The Problem with Techno-Optimism
Today there are high hopes for technological progress. Techno-optimists expect massive benefits for humankind from the invention of new technologies. Peter Diamandis is the founder of the X-prize foundation, whose purpose is to arrange competitions for breakthrough inventions. His aim is “a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy”. The Internet is a special focus for techno-optimists. According to Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen,“future connectivity promises a dazzling array of ‘quality of life’ improvements: things that make you healthier, safer and more engaged”. K. Eric Drexler’s preferred instrument of universal prosperity is nanotechnology. He envisages a future in which miniature robots produce “a radical abundance beyond the dreams of any king, a post-industrial material abundance that reaches the ends of the earth and lightens its burden.”
Some of the shininess of these forecasts depends on a mistake about the well-being of people living at different times from us. When determining how happy people were in the past or will be in a technologically enhanced future, we imaginatively project ourselves into their times. We expect that we would feel miserable if sent on a one-way time travel trip back to the 13th century and therefore suppose that that misery must have been experienced by the people who lived then. We imagine that we would be ecstatic to wake up and find ourselves surrounded by the technologies depicted in Star Trek and so conclude that people fortunate enough to live with them must experience very high subjective well-being. These imaginative exercises mislead us about the effects of technological progress on well-being by ignoring a feature of human psychology I call hedonic normalization. Differences in normalization make people today very different from people of the 13th or 23rd centuries.
Humans have flexible psychologies that enable us to flourish in environments ranging from the Arctic to the Kalahari Desert. Walruses and meerkats lack this psychological flexibility. They are unlikely to work out how to survive an exchange of habitats. Hedonic normalization permits a human raised in the high Himalayas to find that environment normal. The same psychological mechanism that hedonically normalizes humans to Arctic and desert environments normalizes us to the very different technological environments of the 1st and 21st centuries. We can predict that it will normalize us to whatever the technologies of the 23rd century may be. Differences in hedonic normalization mean that ancient Romans, 21st-century New Yorkers, and 23rd-century residents of Cairo would view cars powered by internal combustion engines very differently. What for the Romans would be a quite miraculous technology is boringly familiar to the New Yorkers, and may be repellently primitive and polluting for the Cairenes.
When we overlook hedonic normalization, we tend to significantly overstate the extent to which technological progress will boost the happiness of future people. I would be very happy to abruptly find myself on board a 23rd-century starship if such things exist in the future. But this is not how people hedonically normalized to those technologies will feel. The error of ignoring hedonic normalization is especially apparent when we think about the past. Techno-optimists point to the big differences that technological change has made to our world. Mary Beard’s description of the streets of ancient Pompeii covered in animal dung, rotting vegetables, human excrement and flies makes modern city dwellers glad to be alive now. But imagining how a time traveler from the early 21st century would feel to find herself marooned in Pompeii does not tell us how people hedonically normalized to that time felt. Doubtless the Pompeians would have preferred cleaner streets. But the filthiness of their streets did not affect them in the way that it would affect someone normalized to our comparatively refuse- and excrement-free highways and byways. To see this more clearly, consider how people from the 23rd century might feel about life in our times. The conditions of our cities are clearly not perfect – but they are not nearly as bad for us as they might seem to someone normalized to cities built with 23rd-century technologies.
New technologies can significantly boost the happiness of the members of the generation that first experiences them. However, hedonic normalization tends to erode many of these benefits. There is more at stake here than some unwarranted smugness about past lives and envy of future lives. A tendency to overvalue technological progress tends to make us reckless in its pursuit. In this era of climate change and nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the world many times over, we are acutely aware of some of the perils of technological progress. When we overestimate the propensity of progress to boost well-being, we are more likely to judge the risks of progress to be worth taking.
Our rush toward a technologically enhanced future is likely to expose us to many threats of extinction of similar or greater magnitude to those imposed by climate change or nuclear weapons.
This post originally appeared in OUPblog, the blog of Oxford University Press.
Author: Nicholas Agar
I enjoy the post and understand what is sometimes called the hedonic treadmill theory regarding acclimation to technologies. I believe there is much truth to it as well as I suspect that additional technologies will result in happiness much as added money/income/resources do, up to a point. At some point, the law of diminishing returns begins to manifest itself and each added layer has less and less perceived value. However, aside from addressing some of our current pressing problems, which I believe added technologies can do, we need to consider how technologies might alter human social interactions in ways not fully seen or appreciated, yet. That may be our greatest unknown and as Ray Kurzweil and others argue, if access to the benefits to new beneficial technologies is restricted to a privileged few, that creates its own troubles.
Chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching:
A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die.
Thanks, I liked this. The idea of hedonic normalization is interesting. Kind of reminds me of how I used to joke that if we ever did make contact with beings from other planetary systems, after the initial euphoria, it would take maybe one generation before we turned it into yet another “ordinary” and “boring” subject kids were forced to study in school. (I can just hear them walking down the hall saying things like “Dang! I have a stupid exam in Extra Terrestrial Biology on Friday!”)
I guess we could say that hedonic normalization is a “relativistic” explanation of what happens as we “progress.” We quickly get used to our technology and so it stops making us happy (like it seemed to do when it was brand new). From this point of view, we end up relatively no better off than when we started. But on top of that relativistic perspective is a more absolute perspective on so-called “progress.” Because of the way we develop new tech in modern society, it almost always ends up having a negative impact on our psychological health, our family and community relatedness, environmental health, and spiritual connectedness. So really, the net effect of progressing is that we end up regressing. We become less psychologically healthy and more alienated from everyone else and everything else. We don’t just “tread water,” remaining essentially (i.e., relatively) as hedonically normalized to our situation as a 13th century village-dweller would have been to his or hers. By a more absolute standard, we keep slipping farther and farther behind that 13th century person, at least in these essential ways.
Relative and absolute scales…cool stuff!
I send in my reply to discover that this must be the Greg-only comment section!
And not only that, but all three comments, although different, have a similar theme.
Interesting and odd!
LOL. Must be a Greg-thing!
Techno optimists are obsessed with their gadgets, most often due to their education in natural sciences, which indoctrinate them to believe that what they do is objective, neutral, non-partial, having even the character of natural “law” that can not be avoided, and must be obeyed.
But the natural laws don’t exist “out there”. They are something we ascribe to phenomena in the universe. A construct, in other words.
The history of science shows that what was science yesterday, is not science today. Science changes constantly and is conditioned, not by “law”, but by new methods and paradigms.
Scientific positivism died in the 1930s. Since then, science could only falsify, i.e. say “this is no longer the case”. The days of confirmation are gone forever. It was the naive dream of 19th engineers and scientists. First World War and then the nuclear bomb, shattered this dream.
Technicians and natural scientists m u s t learn and understand, that what they do is a humanistic discipline, and that there is no special moral that save them from the consequences of their inventions.
Even though science must be free (“pure science”), in the next room, the applied technicians work on their military projects, financing much of natural science research, and profiting from it shamelessly. And then, we must not forget, that the “necessary” natural sciences and technical research are payed by people’s tax money. People who usually have no power or say.
Instead of amassing more gadgets, we should learn the difference between our needs, which are few and easy to satisfy, and our wishes, which are endless, and can never be satisfied.
Even more fundamentally, we need to see our ignorance, greed, and aggression, which rise endlessly from the unconsciousness, look at them, make them conscious, tap their energies, and turn them into their opposite: insight/wisdom/a total view, generosity, and compassion.
Warm regards, Björn Lindgren
SWEDEN
Jerry Mander in his book, “In the Absence of the Sacred,” gives a good critique of technology from the perspective of Indigenous Peoples. In the book, he gives an engaging retrospective of the sacrifices that we have made as we have adopted various technologies. In conclusion he writes that “all technologies should be considered guilty until proven innocent.”