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Why technology doesn't matter—Oh but it does!

Tuesday, April 15, 2014 9:09

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Erika Deoudes

[This week, Eerik is back, continuing the series which started with “the travesty of the anti-commons.” His solar concentrator company is picking up steam (pun intended). If your ecovillage needs a communal kitchen/laundry plus internet café, all powered by a solar concentrator array, you need to talk to Eerik.]

In my last series published on this blog I dispensed with the notion of “the tragedy of the commons,” pointing out its inadequacies, and its absurdity, given that the institution of private property depends for its existence the commons, which is both its origin and is instrumental to its preservation. Being the ultimate guarantor of private property, society has every right to assign duties to the private property holder, as well as to demand that private property be returned to the public realm should conditions warrant. Industry and finance often expropriate private land for some industrial purpose, so this principle is not in dispute. But it seems increasingly unusual to think that such expropriations should serve the public good.

My company has recently launched the web site GoSol.co, bringing our contribution to spreading solar energy to public attention. In this context, I would like to turn the readers’ attention to another concept in economics that is much abused: Jeavons Paradox. Unlike “the tragedy of the commons,” which is entirely fictional, this one can be said to exist. However, it is rare to see it interpreted correctly, for there is little reason to insist on calling it a paradox—a term that connotes something unexpected and elusive—when it is, in fact, exactly what you’d expect. In this series of articles, I will argue that technology can help save us, and the rest of the living world, Jeavons’ paradox be damned.

Unlike run-of-the-mill technophile articles that assume this unquestioningly, let’s deal with Jeavons’ “paradox” straight up. Jeavons’ observation is that an increase in the the efficiency with which a given resource is used, which we might expect to reduce its use, since we now need less of it to accomplish the same tasks as before, actually increases its use—by making it cheaper. Better efficiency means lower cost, hence a wider scope of application. This paradox is also applies to many situations where we introduced an entirely new technology that promised to bypasses the old resource all together. For example, computers increased the consumption of paper by making printing so much more efficient and easy, far outweighing the computer’s promise of eliminating paperwork.

We can tell a similar story for essentially every resource: the development more efficient electronic devices has led to greater consumption of electricity and increased production of electronic devices. More efficient mining, smelting and casting of iron, aluminium and other metals has led to more consumption of those metals. More efficient use of fish through freezing has lead to more fishing. Jeavons’ “paradox” appears to apply system-wide: where it is broken by one industry—that does succeed in reducing real consumption—that consumption is quickly absorbed, and then increased, by another industry.

In order for Jeavon’s “paradox” to seem paradoxical, we must make an unrealistic assumption: that wants are fixed. But if we consider the nature of modern economy, infinitely increasing wants turn out to be an obvious consequence of its functioning. It continuously borrows to finance its expansion, the interest on that debt to be paid by future expansion, requiring an ever-larger resource base. Notably, it imposes no limits on the extraction of resources, other than what physics, nature and limitations of technology put in the way, and tends to crash whenever it encounters such a limit. It can be best understood as a machine that continuously optimizes itself for consuming as many resources as possible as quickly as possible. Thus, any technological improvement, in order to count as such, has to have a positive effect on the rate of resource consumption. Improved efficiency is a means by which the rate of consumption is improved, not an end in itself. And the ultimate goal, of course, is to improve the rate of economic growth—just ask any politician.

Along with everything else, Jeavons’ paradox applies to renewable energy. One of the first major clients of solar energy was the oil industry, which needed off-grid electric systems for remote communication relay stations and cheap thermal energy for drying effluent (both solar trough systems and ones that just spray the effluent into the air to let it evaporate directly in the sunlight). By using solar energy, the oil industry reduced its energy costs. Displacing fossil fuels with solar energy in these niche applications allowed it to extract more oil.

And so, if our goal is to consume what’s left of the world’s resources down to the last tree (and swiftly going extinct after that) then improvements in technology will help. But if our goal is to stop the destruction and survive, then they won’t.

Or will they? What Jeavons’“paradox”doesn’t include is the concept ofchoice. Suppose we had cars that periodically run over pedestrians. If we spent our time tinkering with their design, to make them faster and more maneuverable, in the hopes of making it possible to swerve around some of the would-be victims, we would no doubt find that, although the number of kills per mile would go down, we would cover more than enough extra miles to effect a net increase total killings.

But we could also choose to stop driving walk, killing no one. This radical course of action would take much more effort and may seem like an impossible task, especially if we are no longer accustomed to walking, nor even able to imagine it as useful. But it is only at this point that technology begins to matter. If we decide to stop driving the kill-o-matic, this does not imply that we must go without technology altogether and live as people did before the discovery of fire (now that the art of making fire by rubbing two sticks together has been all but lost).

Certain tools can be quite helpful in allowing us to choose a different way of living. As far as the kill-o-matics, it might seem like a moral imperative to simply stop driving them regardless of the consequences to ourselves. As far as the murderous economy, it is a bit more complicated, since the choice is not ours. Unless we change the nature of the machine, our individual actions to oppose it will simply redirect resources to those who want to consume even more. And if we blithely assume that we can change the nature of the machine, let’s keep in mind that the modern economy is really rather complicated—more complicated than any number of Ph.D. economists can comprehend, which is why they choose to ignore it and instead spend their time playing with toy economic “models.” What might move the economy in a positive, non-Earth-destroying direction is exceedingly difficult to discern, and a simple formula based on superficial reasoning, dogma or code is unlikely to be of help here.

What is certain, however, is that any solution that results in a long-term public good… is probably going to be based on the premise that the pursuit of long-term public good is a top priority. Fantastical assumptions that acting in other interests will somehow magically coincide with the long-term public good are unhelpful. This was the point of my previous series of essays on the tragedy of the anti-commons: that there is no justifiable reason for the public to maintain the rights of private property-holders at public expense for purposes that harm the public. There may be no simple solution, but rehabilitating the rationale of the public good (which used to be common sense) is the first step.

Now, assuming, rather optimistically, that this does happen, we are now in a position to understand the relevance of technology.

We cannot escape the need to choose to organize our economy differently. If not, then whatever technology we invent can be employed to track down and kill the remaining elephants (using high-tech camping gear, laser optics, off-grid photovoltaic-powered communications, and a streamlined online bribing system based on a virtual currency). If we invent a way to lower the cost of extracting all the mineral deposits we will be able to afford surveillance and crowd control technology that will stamp out even the faintest whimper of dissent. But just on the off-chance that we do choose otherwise and do succeed in putting in place some some other, non-murderous scheme, then we will need the tools to build this new arrangement. By developing these tools now we can accomplish two things: we accelerate the development of this new arrangement if and when it occurs, and we offer a strong argument in favour of implementing it by demonstrating its practical feasibility.

Stepping out of the realm of theory and into the realm of practice, there is one tool at our disposal that was not practically usable for our ancestors: using solar energy directly with solar concentrators. This is not so radical a change—just a different type of technology. Trees are solar concentrators —just very inefficient ones, slowly converting solar energy into a thermal energy source (firewood). They are also extremely efficient at maintaining a liveable environment for us oxygen-breathing life forms.

Solar concentrators are a simple technology that falls far short of our science-fiction expectations. But science-fiction should serve as a warning about our limits, not an inspiration for juvenile fantasies of technological omnipotence. Observe: nearly all our science-fiction stories rely on magical sources of energy to power these imaginary civilizations and their faster-than-light spaceships, teleporters, forcefields and deflector shields, baked-chicken materialisers and lavishly decorated hologram decks. True, plenty that was imagined in science fiction has come to pass, such as handheld communications, virtual reality, traveling under the sea, flying, going into space. However, all these science-fiction successes have a thing in common: there was no physical barrier to these quests. Only limitations of technology stood in their way.

Teleportation, faster-than light travel, faster than light communications, even the humble light-saber, have not been created in any satisfactory way. All of these hallmarks of our science-fiction have a thing in common: they all either break fundamental scientific laws or require infinite amounts of energy. Consider even the smallest item on this list—the light-saber: if a similar-looking device were ever invented (some sort of plasma field or what have you), it would be very surprising if the power source required to cut through metal and fight long battles without a recharge would fit a 30cm-long handle (we all know how awkward it is to have to swap batteries mid-battle). So, science-fiction writers have correctly predicted physically possible technologies and achievements, but, just as we should have expected, physically impossible technologies have failed to materialize.

Solar concentrator technology was not heralded by our science-fiction writers but rather by geniuses: Archemedes, Leonardo de Vinci, Thomas Edison. All of them saw solar power as the obvious future source of energy. A worldwide deployment of solar concentrators could not only avoid Jeavons’ “paradox” but would have far-reaching social implications—which I will explore in next week’s piece.

Previous posts by Eerik Wissenz:

ClubOrlov: The Travesty of the Anti-Commons
The Travesty of the Anti-Commons—Part II
The Travesty of the Anti-Commons—Part III
The Travesty of the Anti-Commons—Conclusion
Communities that abide: Finland

Source: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2014/04/why-technology-doesnt-matteroh-but-it.html

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