Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Techno-Utopianism Can’t Deliver Techno-Utopia

Aliens playing poker.

 

In the US, people tend to either have either a Utopian or an apocalyptic outlook, with little in between.

I prefer to stay away from stupid pronouncements that the ‘truth is somewhere in the middle,’ but in this case, we do have to go between two positions which are absurd to make intelligent statements about the future of technology.

Technological advance is not an inevitable, magic process which is predictable via chart

 

If you’ve worked at all in any field involving the development of a new technology, you know that it’s an incredible amount of work to get anything functioning in a way that’s actually useful to customers when they’re capable of supporting the improved way of doing things. Sustainable technological advance is much less about developing a great invention and more about developing a great invention at the time during which all the sub-components can be assembled in a timely  and efficient fashion.

The contemporary progressive mentality towards technological advancement tends to be that it’s an inevitable process: it’s this idea that no matter how terrible the management of the government is, geniuses in lab coats will develop new technology, often with government money, regardless of whatever happens in the rest of society.

Nassim Taleb dismantled this view in Antifragile, but although the book has been widely read, its insights have not been broadly shared, in part because our written media has stopped being book driven, and is now more driven by television. Additionally, because Taleb took a nuanced view towards Silicon Valley culture, and because Silicon Valley workers rarely read anything that’s not published by O’Reilly or some other technical manual publisher, its criticisms were not widely discussed.

It took hundreds of years before many of the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci became even feasible at the prototype level. The reason for this is just that the materials involved were all too expensive or unavailable, or otherwise unfeasible due to better practical alternatives being available at the time. This is also the case for countless inventions today, many of which are entirely reliant on improved conditions outside the control of the team developing the new technology. . Leonardo died in 1519, but the tank only became widely used during World War I.

You can teach a robot to dance, but that doesn’t make it useful

 

You can make a dancing, agile robot, but until it has a miniature battery which is also affordable, it’s merely an expensive branding stunt, no different from an Animatronic figure at the Epcot Center. The big cord attached the dancing machine is what makes for the problem: the limiting factor is the battery, much more than the flexibility of the robo-legs.

There is this popular notion that any contemporary problems that we face, like unbearable long-term government obligations, can be overcome by technological advance. The trouble is that technological advance only becomes useful at the applied level when social conditions can support it. There are millions of prototypes that would represent a meaningful advance over current technologies. Many of those are not possible to implement until the world as a whole is wealthy enough to support it.

Part of the reason for the gun-shy attitude towards criticizing the government is that many of the investors who focus on technological innovation are reliant on deploying government pension money into their funds. It’s politically difficult for an investor to simultaneously put to work the savings of government workers and to decry the innovation-squashing policies supported by the same workers who are paying his management fees. Further, the government can and does retaliate against companies that don’t tow the Progressive line.

You can’t create durable technological advance if you’re serving a broader society of decreasing overall quality. The quality of the society is what makes technological advance feasible, more so than the genius, who will often come up with useful designs hundreds of years before his time. The genius is critical, but his ideas are mostly inapplicable without the accumulation of social capital.

Technology is feasible when you have a large proportion of the people in a civilization working towards highly productive purposes. It isn’t feasible when most of the people in the civilization are moochers. Innovation stops being sustainable when the feedstock, which is a hard-working population of law-abiding people, begins to diminish.

Although do-gooders like Bill Gates hope that Africans and low-caste southeast Asians will fill the gap posed by diminishing Northeast Asians and Whites, history and biology suggest that this is a vain effort.

The ‘inevitable’ mindset leads people who would otherwise be taking a leading position to lean back as it regards to critical issues, because they just assume that a future invention will deliver them from their duties. They use the inevitability excuse as a reason to disengage from civic life, or instead to incompetently flail at the disconnected strings of democratic maneuvering, which is much worse.

Doomers have the wrong attitude

 

On the other side of the spectrum, you have people who believe that technology has run its course, and that there are no possible future inventions, and that we should all accept diminished expectations in light of this realization.

This is a defeatist mindset, even if it’s been a sensible mindset to hold for most of history. Part of why the Western world and the areas that have copied it have done so well in material terms relative to the historical standard of the hunter-gatherer is that it has rejected that mindset. Instead, we take the position that mankind can advance itself as far as it can go, and that the human mind is capable of breaking through many (but not an infinite number of) barriers placed by the natural world.

If the doomers are correct, it’s because everyone else has failed. But success is not possible if you don’t shuck the mentality that people who hold the mentality that civilization is inevitably doomed to collapse hold. To avoid collapse, you have to have a somewhat unrealistic, perhaps insane, attitude towards the feasibility of technological progress.

The two delusional outlooks feed into one another to create a dilemma that isn’t easily resolved. Both of them tend to sap motivation from people who might otherwise be able to work towards stop-gap solutions: the utopian will tell himself that the problems will solve themselves, and the doomer tells himself that the problems can’t be solved, so despair is a better choice.

To generate technological progress, civilization needs to be capable of supporting the the conditions that make it possible. No technological advance that’s implementable in a foreseeable time frame can replace the social preconditions for civilization.

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The Liberal Arts Are Too Important To Cede to Idiots

The United States is traditionally a practical place, being an overgrown British colony and dumping ground for European cast-offs of varying quality level. However, before the full onset of public education, the country was known for being unusually literate. The America of 1776 read at a higher level than the America of the early 21st century.

The post-colonial era up until public education annihilated our intellectual standards was one of surprising vigor in the liberal arts.

Even through the 20th century, the question of who would write the next ‘Great American Novel’ was a source of constant speculation. Although true reactionaries could quibble with the real quality of American letters on an absolute scale, for our purposes, the decline is what’s more important.

Most contemporary debate about the liberal arts is both insipid and toxic. This is true both on what passes for the right and the left.

The right tends to be of one of two schools:

  1. The liberal arts are for stupid women and fags. We should not teach them anymore. Instead, we should train students in science and technology, so that they can get good jobs and pay taxes.
  2. The liberal arts are these important great books which we must study as if they were museum artifacts, so that we can look cool in our tweed jackets and pretend like Communists don’t already run America.

On the left, it’s actually pretty similar:

  1. The liberal arts are taking valuable government dollars away from how they really should be spent: training more engineers so that we can pay lower wages to our employees and keep more of the profits for ourselves. Work is dreary and it’s better to pay someone else to do it for you with freshly printed money.
  2. The liberal arts are critical to fighting cishetero patriarchal homophobic oppression. Without teaching the liberal arts in our public universities, no one would read the great works written by trans-species authors of color.

My formulation of why the liberal arts are important is going to more crass and utilitarian than I’d otherwise prefer to frame it. I’m going to frame it like this because if I’m too delicate about it, I’m concerned that the message won’t be understood by various thickheaded conservatives.

The arts matter because they unify the culture

Culture tends to be what animates people, what keeps them from wanting to put a bullet in their own heads. It’s what they use to form important relationships with one another. Shared aesthetic sensibility is most of what draws one person to another, and what draws small clusters of people to larger groups.

Without people cooperating with one another, there’s conflict, anomie, unhappiness, and a lack of vigorous, happy cooperation.

Why do so many people want to kill themselves nowadays? Why are they having trouble remaining motivated? Why can’t they maintain happy relationships with one another? Why are they beset with vices and deficient in virtue?

It’s probably because the left has obliterated what was once a rich, animating cultural tradition which the American people took close to their hearts.

There is the sort of propaganda-poster unity common to socialist countries, and then there’s the unifying cultures indigenous to various European countries from pre-modern times. One is a unity that only exists on paper: in reality, everyone under Communism is out to fuck everyone else over. In a real culture, it’s a unity of attitudes, of life sensibilities, of morals, of stories, of vocal tone, and other intangible factors that prevent people within the country from behaving like vicious Communists eager to betray their neighbors.

People who share a common cultural framework are more apt to cooperate within their own groups. Preventing that common framework from forming, or forcing a dysfunctional framework upon the whole society, damages the ability of people within that country to cooperate with their fellows.

The study of the liberal arts should be an elite pursuit

When the highest standards of liberal education are not held by the political and social elite, their inferiors deteriorate rapidly, with no guiding stars to look up towards. Even a Napoleon is more respectable than a Snooki.

The left has denigrated the European cultural tradition, and has ceded it to idiots and junk-merchants. To care about culture is either to be a Social Justice Stormtrooper, or a hopelessly reprobate reactionary, out of touch with what’s important today.

Real elite people of Tomorrow’s Glorious Technocratic Future focus on their spreadsheets —

What crap is this? These idiotic proclamations are why the country has so often tended to veer towards inane, backwards-looking non-strategies which could have never succeeded. Americans are routinely bamboozled by people bearing spreadsheets with no sense of human life beyond that which can be modeled in Excel.

Part of this problem is baked into the American political design: if we’re all democratically equal, what sort of antisocial maniac says that the liberal arts shouldn’t be made democratically accessible? Isn’t this part of the whole centuries-long conflict between the animating philosophies behind Protestantism and Catholicism, bound up with politics, technology, and various local differences? Should the Word be equally accessible to everyone, or only through the interpretation of a hierarchical elite?

Well, yeah.

This is one of the reasons why there has been no meaningful resolution to the debate on this issue. The main premises are not being debated in an open way, because what passes for left and right share the most important premise in that education ought to have egalitarian aims, rather than aims that strengthen social hierarchy.

Because the aim of the liberal arts is to feed into the care and growth of a culture that strengthens a glorious civilization, the de-civilizing impulses glorified in just about every liberal arts department that matters in the US runs against their own proper aims. When conservatives think of the liberal arts, they tend to think of all the Communist petit-professeurs who tyrannize their students with their postmodern gibberish.

There can be no reconstruction of that hierarchy until conservatives realize that promoting any form of egalitarianism runs counter to their more important goals of living within a civilization that shares their values. The ‘everyone is equal’ value annihilates all other values in time.

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That Farting Sound Of Technological Stagnation

Via Hacker News today, here’s a post from a former graphics developer at Valve claims that the vaunted SteamOS, a Linux-based gaming OS intended to supplant Windows and compete head-on with consoles, is going to be vaporware.

Hey, this is just a thought, but maybe Valve developers could stop locally optimizing for their bonuses by endlessly tweaking and debugging various half-broken dysfunctional codebases and instead do more to educate developers on how to do this sort of work correctly.

The entire Intel driver situation remains in a ridiculous state. I know Intel means well and all but really, they can do better. (Are they afraid of pissing off MS? Or is this just big corp dysfunctionalism?) Valve is still paying LunarG to find and fix silly perf. bugs in Intel’s slow open source driver:

Major Performance Improvement Discovered For Intel’s GPU Linux Driver

Surely this can’t be a sustainable way of developing a working driver?

Anyhow, onto SteamOS/Steambox. Here’s a surprisingly insightful comment I found on Slashdot. I don’t agree that SteamOS is done just yet, but you’ve got to wonder what is really going on. (So where are all those shiny Steam machines they showed earlier this year anyway? Does all this just go into the Valve memory hole now?)

This post is, alone, not an indicator of anything. But it is part of a pattern of American technology companies promising substantial (or just incremental) innovations, and then failing to deliver them on anything resembling a sane time table.

Let’s go through a list of ‘next big things’ that were eventually dropped or put on an indefinitely delayed time table:

  • Google Glass, quashed by prog concern-trolling
  • Self-driving Google Car
  • The Facebook App Ecosystem (died when Zynga choked to death)
    • Facebook was supposed to be the ‘identity layer’ for the internet…
    • …but they’ve had so many problems establishing user identities that they’re just becoming an added layer on top of the government’s existing ‘identity layer.’
  • Real time restaurant demand management software (Groupon Now flopped at launch, as did the company on IPO)
  • Personal cloud storage as a driver of tech IPOs (Box.net and Dropbox have delayed IPO indefinitely; all major tech companies have released clone products that are priced competitively)
  • Google was going to attempt to de-anonymize the web by favoring verified authors in search results, even touting it in the CEO’s book…
    • …but then quietly cancelled the program a couple years later with little explanation.
  • Moore’s Law has not kept up
  • ‘Crowd-funding’ has been marginal and has now earned a bad reputation for enabling fraud and incompetent producers.
  • 3D printing wildly over-hyped relative to its actual utility in the moment
    • Requires more technical know-how to produce quality prints than advertised
    • Insofar as it requires technical ability to use competently, it doesn’t meet the requirements of its florid sales pitch
  • ‘Cloud computing’ has become an increasingly toxic buzzword thanks to the activities of the NSA and other high profile security breaches.

And of course, there’s more.

The problem that Americans have is that they believe that they can innovate and compete globally in the 21st century while relying on theories of economics and politics which are frozen in the 1930s. They just think that they can keep motoring on without making any fundamental revisions or checking some old assumptions made in the FDR era.

Without innovation in the capital structure of society, conditions become too chaotic to effectively innovate in technology. Zero interest rates make it attractive to invest in lengthening company capital structures, but it makes it impossible for those structures to calibrate effectively to the real conditions of society.

What that means is that it becomes affordable for companies to invest in Quests For The Holy Grail, but it becomes impossible to actually find the holy grail. Launching new quests is cheap, actually following through is not possible due to an inability to find accurate price information.

Progressives are mostly comfortable with ‘disruptive innovation’ as long as people remain in FDR’s concentration camp of glorious happy progress. Once people start to chew at the barbed wire, the opinion-making class becomes apoplectic, demanding that it stop immediately. Writers even go berserk when people develop a dispatch service for taxi cabs that uses smart phones — a marginal change if there ever was one.

The trouble that the opinion-making class is in is that they are focused on what’s going on within the barbed wire, and ignoring most of what’s happening outside of it.

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