Wednesday, February 21, 2024
The mother of necessity
"Reckless and random the cars race and roar and hunt us to death like bloodhounds."
From The Waves by Virginia Woolf
If you open any book by scientist and historian Jared Diamond to any page, you will find something fascinating, like this from page 291 of Guns, Germs and Steel:
"In 1905, motor vehicles were still expensive, unreliable toys for the rich. Pubic contentment with horses and railroads remained high until World War I, when the military concluded that it really did need trucks. Intensive postwar lobbying by truck manufacturers and armies finally convinced the public of its own needs and enabled trucks to begin to supplant horse-drawn wagons in industrialized countries. Even in the largest American cities, the changeover took 50 years."
This passage should be a revelation to anyone born after World War II. No one alive today remembers a time when the public did not believe itself attracted to an unsustainable culture of cars and trucks bringing constant noise, pollution, speed for its own sake, vast injury and death. We don't remember this skepticism about internal-combustion based personal vehicles because the memory has been aggressively erased by various forms of propaganda, such as advertising and movies.
In World War II, Diamond further discusses, the US spent $20 billion developing an atomic bomb, propelled by a perceived necessity of beating Hitler to it (later it was clear that the NAZI regime had little chance of developing the bomb before its defeat).
Diamond calls these modern practices a reversal of the idea that "necessity is the mother of invention;" rather they show that "invention can be the mother of necessity."
Diamond's examples highlight the role that war plays in creating necessity, something we should ponder now as rumblings of war increase. How might coming conflagrations enable introduction of new technologies? At first glance it does not appear that interested parties need war to create necessity for their products. The general public is already enamored with computers, the Internet, cell phones, social media, AI and robots- already believing that we need these things. But most people do not believe that they need to be displaced by machines from anything you could call "employment." AI, even in its early stages, appears potentially able to perform any human job. Many people would prefer to keep their jobs, using the income to purchase AI's products. War could overrule that preference. For instance, if war creates a shortage of doctors, people who are averse to a robotic doctor will go to one if that is the only option. A generation later no one will remember a need for human doctors. It's hard to think of a profession that is not susceptible to such "automation," as we used to call it.
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As the perceived necessity of AI combines with the perceived necessity of genetic engineering, we face an atom bomb of evolution that will compress millions of years of change into one or two generations. Current humanity is about to become as distant a memory as pre-agricultural humanity, but you wouldn't know it from public commentary. For instance, no element of our disruptive future was discussed or even indirectly referenced in the recent presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, after which all the commentary has been about the pros and cons of gerontocracy [Update, 7/29/24: The avoidance of discussion of our actual future continues after Biden's replacement by Kamala Harris]. If we want to affect our fates we will need updated definitions of the "issues" from new political forces. Otherwise all current society, from Boomers to Gen Alpha, may find it necessary to apply for unemployment.
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