The Unevenness of Technological Development, and the Vision of RethinkX

Amid the steady analytical output from the RethinkX think tank the principal document tying the implications of their studies of energy, transport, cellular agriculture and other technologies remains their Rethinking Humanity report of September 2020, which argued that order-of-magnitude price drops in the cost and natural resource inputs required to produce the goods of five "foundational sectors" in economic life--food, energy, transport, materials and information--will, with virtually mathematical certainty, mean a crisis in human existence as radical as the transition from prehistoric to civilized times, which the authors predict happening in the next two decades. As the cliché had it the crisis spelled not only the possibility of bitter conflict and great danger, but also opportunity, with the optimistic outcome the authors of the study envisioned the end of civilization’s unequal and brutal "Age of Extraction" with its hierarchies and exploitation, and the beginning of an "Age of Freedom."

There is, of course, no need to rehash the argument here. Apart from the fact that anyone who would like can download a copy of the sophisticated but highly readable document free of charge from the authors’ own web site I have already got in my two cents on the matter. I only raise all this as background to my mention here of the particular dimension of the issue I find myself thinking about now, namely the profoundly different rates of change across those five sectors. After all, there is no question but that the pace of technological change, the drop in costs, in information, has far, far outpaced any such trend in the other areas. Indeed, even as the price of producing, copying, storing, processing and transmitting information has fallen at mind-boggling rates over recent decades the prices of all the rest have remained stubbornly high, as we were painfully reminded during the food-and-fuel crisis of ‘06-’08, and are reminded yet again during what may be the even sharper inflationary shock we are all now living through.

The fact can seem a cruel irony. After all, while there is no questioning the great practical amenities the digital age has provided, many of which benefit those who have been particularly disadvantaged in various ways (cellular telephony, for example, may well have sped the development of modern communications infrastructures in developing nations), it would seem that from the standpoint of the world’s ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed billions, and even the budgets of all but the most affluent "First Worlders," there is far more desperate need of cheap food, materials, energy and transport than of those amenities. It may also seem that the revolutionizing of information so far ahead of the others, with society so little changed, has meant that even the potentials of the revolutionizing of merely the informational sector are far from being as fully realized as they might have been. Consider, for example, how once upon a time it was hoped that Internet access might be a public good, but instead one must pay vast sums to service providers, and get in return heavily surveilled, algorithm-fiddled, ad-choked Internet where we can’t avoid running into paywall after paywall after paywall. Consider how, as the pandemic recently showed, telecommuting had made so little advance after a generation of everyday Internet usage.

Still, as anyone familiar with the history knows the progress of technology has never been even (thus in the nineteenth century did we have newfangled steam locomotives delivering goods to train stations to be picked up by drivers of the same sort of horse-drawn carts people had been using for millennia), and alas, never revolved around the needs of those who have least, and most need their lot ameliorated. More significantly, the developments in the other four sectors they anticipate would seem to depend on the gains in information technology discussed here, from the vision of cheaper transport summed up in Transportation-as-a-Service (reliant on advances in artificial intelligence), to the prospect of cheaper production and fabrication of materials (which utilizes computerized 3-D printing). The result is that the successes in information technology may well prove to have been a prerequisite for what follows, reminding me of something claimed by a famed futurologist whose ideas I have been considering for decades--Ray Kurzweil. As he acknowledged the changes in technology were overwhelmingly coming in the area of computers, but computers will change everything. Should that prove true RethinkX may turn out to have done an even better job than Kurzweil of explaining how such a thing came to pass.