded food production, sped up transportation, and provided us with information and entertainment in quantities and varieties no one could previously have imagined. Why shouldn’t it be able to solve climate change and all the rest of our problems?” http://www.postcarbon.org/why-climate-change-isnt-our-biggest-environmental-problem-and-why-technology-wont-save-us/
  • The need for self-sacrifice: “ people want a vision of the future that’s cheery and that doesn’t require sacrifice. Now, they say, only a technological fix offers any hope. The essential point of this essay (and my manifesto) is simply that, even if the moral argument fails, a techno-fix won’t work either. A gargantuan investment in technology (whether next-generation nuclear power or solar radiation geo-engineering) is being billed as our last hope. But in reality it’s no hope at all.” http://www.postcarbon.org/why-climate-change-isnt-our-biggest-environmental-problem-and-why-technology-wont-save-us/
  • The good news is that systemic change is fractal in nature: it implies, indeed it requires, action at every level of society. We can start with our own individual choices and behavior; we can work within our communities. We needn’t wait for a cathartic global or national sea change. And even if our efforts cannot “save” consumerist industrial civilization, they could still succeed in planting the seeds of a regenerative human culture worthy of survival.There’s more good news: once we humans choose to restrain our numbers and our rates of consumption, technology can assist our efforts. Machines can help us monitor our progress, and there are relatively simple technologies that can help deliver needed services with less energy usage and environmental damage. Some ways of deploying technology could even help us clean up the atmosphere and restore ecosystems.But machines won’t make the key choices that will set us on a sustainable path. Systemic change driven by moral awakening: it’s not just our last hope; it’s the only real hope we’ve ever had. http://www.postcarbon.org/why-climate-change-isnt-our-biggest-environmental-problem-and-why-technology-wont-save-us/

Sam Altman - Head of Y combinator

http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/sam-altman-mission-fix-american-democracy-2017-6/

Like many of his peers in Silicon Valley, Altman believes technology is the way to a better future. But his real-world ambitions are grander than most. He wants to investigate ways to build new cities, give people money for nothing, rethink voter registration, keep politicians accountable, and get new, Altman-approved leaders elected — all while running YC, which famously birthed startups like Airbnb and Dropbox.

Much like one of his notable colleagues, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Altman is set on turning the ideal into the practical. Both believe they have solid ideas for reshaping society. Sometimes this means executing plans within the next few months. Other times it means roadmapping projects decades down the line, and relying on phrases like "The math should work out" to assuage a wary public.

…

"Let's imagine we get to a world where AI gets so good that robots can mine raw materials out of the ground, refine them, and build them into a house," he told Business Insider. (These robots, he clarified, are solar-powered.) "You can imagine a world where you own a small piece of land, you can say, 'Hey, robot. I would like a house here,' and you come back like a month later and there's a fully constructed house built for you for free."

…

"I don't think tech is the solution to all problems," he said. "And I certainly don't think startups are the solution to all problems. They're the solution to a lot, but if the tech industry doesn't think about how everybody wins and everybody benefits, then we've kind of failed."

…

"We try to make the cost of failing super low," he said. "What we're going for is a few really big world-changing hits and a lot of failures along the way. I view that just as the overhead of doing business."

SoftBank

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-02/inside-the-eccentric-unstoppable-deal-making-of-masayoshi-son

Longer term, Son will have to do a better job articulating how his deals fit together. At the company’s annual shareholders meeting in June, he closed with an awkward video the company has used for years to explain its view of technology’s future. It opens with a blond man wandering among stone ruins. “Sorrow is inherent to the human condition,” he says, staring into the camera. “Since the beginning of time, humans have sought to overcome sorrow.” [Video here: https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/news/webcast/?wcid=s7ez7167]

The clip goes on to explain how technology will connect people on opposites sides of the world and allow them to share thoughts and ideas. It closes with the man wading through a field of waist-high grass. “Together we’ll open the doors to a new century of happiness and joy,” he says. Bafflement ensued.

Even as his allies describe it, Son’s vision seems like garden-variety optimism about a technological future that has been enunciated by many industry leaders: a trillion connected devices, generating data that will be analyzed by artificial intelligence to supposedly make the world a better place.

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