FQ.07.33: Favorite Quote for This Week

We won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress [at today’s rate of progress], or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.
—Ray Kurzweil

Comments

[Curt Doolittle,]

Ray is a wonderful man, but I will offer another option that is not so savory, or optimistic:

After the Sea People attacked the early greeks, writing was lost for five hundred years. After the fall of the Roman Empire, every daughter knew less than every mother, every son, less than every father, for a thousand years, and eastern mysticism spread across all of europe like an intellectual plague. China actively supressed the advancement of konwledge, and peopled itself into constant poverty.

Civilization does not progress linearly, and often receeds. The nineteenth century might be seen as Europe's (germanic europe's) attempt to throw off mysticism, in what we now call the romantic period, but that process failed. The new religion is combination of over reliance on what we call scientific konwledge, (which turns out to be the fastest expiring knowledge we've found) and statism, and the worship of the state, and it's apparent wisdom. These are not positive indicators.

What if, instead of twenty-thousand years of progress, we instead, have twenty years of progress, or instead of that, we have a thousand years of regression?

While it appears that much of the world is embracing that thing we call capitalism (resource management for the satisfaction of human wants - and the creation of consumption via consumers - via the computational network of the pricing system, contracts, money, accounting, and property rights) if one instead looks at the spread of ideologies and demographically the spread of the populations that hold them, it looks like there is just as much chance that the forces of reason, science and liberal democracy will be out bred by the minions of ignorance and superstition. It is unreliable to extrapolate current data into the future, especially in the less advanced countries. The anglo method of capitalism relies on other important factors including: risk taking technical innovation, and what we call objective truth, both of which are necessary elemtents of the social order for knowledge creation.

Since knowledge creation is what comes before production, these other cultures must sufficiently adopt these technologies as well.

The same is true for cultures that will take risks. Russia for example has no laws that will protect small business or individuals, which is the source of most innovation that challenges "innovators dilemma's", and destroys existing bureaucracies. (Actually they have laws, just a "human problem" in the courts.)

This process of innovation is highly risky. It requires experimental capital, and a population predisposed to risk taking, especially among it's most high potential young people. So, while capital is moving away from innnovative cultures, these other cultures are commoditizing past knowledge and using it to implementing consumerism. They are not innovating though. Innovation is the first step to production. And for some of them, innovation is an alien concept.

The domino effect of starving innovative areas, and feeding developing areas is a temporary process, which eventually starves everyone. rThat is unless you claim that innovation is equally spread across humanity, when, for the past five thousand years, it is pretty clear that it is not.

These are just a few scenarios: starving innovative people (sufficently) to stall increases in production, or, demographic impediments to the economic or idiological system, or outright warfare over either. In any case the fantasy world of star trek and it's Euro-centrism will certainly not be what we end up with. And there is no promise that it will be so benevolent. There is just as likely a chance we will live in a worldwide afghanistan with a loss of a quarter of the world's population. (Of course, I am not quite this pessimistic.)

Kurzweil is an optimist, but one should be cautious of predicting the future. No one has been particularly good at it. And we have a record of being terrible at it for more than a few days at a time. And if Quigley and Spengler are even close to accurate, it is more likely to be a pessimistic future than a postiive one. In fact, if civilization accellerates faster then these men predicted, and as Kurzweil indicates, western civilization and rationalism's fall will not happen in 2500, but before 2100. How is that for accelerating evolution of a different kind?

The tendendy for humans to be "net builders" as the S/O states, is only true if you look at a long enough time frame.

Cheers

[Steve]

Very thoughtful post. Any recommendations as to the best way for us to proceed?

I remain optimistic that at least a few cultural islands friendly to innovators (the USA being one of several) will succeed -- and that the cultures and ideologies currently thriving on ignorance and suppression will recede into impotence and insignificance. But if you're right that Kurzweil's optimism (and mine) is naively wishful thinking, then you might be correct that we should look forward to a thousand or more years of dark ages. (I read someone's speculation a while back that if the library of Alexandria had not been destroyed, humankind would have reached the moon a thousand years earlier than 1969.)

[Curt Doolittle,]

RE: Library at Alexandria.
Technological innovation is one thing, social innovation is another. While we have advanced technology dramatically in the past thousand years, we only in the 1880's caught up to where Rome and Greece had been philosophically, and we seem to have lost that battle as well. I am fairly sure that the romatic vison of europe would have to have survived and the first world war not come to pass, in ordre for these social processes to have evolved. As such, very little, even in economics, seems to have been innovative since that time period. Perhaps Hayek extends this time period a bit into the early twentieth century. So, we have had little advancement in social knwledge since the fall of the great european intellectual centers. What we have had is transfer of economic power, political power, and the arts, into the hands of common people. The first of which is a good thing, but the latter two not necessarily so.(as awful as that sounds, it looks as if this power transfer is a precursor to the fall of all great civilizations). As for technical innovation, such things are far more complex than we think, and most involve many other related technologies. As such, they are largely a function of the population, the number of people in the population who have education (in the classical sense), the heroic vision (something we take for granted), conentration of capital in some for that can fund these people (competision for status must at least exist, such as in Florence). So, many factors must coexist for technical innovation, and some of them are social, some religio-philosophical, and some economic. To create a Mozart takes at least two generations of people trying to BE a Mozart, so that enough top thinkers pursue that avenue. The same is true for other fields. you cannot educate an average man to these heights. You must evolve him, and many people must fail in order to produce him.

RE: Dark Ages
I do not really see another dark ages in the same way as we have had them before, because we simply cannot return to the fields and self-sustain these populations any longer. Somewhere around five billion people would have to die. So, I think it is either a period of stagnation for two to four generations, or something more catastrophic as an outcome of war.

RE: On How To Proceed

I think we must solve the problem of what to do for economic computation and the pricing system, when most of the planet lives in Cities. I have been working on this for about a year and am not sure about the outcome. As far as I can tell it leads to totalitarianism. But I need to spend more time on the problem.

I am off to spend a little more time walking around Russia to see how things are progressing here.

Curt

[Gene Hoffman]

Curt,

Though your tale of caution is always wise, you may be overlooking one major difference in the trends. Along with the powerful technological and institutional changes that you concur with, there has been a tremendous decentralization of that progress due to the technology in question.

That decentralization was patently obvious in Eastern Europe during the fall of the Iron Curtain. Fax machines created poor versions of the networks that were needed to allow the intellectual virus of liberty room to spread its necessary information.

That trend is accelerating. The internet is often referred to monolithically, but that ignores its practical reality. It's just an addressing scheme and some well defined protocols. As much as it was jokingly designed to survive a nuclear attack, it may actually end up creating the resilience of human community neccessary to survive an attack from anti-modernity.

Tools, distributed far and wide in at least a few key civilizations create the neccessary steps to keep progress moving. Lawyers, guns, money, and a diversified IP network go a long way to underpinning progress in western civilization.

The Flynn Effect combined with the inherent decentralization of technology may mean that we have passed through that fuzzy barrier between gradual change of degree that causes a marked change in initial circumstances.

-Gene

[Aaron]

The historical examples of regression are interesting, but consider that smaller populations, and even smaller elite populations made those events possible.

There was only one library of Alexandria. How many equivalents of the Library of Congress exist today?

Even wars and disease in modern times might not even slow us down, but speed us up as more resources are put into research in those areas during times of crisis.

"If there were no problems, no one would have any jobs," as one of my customers says.

I think a more potential cause of stagnation would be mass satisfaction at some level - no work needed to live - everyone playing in fantasy worlds.

[James Dhimmi]

"...it looks like there is just as much chance that the forces of reason, science and liberal democracy will be out bred by the minions of ignorance and superstition."

Read "America Alone" by Mark Steyn. It is the most humorous, and most frightening book I have read all year. It is a blast to read, but a nightmare to contemplate.

If you find Curt's arguments compelling, then you will love this book, because Steyn uses statistics and facts to back up his thesis that Europe is already heading for a new Dark Age which might arrive in less than 60 years! Think about your garnddaughter Steve ;)