A lot of things keep me up at night – everything from the trivial (“did I remember to brush my teeth?”) to the to the profound (“does it matter?” ). But recently, I’ve been plagued more than usual in the wee small hours by the challenge of developing sustainable and resilient technologies.
Blame it on reading about too many fictional futures where post-apocalyptic dystopias dominate, but I do worry about how to ensure a secure future that depends on highly complex and specialized technologies.
Here’s my problem: Technologies – or rather, the understanding and skills to use specific technologies – can just as easily be lost as gained. Just because we as a global society can do something clever now, doesn’t mean that people 10, 20, 50 years down the line will still be able to do it. Securing and maintaining technological advances requires effort – take our eyes off the ball, and the technology innovation-equivalent of entropy begins to eat away at progress. And the more dependent we become on complex technologies, the more effort it seems we need to expend to support this dependency.
Which all makes me wonder: Are we are destined to hit a point where our global intellectual capacity is so taken up with maintaining the technological status quo, that we will loose the capacity for further technological innovation? Or even worse; are we heading for a technology innovation impasse ends up degenerating into an uncertain and unenlightened future?
I have to say, I’m not an optimist here – that is, unless we learn how to build effective technology ratchets.
A mechanical ratchet, as everyone knows, is a device that allows movement in one direction only. By comparison, a technology ratchet can be considered as something that allows technology development to move forward, but prevents or inhibits it from moving backward. The idea is to find ways to hold onto ground gained through technology innovation, without having to constantly expend huge amounts of effort in doing so.
This is a significant challenge. Up until the point that we started using our heads and creating our own destiny, the progress of humans – and our evolutionary precursors – was underpinned by a rather robust biological ratchet: evolution. Evolution is a well-honed ratchet mechanisms that ensures the successes of one generation are passed on to the next though random mutation and natural selection. In effect, progress is hard-wired into an organism’s genetic code, meaning that each subsequent generation is spared the hassle of learning the rules of survival from scratch. But when we humans started to think for ourselves, we left this biological ratchet behind, leaving us dependent on “soft-wired” technologies that each new generation needs to be taught.
Fortunately, we’ve managed to develop some technology ratchets that have made the process of transferring knowledge from one generation to the next a little easier. Skills like making fire, using wheels and growing crops have propagated successfully from generation to generation for thousands of years, so we must be doing something right. But how effective are these ratchets, and are they up to the task of sustaining technology innovation in the 21st century? The history of technology development has been “lumpy” to say the least – as civilizations have come and gone, technological ground has been lost as well as gained – suggesting that the technology ratchets of the past might be a little creaky, to say the least.
Living in what is probably the most technologically advanced and technology-dependent age of humanity to date, I’m not sure we can rely fully on old and worn technology ratchets – if we are to prevent a precarious technology-dependent society collapsing like a pack of cards at the slightest provocation, we need to proactively develop effective technology ratchets that underpin sustainable and resilient progress.
So what sort of technology ratchets should we be building? Here are four ideas for starters:
Open-access knowledge-repositories. These used to be called libraries! Whether stored on paper, digitally, or within cultural and social memories, widespread access to resilient and durable knowledge-bases is an important technology ratchet. Where knowledge is privileged, easily corrupted, or temporal, it becomes increasingly hard to ensure its endurance across generations. Ironically, while we now have access to more information than ever before, the resilience and accessibility of the “knowledge” associated within this information is by no means certain.
Skills transfer mechanisms. I was tempted to say “education” here, but what most people consider as education is part of a broader technology ratchet that ensures the skills of one generation are passed on to successive ones. This includes knowledge transfer. But it also includes the ability to use this knowledge. Skills transfer mechanisms will depend on formal education – including “book-learning” and-on-the job training. But they will also depend on learning in less formal situations – skills passed on by parents and peers, or through social interactions. I suspect sustainable technology innovation will require more people to acquire and pass on more skills than ever before in order to succeed – and we are going to have to find new ways to achieve this.
Redundancy. Biology works so well because it has built-in redundancy. The same information is carried by billions of cells, and there are often multiple pathways to achieving the same end. The result is incredible resilience – throw a curve-ball at biology, and it adjusts and adapts. It’s something that we could learn from in ensuring resilient technology innovation – redundancy as another technology ratchet. It’s somewhat counter-intuitive, but developing multiple technology approaches to the same end lessens the chances of loosing critical knowledge and skills. The way technology innovation currently works, redundancy often falls by the wayside (think technology monopolies for instance). I suspect we will need to find ways to overcome this in developing resilient and sustainable technology solutions in the future.
Cultural integration of science and technology. How can technologies be sustained in a society where those dependent on the technology haven’t the first idea of how it works – or what to do if it goes wrong? When everything is going okay, the current model is one that works well. But its a model with very little resilience – meaning that when things go wrong (as they are sure to do), things quickly degenerate into a mess. The alternative is to embed an understanding and appreciation of technology – and the underlying science – within society itself. Cultural integration of science and technology provides an effective technology ratchet for preventing slippage in the face of new challenges. As well as facilitating the passing-on of knowledge and skills across generations, it disperses understanding throughout society and enables informed decision-making in the face of emerging issues. Unfortunately, many of today’s cultures do not respect science and technology to the degree that is necessary for this technology ratchet to be effective.
Astute readers might spot that these are not new ideas. But framing them in the context of technology ratchets possibly is. And maybe – just maybe – by framing them in this way, new light will be shed on how to use them to underpin sustainable and resilient technological progress.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that all this talk of technology ratchets is the product of chronic insomnia, and I ought to stick to safer ground in the early hours – like teeth, for instance.
But I suspect that there’s mileage in the concept. It seems painfully inefficient to have to support each advance in technology with a sustained and long-term effort to maintain the advance – not to say precarious. Wouldn’t it be better to develop more effective ways for each generation to lay a solid technological foundation for the following generation to build on – one that isn’t high maintenance?
That, to me, sounds like a technology ratchet.
Very thought provoking. And as you’ve said not new necessarily, but the framing is to me. And starts to address the question we’ve been nutting out – why communicate science and technology? Thinking about it terms of a technology ratchet provides a much better motivation than the old ‘we think the general public need to know’.
I think you’re right on the communication and engagement front – I found this a very useful frame that helped crystallize a number of things in my thinking. At the same time, there’s a lot still to be hashed out – see Hilary Sutcliffe’s comments below for instance.
While we do have ready access to more information than ever before, we also have a problem. How do we find something useful if we don’t know enough about it know how to look for it or even if something exists at all? Search engines are amazing tools for finding information if you can tell them what you’re looking for. But what if you don’t know anything yet? How do you go about discovering entirely knew topics? This problem was solved in the past by libraries. Some wise and benevolent person (known as a “librarian”) would choose what books made it into the limited shelf space within some budgetary constraint. While this necessarily limited the information available, a person could browse along the shelves and somewhat accidentally come upon all kinds of interesting things without knowing anything about them previously. My daughter loves the library, but many of her classmates never set foot in one. They use the internet whenever they look for information, and they may find what they’re looking for, but I suspect they rarely stumble on something new and wonderful by accident that way. There was also the printed encyclopedia, which had a broad range of topics but limited depth – still enough to find out something fascinating but previously unknown existed. I love wikipedia but it’s really not quite the same experience to browse through it, there’s just too much of it.
So, what to do? How do we create a ratchet to keep interesting but financially unprofitable ideas alive and accidentally discoverable in the age of the internet search engine?
Ha – knew that comment on libraries would hit a nerve somewhere!
I’m not sure how we do this, but I agree with you that we need resources that go beyond profit and dazzle, and provide a strong and serendipitous source of knowledge – not just information.
I still find browsing through printed material incredibly rewarding. I’m never quite sure whether this is a generation thing or whether there is something more to it – I suspect the latter!
I respectfully disagree.
Hyperlinking – and Wikipedia has expanded my horizons like never before.
For example, on my own I might have never found out that something like cubane exists!
Agreed— w/ Kristin – solid post and appreciate your framework. Diffusion of ideas takes a long time- and these are foundational strategy elements. Two that resonate most are the open knowledge base (Will write more about that later- but believe there are high potential efforts happening in some science communities around new database frameworks that might change the nature of collaboration and open access) I think this is a low hanging fruit!
Re: cultural alignment I think we have our clear target w/ the ‘Millennial’ Generation (across planet) of young adults born post 1980. They are going to set policy and market agendas for next fifty years and I believe they should be our primary focus for shifting mindsets towards applied science and engineering. I am fond of the meme being pushed now state-side on getting young people to see themselves as ‘makers of things, not just consumers of things’ – and believe inspiration may be found in unveiling a new vision of materials manufacturing and design that would engage young people beyond our business as usual scenarios!
Thanks for post– and for Twitterverse presence..
Garry G
Brooklyn, NY
Thanks Garry – interesting comment about the cultural shift from “consumers” to “makers.” Looking forward to more thoughts on open knowledge bases.
If you’re depressed now read Prof Robert Winston’s new book Bad Ideas about the ‘dangers human societies face from our inventiveness’. That’s what I worry about.
Also I am growing more concerned about the increasing focus on ‘cultural integration of sci & tech’. This idea of ’embedding appreciation of tech’ into society could be construed as a stepping of responsibility. So some of the thinking I have seen, and hinted at here, says, if we embed an appreciation, people will understand that science is not always perfect, has unexpected consequences and will have a wiser and therefore ‘more forgiving’ attitude to what goes wrong.
What about the responsibility of science and the science supply chain, including companies and governments, is to minimise unintended consequences, take responsibility for downsides and upsides and not just unleash technologies without the appropriate due diligence and blame society’s lack of understanding ‘when it goes wrong.’ The anti-science backlash if if comes will be because ‘society’ gets fed up of bearing the brunt of innovation which is not properly thought through, considered as part of whole systems thinking and a belief that innovation trumps all when, to repeat a phase from your previous post, ‘it creates more problems than it solves’.
The trouble with the ratchet is it doesn’t allow you to recalibrate, it leaves you on a linear trajectory where going in one direction is the only option, moving sideways, and even where you have just come from isn’t an option.
Thanks Hilary – thought-provoking and helpful!
The cultural integration ratchet clearly needs more thought and further explanation. A couple of things were going through my mind when writing this – developing a culture where decision-making on science and technology isn’t abdicated to a powerful few, and enhancing knowledge and understanding-resilience by spreading them through society and creating the equivalent of knowledge/technology memes. If you include researchers, industry, governments, citizens and others as integral components of society, this leads to reasonably holistic thinking about how we get science and technology right within society, while avoiding an “us versus them” dichotomy. But there is a lot more thinking to do here I suspect.
Your point about recalibration – or rather, an inability to recalibrate with ratchets – is a good one. Fortunately, technology ratchets are always likely to be “soft” ratchets in that they will require a certain amount of maintenance – and that allows room for recalibration. I actually think the concepts of technology ratchets and recalibration/adaption are complimentary – you need the one to sustain progress, and the other to make sure progress is robust, in the right direction, and adaptable. Think of technology ratchets with feedback loops!
I need to get a copy of Winston’s new book btw.
Just a few thoughts on this provocative discussion:
Some technologies ought to be lost. Andrew, you wrote: Just because we as a global society can do something clever now, doesn’t mean that people 10, 20, 50 years down the line will still be able to do it.
Another version of this sentence reads: Just because we as a global society can do something that looks clever now but is stupid from a more informed perspective, doesn’t mean that people 10, 20, 50 years down the line will still want to do it.
Is this not, in part, what the sustainable technology is all about? Consider chemical technologies from the 19th and 20th centuries in which incomplete but powerful knowledge about reactions and material transformation, coupled to both societal needs (desires) and a driving force of cost minimization on the commercialization side, has led to an industry in which production has trumped concern about environmental consequences. Only now is that changing as an ethic of green chemistry and sustainable technologies begins to have a transformative effect.
And that brings me to the second thought. Perhaps we need a technology ethic of sorts that will improve the chances that any technology ratchets go in directions that we don’t ultimately regret and find hard to reset. One possible ethical element that has been on my mind lately is the need for engineers and innovators to develop technology that accommodates the human (even the most technophobic among us!) and stop forcing the human to accommodate to the technology. This is hard, I know, but I think too often far from the minds of the techno-oligarchs with the knowledge and means to bring technology to the masses. If a Humans First ethic were to take hold, it might encourage a mindset in which the sorts of unintended consequences that require subsequent remediation will not be as likely a consequence of new technologies rolled out with great fanfare .
Provocative comments on a provocative post – thanks Ivan!
Good point about technologies needing to evolve, and the poor ones being allowed to whither and die – ideas hinted at in Hilary’s comments as well. Clearly we need intelligent and responsive ratchets.
I like the idea of including a technology ethic – some of your thoughts reflect thinking on responsible innovation, which Richard Owen write about here a few months ago: https://2020science.org/2009/12/16/owen/ I would still argue that we need technology ratchets to ensure that we don’t loose gained ground, but that these need to be developed and used in a broader framework of responsible innovation, technology ethics, responsive innovation, and adaptability (and plenty of others that I’ve left out).
Oh Ivan, that’s what I wanted to say, but much better said!
Re the Human centric approach, I think you are right, though I think the environment has also got to be part of that ethic too.
In a way, this may then bring us back to the ‘triple bottom line’ approach but applied to science. Ie people, planet and profits which is the approach that quality businesses are trying to take. http://bit.ly/2FEGX . We can’t deny the importance of the finance and innovation aspects of science either and it is perhaps getting this balance right which is where we should concentrate our efforts?
The answer seems pretty simple to me.
Keep the American consumer markets flowing so as to give the illusion of stability, let nations with developing middleclasses presume to think they can indulge as well, and all the while transfer knowledge and functions to machine systems which can distribute that across a large network so it does not have a central vulnerable point.
I’m not pessimistic about our evolution but we are going to be facing some big challenges as a species. I think that when pressed hard we become very resourceful and can switch the game, so to say… but rather on waiting to see how we will react let’s continue to hand over things to machines and computers.
A good ratchet might be a system that does not need humans to continue to advance
You know, I was tempted to bring in the singularity as a long-shot but highly effective ratchet – if it ever occurs, there’ll be no going back 🙂
Great article. Some observations:
1. I observe that over these years – when I was in school and now my children are going, science text books have changed in presentation but the content is still informative. No where they talk about “How to think science?” or “What is science?”
It is like feeding mangoes without teaching how to grow them!
2. There are two significant threats to scientific progress:
a. Life expectancy is growing slower than the amount of information needed to reach the frontier of research. A time will come when by the time a researcher knows all her tools, she might die natural death.
b. Along with rise in life expectancy, childhood period doesn’t grow. That means less percentage of time for skill development. Add to that many avenues of diverting attention like computer games (less distracting) and early onset of sexual activity and peer pressure towards it (way more distracting)!