If you only look at the technologies themselves, in isolation, the parallels are there, including the tendency to see computer code as space-age DNA, and to sit back and be awed as some brave new world unfolds. But what really distinguishes human techology from biological evolution, surely, is that it all happens under conscious, human control – which implies some important differences.
Technologies, unlike living organisms, can inherit acquired traits, and features of unrelated technologies can, as it were, ‘jump species’, as when turbine technology migrated from power stations into jet engines, and punched-card technology for storing information spread from the textile industry (the Jacquard loom) into the music industry (the pianola) and then to computing. The eclectic human agency responsible for this cross-fertilization is well demonstrated by the Victorian computer pioneer Charles Babbage, who was continually investigating the arcane processes developed in different industries – and made the connection with the Jacquard loom at an exhibition in 1842, as did his future collaborator, Ada Lovelace.9
This is even more the case where electronics and computers are concerned – a point that Brian Arthur makes: ‘Digitization allows functionalities to be combined even if they come from different domains, because once they enter the digital domain they become objects of the same type – data strings – that can therefore be acted upon in the same way’.10 Digitization is, moreover, just one of the possible techniques for doing this, as will be explained later. The underlying and really powerful principle is that phenomena from utterly different domains of experience may share a deeper, abstract reality that can now be worked with as if it were a physical thing in itself.
Most importantly of all, technological evolution need never have dead ends – and this is where we come slap-bang up against the contradiction that is today’s technological environment, in which promising technologies can be ditched, apparently never to return, within months of their first appearance.
TECHNOLOGY SHOULD HAVE NO DEAD ENDS
In principle – and in practice for most of the millennia that our technological species has existed – ideas that have ‘had their day’ are not dead and buried for ever. Human culture normally sees to that. Technological improvements can and should be permanent gains – inventions should stay invented. They may lurk in human culture for decades or even centuries, and be resurrected to become the bases of yet more discoveries, so that technology becomes richer, more complex and more efficient.
In the past, discoveries have tended overwhelmingly to become general property, rapidly, via exactly the same irrepressible social process whereby songs and jokes become general property. The genie does not always go back into the bottle and can turn up anywhere – precipitating further discoveries, always making more and yet more efficient use of natural phenomena, and revealing more about those phenomena, which yet more technologies can then use.
Biological evolution proceeds blindly, as it must, over vast epochs via small changes and sudden catastrophes. It contains prodigious numbers of dead ends: species that die out for ever, taking all their hard-won adaptations with them. Living species cannot borrow from each other: mammals could not adopt the excellent eyes developed (in the octopus) by molluscs; we had to develop our own eyes from scratch; so did the insects. Human technologies can and do borrow freely from each other, and in principle have no dead ends.
Unlike biological species, an abandoned technology can lie dormant for centuries and be resuscitated rapidly when conditions are right. With living things, there is no going back; the fossilized remains of extinct species, like ichthyosaurs and pterodactyls, can’t be resuscitated when the climate is favorable again. Darwinian evolution must plough forward, the only direction available to it, and create completely new creatures (dolphins, birds) based on the currently available stock of life forms (mammals, reptiles). But with technology we can always go back if we want to. For once, the arrow of time is under our control. Or should be.
Comparing Darwinian and technological evolution reveals an anomaly in the kind of innovation we see around us in the present computer age: here, technologies apparently can effectively disappear from the common pool, the way dinosaurs and other extinct species have done. Fairly large technologies can disappear abruptly, as soon as a feeling spreads among those who control their manufacture that the market for them might soon disappear, or even might become less attractive.
Or a technology may deliberately be kept out of the common pool, by someone who patents it in order to suppress it. Yesterday’s ideas may survive in documents, and for a while in human knowledge and skill, but they soon become very difficult to revive. ‘The show moves on.’ Premises and equipment are sold, staff are laid off and all the knowledge they had is dispersed; investors pull out and put their cash elsewhere; and products that once used the technology either die with it, or are laboriously redesigned to use alternatives. These extinctions help to create the determinist illusion that technology follows a single ‘best’ path into the future but, when you look at what caused these extinctions, fitness for purpose seldom has much to do with it.
No technology ought ever to die out in the way living organisms have done. It seems perverse to find Darwinian discipline not merely reasserted in a brand-new domain that should in principle be free of it, but in a turbo-charged form, unmitigated by the generous time-scales of Darwinian evolution. This market-Darwinism comes at us full pelt within ultra-compressed, brief, human time-frames. Where there should be endless choice, there is instead a march of progress that seems to have the same deterministic power as an avalanche.
But this is a fake avalanche. Every particle of it is guided by human decisions to go or not to go with the flow. These are avalanches that can be ‘talked back up hill’ – in theory and sometimes even in practice. Even in the absence of such an apparent miracle, deviation always remains an option, and is exercised constantly by the builders of technology. Indeed the market would have very little technological progress to play with if technologists did not continually evade its discipline, cross boundaries, and revisit technologies long ago pronounced dead. This becomes more and more self-evident, the more our technologies advance.
ARE SOCIETIES TECHNOLOGIES?
Brian Arthur begins to speculate on the possible range of things that might be called ‘technology’. He observes that science and technology are normally paired together, with science generally assumed to be technology’s precursor, or its respectable older brother. Yet he points out that human technology evolved to a very high level for centuries and even millennia before science existed, as we now understand it. And then he asks, is modern science a technology? It is a technique that, once discovered, has evolved in much the same way as specific technologies have done.
Taking this argument further, human nature is part of nature; we have various ways of exploiting it to particular purposes and, as we learn more about how people function, those ways become more and more refined.
Exploiters of humanity are avid students of human nature: they are eagle-eyed at spotting ways of coercing people to do things they do not wish to do and quick to adopt the latest research for purposes of persuasion. They know that human nature is what we make it. They make it fearful and obedient. We, however, know that human nature can be better than this. We know that human nature can take almost any form – but we also know, roughly at least, what kind of human nature we want. Should we not devise societies that will help us to be the kinds of people we aspire to be?
A key part of any Utopian project should be to discuss widely and think deeply about the human natures we want to have and the ones we do not want to have, and to devise the kinds of social arrangements that will support and reward those characteristics.
HUMANITY BEGAN WITH TECHNOLOGY
Economic
