From American Affairs Journal, Winter 2023:
Technological Stagnation Is a ChoiceDo we live in a world of “ever-increasing change” characterized by “disruptive innovation”? Is “technology moving faster than ever before”? Are these, in fact, “unprecedented times”?
Contra the bromides of TED-talkers and Davos men, a growing chorus of contrarian scientists, scholars, and investors hold that the pace of innovation has slowed, not increased. They argue that the explosive growth and spread of digital technology has misled the public (and many policymakers) about the state of affairs in every other area of scientific progress. If we look up from the extraordinary virtual worlds depicted on our screens, we see that the future is receding before us.
But among the contrarians, there is a critical division. One camp, championed by Peter Thiel, holds that there are no physical or scientific reasons why we could not increase the pace of innovation, that technological stagnation is ultimately a social problem. The bureaucratization of science, the explosion of the regulatory apparatus, the demise of meritocracy, and any number of other social factors have slowed the pace of innovation, replacing actual technological magic with a digital simulation thereof. As Thiel famously summarized: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Call this the social theory of stagnation.
The other camp is best exemplified by the work of Vaclav Smil. Smil, a Czech-Canadian professor of environmental studies, has won acclaim for his prolific output of books on energy and society, characterized by telling sweeping stories while maintaining extraordinary attention to detail. Smil and others hold that, while the rate of innovation is slowing, this is a return to historical norms and not the result of some kind of social decadence. It was the extraordinary transformation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that was the aberration, as the scientific method unlocked the secrets of physics, chemistry, and biology in a onetime boost. Smil and others believe in the Singularity (an exponential transformation of the human species); they just believe we are already on the other side of it.
As outlined in his 2017 Energy and Civilization and in the final chapter of the book under review here, Smil draws our attention to the problem of scale in particular. As its name implies, the digital revolution was a revolution in the representation of numbers. Moore’s law relies on the ever-smaller physical means of representing numbers (since 1975, the number of transistors in an integrated circuit has doubled about every two years). In principle, a bit of information can be encoded into a single photon (in fact, in a subatomic particle). If computation is simply moving bits around, the physical limits of miniaturized computation have no analogy in other fields of human endeavor.
Contrast computation’s sustained geometrical increase in scale with advances in crop yields, energy density, transportation speeds, energy efficiency, infrastructure costs, and more. Where computational density has increased approximately 35 percent per year for the past fifty years, these other factors have improved around 1–2 percent per year. Thus, over the whole time span, they have improved by 1.65 to 2.7 times, while microprocessor performance has improved 10,000,000,000 times.
Moreover, as Smil is acutely aware, the world of macroscopic change (in contrast to microscopic digital improvements) besets us with trade-offs. Increase transportation speed and drag comes for you. Move away from energy-dense fossil fuels, and much of the carbon emissions savings are reversed as a result of building the many more solar panels, wind turbines, and hydroelectric plants required in order to power all of these electric vehicles, including manufacturing significant amounts of steel, aluminum, and other metals for which there are no reduced-carbon smelting methods. Almost everything about modern civilization is downstream from unlocking the energy density of fossil fuels. Moving toward decarbonization will demand incredible ingenuity and innovation just to tread water. Short of a radical new energy source, like fusion, growth will remain incremental at best. Call this the physical theory of stagnation.
In Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure, Smil sets out to deflate our expectations of a futuristic utopia just around the corner, by focusing on the immense difficulty of innovation and the possibility of failure. Real innovation, understood as the social transformation wrought by mastering new inventions with the ideas, processes, materials, and organizations needed to make them useful, is extremely difficult. Smil wants to persuade us that it can go awry or can stubbornly fail to arrive altogether. His biggest bugbears are hucksters like Yuval Noah Harari and Ray Kurzweil, who seem to promise an audacious future that will inevitably land in our laps.
And yet, Smil’s book admits of radically different interpretations. Smil begins from the notion that we live in a world beset by innovation hype and that a healthy dose of realism is just what the doctor ordered. But is innovation hype really the dominant tendency today? What is the meaning of the stories Smil recounts if you presume instead that a lack of concern for innovation and growth characterizes our society? Smil’s book was highly persuasive for me, though not in the way he might expect; I began sympathizing with his position and finished the book vehemently rejecting it.
Smil’s distinctive approach is a phenomenology of innovation: put aside the blustery concepts and paradigms, and rush, like philosopher Edmund Husserl, “to the things themselves.” Smil wants us to understand that a technology as foundational as the diesel engine or nuclear fission reactor does not enter into the world all at once: it is the product of thousands of incremental improvements, path dependencies, and false starts. While one never wants to go toe-to-toe with Smil on the facts—the intellectual equivalent of facing George Foreman’s right hook—one can reexamine Smil’s careful narratives and find that they tell the story, not of failed innovation and of hype, but of human ingenuity and failure of imagination....
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