This article explores the possibility of humanity’s technological progress stopping, discussing how the supply and demand for technological advancements could collapse and how future societies could change as a result.
We currently live in a world of constant progress. While many may disagree with this proposition on ethical and moral grounds, there is no disputing the fact that humanity has been on a scientific, technological, and economic sprint that never stops, even if it stumbles or falls. And underlying that drive has been the relentless intelligence and desire of humanity. In Homo Deus, Yuval Harari anticipates and worries about the future of this relentless progress, and in this book, we are invited to envision it with him and wonder how we can avoid it.
But there is one premise to his story of an advanced future. He assumes that human technology will continue to advance as it has been. At first glance, this premise seems obvious. Progress is an integral part of capitalist society, and humanity has always been on a path of technological, economic, and scientific advancement. But in an era where technology is going beyond creating machines that efficiently repeat tasks and creating technologies that surpass humans, can we really believe that technology will progress as it has so far? Is there any other possibility?
To consider this possibility, we need to look back at how technological advancements have affected us. So far, humanity has benefited from technological advancements. It has taken us from traveling from city to city in horse-drawn carriages and grinding grain on water wheels to flying across continents in airplanes and generating massive amounts of energy from nuclear power. It has also created intelligences that perform calculations and analysis that humans could never do. But there has always been a downside. Airplanes were used to bring down tall buildings in exotic lands, killing countless people, and nuclear power was used to kill people and destroy the environment. And while technology has made things more efficient, it has also made people unnecessary. But these side effects haven’t stopped the overall progress of technology. Why is that? To understand this, we need to look at why and by what means technology advances.
First of all, if you think about what it takes for technology to advance, there are many factors that come to mind, but we can divide them into two main categories based on the basic principle of capitalist society: supply and demand. The first are the factors related to the demand for technological advancement. In order for technology to advance, capital is required for labor, experiments, and maintenance, whether in a lab or a company’s research team. Capital comes from stock sales or corporate support, which in turn comes from demand from people who believe they can benefit from the advancement. Only when these demanding actors invest capital can technology advance.
The second is related to the supply of technological advances. Technology needs more than money to advance. It needs technologists and engineers to lead the advancement, laboratories to conduct experiments, and a system to recognize and utilize the results of their research. These technologists and engineers are referred to as human capital, and facilities like labs are referred to as physical capital. These elements of supply and demand are necessary for technological progress.
However, the side effects of technological advances can threaten these supply and demand factors. For example, on May 8, 2018, Google announced a technology called Google Duplex. This is a technology that allows artificial intelligence to make phone calls on its own at the user’s request to make an appointment or book a hair appointment. In a demonstration of this technology, most people would not be able to tell the difference between what the AI is saying and what a human is saying. The machine now knows what questions to ask, how to answer them, and with what nuance, and it can learn from its deficiencies. In this environment, who needs a phone agent? You may want to keep a few people on hand in case the AI makes a mistake, but in most cases, it will be beneficial for your organization to replace them with AI. In these examples alone, people whose jobs can be replaced by AI will not be needed. Will unemployed phone agents be able to re-enter the workforce and find a job? Even if there are specialized jobs that AI hasn’t already taken over, most former phone agents won’t have the knowledge to do them, the time to train for several years right away, or the money to pay for it. Even if you go to a fast food restaurant to get a simple job that most people can do, there will already be machines taking orders and cleaning up instead of counter staff.
So why can’t the government bail these people out like it did in the past? Just as FDR created many public works programs in the United States during the Great Depression to create jobs, it may be possible to create jobs in a similar way today. But if it’s cheaper to use machines than people, why should we use people for public works? Even if people are hired as part of the solution, this will be limited by the competitive nature of the market, and there will be fewer and fewer specialized jobs that machines can’t replace. For example, doctors, once considered a specialized profession, are now being replaced by Watson, an artificial intelligence trained on big data that advises patients on treatment and analyzes imaging data. At an AI event in 2016, deep learning authority Jeffrey Hinton declared, “It’s self-evident that AI will surpass radiologists in five years,” and AI has made that prediction a reality.
While it’s possible that the Luddite movement could reemerge in the face of fewer and fewer human jobs, it seems unlikely that a modern, fragmented crowd would destroy something in an age of heightened security systems and informationized resources. As a result, unemployment is bound to rise, and with more unemployment, markets will stagnate. When the market is down, people are more likely to be skeptical about the benefits of technological advancements, as there is no guarantee that what they make will sell. Eventually, the demand for technological advances collapses.
When demand collapses, the supply side of technological advancement also suffers. Without demand, companies invest less in research, physical capital such as labs decreases, and human capital decreases as there are fewer places for engineers to work. Systems such as academia become less active, and the environment for technological progress becomes inert. In addition, the scale of unpredictable accidents and disasters that occur as technology advances is also increasing. In the days of horse-drawn carriages, a few people might be injured or killed in a wagon wreck, but today, dozens of people can be killed when an airplane lands incorrectly. Technological advances have also caused global disasters, such as global warming. In the future, these disasters may become even more severe, which could undermine the legitimacy of technological advancements and lead to sanctions.
We can now explain why technology has advanced in the past despite adverse effects, and why this is likely not the case now. In the past, technological advances have created jobs that have become obsolete and unnecessary, but they have also created new jobs that utilize intellect or emotions that were thought to be the sole domain of humans, and governments and societies have been able to provide them, thus maintaining the number of people with spending power to some extent. But there is no such thing as a human domain anymore. Intellect, which used to be the domain of humans, was slowly eroded from the moment computers started computing, and when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, it was no longer the domain of humans. Even in the realm of art, which often utilizes human emotions, AI is producing works that are indistinguishable from those of great composers. AI that understands human emotions and talks to or counsels people is also developing. In such a situation, it will be very difficult to find work that only humans can do, which means that the demand for technological advancements may collapse.
If the supply and demand for technological advancements collapses like this, technological advancements can stop. Just as goods that no one needs will disappear from the market, so will technological progress. There are many possibilities for how technological progress might stop. On the negative end of the spectrum, we could imagine a society in which only those with the wealth and skills survive, with a very large Great Depression due to the inability to effectively counteract the decline in the number of workers. On the other hand, a more positive future might envision a society in which governments successfully regulate technological advancements and companies assign people to jobs to maintain the economy. We’ll discuss the different possible futures later, but first, let’s answer some questions that have arisen from the story so far.
Many people might object to the previous assertion that technological advances are driven by demand. For example, cars today seem to have a clear purpose, but they weren’t originally invented because of demand for transportation. In 1866, when Nikolaus Otto built the first gas engine, people were already accustomed to thousands of years of land transportation on horseback, which was being replaced by railroads. Horses were always available, and there were no major complaints about railroads, so people didn’t see much of a need for Otto’s gas engine, or truck. After World War I, however, the military realized the need for trucks, and truck manufacturers and the military lobbied and convinced the public of the need, so trucks gradually replaced horse-drawn carriages. From these examples, it seems that sometimes inventions and advancements create new demands.
I’d like to borrow a perspective from Professor Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Iron to explain this idea. In this book, Jared Diamond explains that sometimes inventions and advancements create new needs. For example, the phonograph was originally invented for office use, but is now widely used to play music. However, he explains that these advancements are the result of the accumulation of other advancements and innovations that came before them, and that the accumulation of advancements and innovations came about when society saw an unmet need. In other words, some advancements come from other technologies that are driven by existing needs. Based on this perspective, we can conclude that in a future where there is no demand for technological progress and innovation itself, technological progress could stop because there would be no technology to base new advances on.
So far, we’ve talked about a future where technological progress stops, but there are plenty of other possibilities. For example, we could see the discovery of another uniquely human domain beyond intellect and emotion, or we could see a complete reorganization of society to prevent the collapse of the demand for technological progress, much as the United States successfully overcame the Great Depression by modifying capitalism through the policy of modified capitalism. And since these predictions are based on current social structures and technologies, they may be narrow and narrow-minded. But as Yuval Harari notes in Homo Deus, our speculation about a future has its own meaning. I hope this story focuses on that “meaning,” and I hope that readers of this article will come away with their own opinions about the possibilities presented above and prepare for the future.
