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The XVIIIth century, by allowing free thought, unleashed creativity. People knew they could change things. Obviously, they started by changing those things that were bad. This resulted in unprecedented improvement. This led everybody to believe that change was good. The word progress best conveyed this confusion in meaning between change and good. The end of the XIXth century strongly believed that technology would bring happiness, that science would unveil truth, that industry would remove hunger, that medicine would cure death.

The XXth century, with its unprecented leap forward in scientific and technical prowess did a great job at convincing people that technological progress was steady, accumulative and good.

I want to challenge these three assumptions.

Technological progress is not steady

If we believe TV commercials for the new formula of washing powder, the new generation of running shoes or the ultimate workout machine, technological progress appears steady, with novelty upon novelty, each day, each month, each year.
In fact, science and technology breakthroughs come randomly, in unexpected steps.

If we just look at physics, we have had three major steps since the XVIIIth century: Newtonian mechanics, then electromagnetism, then quantum physics and relativity. Each time, it was an enormous step, a change in paradigm as Karl Popper puts it, leading to an avalanche of discoveries and technological changes in its wake. Then after a while, the avalanche subsides to a small trickle. Everybody hopes for a new revolution, but there is no way of knowing whether it will come any time soon. It has been a good seventy years now that no such revolution has occurred in physics.

However, because of the collective belief that progress should be steady, there is a pressure to continue improvement, even if the corresponding costs are soaring. Just look at the evolution of commercial airliners between 1950 and 1970. First there were Lockheed Super Constellations: 70 passengers, piston-engine, 8,700 km range at 610 km/h. Then there were Boeing 747, 360 passengers, jet engines, 12,000 km of range at 950 km/h. Forty years later, the A380 is about to improve some 40% over the B747: 20 years for 500%, forty years for 40%. If this is not stagnation, I do not know what it is.

Now onto semiconductors, the icon of continued progress: we are still witnessing a steady growth of computer processing power, but if you look at the industrial investments needed for each new generation of superchips, you see how it is bound to stagnate at some point. Note: ‘Dual core’ does not mean progress; it means “we could not double the power, so we’ve put two processors”. People tell us that optical computers will soon take over, but nobody will tell you they will be ready in ten years from now. We would really like them to be, but I believe they are just as hypothetical as the flying cars that were once supposed to become commonplace by the time I turned 30.

Technological progress is not cumulative

Because we cannot forget language, writing, the wheel, agriculture or the compass does not mean everything mankind learns to do is definitively acquired. I think it is easy to remember the simple things, but some things involve so many skills, intelligence and investment that if you reduce the amount of effort, the knowledge recedes.

A personal example: I am working on a project to send an unmanned probe to the Moon somewhere around 2013. Forty-four years after Neil Armstrong went there, we are barely capable of sending a 500-kg automated payload. This is just one item in a long list of high-technology success ghosts:

• Concorde: here is an interesting technological spike. 99% of all engineers who worked on the program have gone to retirement. No other aircraft development came even close. And it is the same for any large supersonic transport or military aircraft elsewhere in the world. With the increase of oil prices, I am quite sure that the people who bought the last Concorde tickets will be the last ones in a long long time to have travelled at the speed of a rifle bullet. If we had to do it again, it would cost as much as it cost at the time. And you do not want to know how much it cost at the time.
• the space shuttle: the space shuttle was designed directly after the Apollo programme, with an enormous amount of inherited know-how. Then came a gap of thirty years in development effort. There is no way we could do that anymore. The Europeans have tried and failed miserably with the Hermes endeavour in the 1990s. The Japanese have tried with HOPE, and stopped. The Russians had succeeded in the 1980s just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nobody knows how to do a Space Shuttle anymore. Unless we agree to spend the same budget as the Space Shuttle first development. That can hardly be called acquired progress.
• integrated rocket engines: the engines of the space shuttle (1980) or the engines of the Energia launcher (1985) have no equivalent today. It has been nearly thirty years nobody has dared to touch the design or even the settings, and now that all the bearded experts have retired, you will not see new powerful rocket engines any time soon.

High-technology is like sports: when you have not done any, you improve rapidly with reasonable training; with infinite training efforts, you can only reach so far in terms of performance; when you cut back on training, you are back to square one.

There is still hope. Obviously language was something extremely difficult for prehistoric humans to acquire. Yet we could not forget language now. There is therefore a possibility that if we maintain the effort for a sufficiently long time, some things become obvious and are definitively acquired. I sure would like semiconductors, tolerance, gender equality and democracy to become as obvious as language.

Technological progress is not good

As I mentioned before, when they could change their world, people obviously started by tackling the worst bits. Agricultural progress put an end to famin in Europe. Hygiene stopped plague and cholera epidemics. Hence the impression that change was always good.
Yet, from the start, there were early signs that sometimes, something that was presented as progress did in fact bring a regression. The luddites and Lyon’s Canuts were interesting precursors of today’s anti GM or anti-nanotech activists. Improvements in farming techniques destroyed rural social structures and pushed millions into urban slums.

World war I saw the demise of positivistic faith in science: everyone saw how technological advances had revolutionized warfare to the point that a single battle could kill up to 100,000 men. The gas chambers and the atomic bombs then showed how far the dark side of scientific progress could reach.

Even with ample proof that science and technology can bring the worst with the best, there is still a widespread faith in progress. Anyone resenting some kind of technological change is immediately called ‘backwards’ without appeal. You name it: genetic engineering, nanotechnologies, cloning, nuclear power. And when you can invoke a good cause, there is even less discussion: the current frenzy for biology and genetics is surfing on the giant misconception that medical progress is bound to be good, because it relieves suffering.

I could tell about nerve gas and biological warfare, but I will keep to basic medical practice: it is obvious that a lot of suffering has been reduced with the help of medicine, but how much suffering now happens because of medicine? Without the medical knowledge of the XXth century, I would probably have died of pneumonia or diphteria over a fortnight when I was a kid, but my grandma would not have suffered ten years from alzheimer’s before her heart gave way. I am not saying that medicine is bad. I am saying that we cannot know for sure whether such and such new medical trend is good a priori.

We know that science is neither good nor bad a priori; I say that technological change is no different.

Runaway technical progress

The notion of progress excuses us from taking time to determine what is good: any change is good, so that what we can do, we do, it will be good. Progress appears even better if we can forget how things were before, as in Orwell’s 1984. This leads to what I call runaway technical progress. First we get rid of famins, then we make tasty burgers, then we grow fat, then we invent fad diets, then we invent heart-stroke pills, then we invent stem-cell heart repair. Or we select seeds, then we improve seeds, then we make specialised cultivars, then they get infested with pests, then we invent pesticides, then we invent genetically modified cultures that produce their own pesticides, then the pests become resistant, then we invent more pesticides and more genetically modified varieties. Or we invent electricity, then we make lamps, then we build air-conditioners, then we build more powerful coal power plants, then the world gets warmer, then we build very strong tornado shelters, then we spread aliminium particles in the stratosphere, then we find a great cure against aluminium-related lung cancer, etc. It is all progress.

Fortunately, the hard truth that we never know whether a new technological step will be good or bad is gradually showing. The sad result is that more and more people are made to believe, in reaction, that everything was better before. Wherever I turn, the words ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ are overused as a quality label. This is not true either. We are not smarter than our forebears, but neither were they smarter than us.

Where do I stand?

Technological progress is not steady, not cumulative, not necessarily good. The word ‘progress’ should not be an alibi for doing anything and everything. If we just take the time to think, discuss, disagree, choose, know what we want the world to look like before we do something, maybe we have a chance to achieve actual improvement, instead of running madly from change to change like a herd of gnus galloping towards a cliff, mooing ‘progress’.

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