In Poul Anderson's first, "Psychotechnic," future history, technology causes mass unemployment. In his last future history, Genesis:
"Automation made traditional skills useless, raising resentment and despair side by side with new wealth and new hopes."
-Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), Part One, II, p. 9.
However, in this passage, the author is not projecting a speculative future but summarizing the twentieth century before moving his narrative into the future. Only the last two developments summarized in this chapter are speculative:
"Artificial intelligence" (ibid.);
AI systems enhancing AI - soon without any human input.
Genesis begins where I, Robot ended. Everything about this late Anderson novel is appropriate: its title; its copyright and first publication date, 2000; its first mass market edition date, 2001.
Anderson summarizes technology:
gunpowder brought down societies;
steam engines changed civilizations;
internal combustion engines made Earth one neighborhood;
agriculture fed billions but starved nature;
computers undermined liberty but the Internet curbed tyrannies;
computers transformed industry, economics and everyday life;
the Internet revolutionized communication and access to knowledge;
(an earlier knowledge revolution was movable type);
automation and AI (see above).
One word: dynamic. It can be good to be alive now, if we are not on the receiving end of the considerable grief, but it is also necessary to think - and act - about the future.
4 comments:
Technology always interacts with social organization -- they affect each other, in a feedback loop, rather than through any simple cause-and-effect.
Eg., the fact that Europe was politically divided rather than united the way China (comparable in total area and population) was affected technological development radically.
China was very inventive, more so than any other region up until the late medieval period, but it didn't have the relentless competitive pressure than inter-state rivalries did in Europe.
China's main exterior military challenge was Central Asian nomads, often a hard problem, but one that the Chinese knew how to meet -- basically by numbers and superior organization. Nomads made serious incursions into China generally only when a cycle of Chinese weakness and division coincided with unusually able leadership among the steppe peoples.
Europeans fought each other continuously like starving weasels in a bucket, and innovations in weapons technology spread very quickly. You couldn't get out of the arms race or your neighbors ate you, so you had to keep up no matter how socially destabilizing the effort was or how many entrenched interests it disturbed.
The technical innovations usually both demanded and caused social changes.
Gunpowder cannon strengthened the central State against localism, because cannon were both effective against fortification, and very expensive. Better cannon required improved foundry technique and more rational, larger-scale organization of furnaces and forges with more specialization and more use of powered machinery, and so forth.
Eventually new types of fortification were quite resistant to cannon -- the 'trace italienne', culminating in Vauban -- but the new style of fortification was itself crushingly expensive, -and- it required large, disciplined garrisons to man the defenses, and intricately organized types of siege-forces to attack.
All that required the tax powers of a centralized government to support. And the use of gunpowder small arms devalued individual skill at arms -- a longbow as about as effective as a flintlock musket, but it required enormously more training. What musketeer armies needed was not individual skill (you could learn how to use a musket well in a couple of months) but discipline, unit articulation a form of early division of labor that turned individual warriors with a "heroic" ethos into interchangeable parts in a machine.
That had knock-on effects on the rest of society.
The musket didn't actually -require- drilled armies, but it gave them an enormous advantage. When European armies met Indian ones in the 18th century, the Indians were using pretty much the same weapons -- they'd gotten gunpowder as early as Europeans, as it diffused throughout the Islamic world. What they hadn't developed was the machine-discipline Europeans had developed to get the most use out of them, and it crushed them.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Again, very interesting and very convincing! It fits in with what I have read in my amateurish studies of history. Yes, a quarrelsome, disunited Europe was far more eagerly willing to adapt to adopt new technology than a united Chinese Empire usually was. Because doing was NECESSARY if you didn't want to be devoured by your neighbors. A classic example being what happened to Poland in the late 17th century to the extinction of the old Polish kingdom at the Third Partition.
Sean
Good example. The Polish state was crippled by the "librum veto" (the right of any member of the Sjem to veto proceedings) and by the elective monarchy, which meant a competition for noble support at every succession.
Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian Union, to be pedantic) was huge; at one point it stretched all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and it was a potent military power for a while. A Polish force turned the tide during the last Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683.
But it couldn't compete with the better-organized states to its east and west and south. Even the Habsburg realm centered on Vienna was better at mobilizing its resources.
It's notable that in most of Europe either the monarchs crushed the old representative assemblies (in most instances) or the opposite happened (in Poland and Mecklenberg), whereupon the country's enemies destroyed it.
In Britain, there was a more fruitful balance between the executive and the the legislature, which lead to a strong state -with- a representative legislature.
Parliament represented the property-owners; and because they felt they had a stake in the State, it was willing to tax property in a way which supposedly "absolute" monarchs like the Bourbon Kings of France could never match.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Exactly! The elective monarchy and the liberum veto in the Sejm fatally crippled the old Polish Commonwealth. One of the consequences of the First and Second Partitions was a desperate attempt in Poland to correct these flaws. The Constitution of 1791 restored a hereditary monarchy (with the proposed ruling house to be the Wettins of Saxony) and abolished the liberum veto. This angered Catherine II of Russia, who did not want to see the remnant of Poland pulling itself together. Hence the Third Partition of 1795, completely abolishing the old Commonwealth.
One of the problems of the Habsburg Empire was how DIVERSE it was, politically and ethnically. It was not a unitry, centralized state a la France or the UK, more a confederation of large and small states sharing a common sovereign. So the Emperors had to govern thru a complex mix of means and institutions in various of their states. Some, like Joseph II, tried to unify and centralize everything in and thru Vienna, in the teeth of fierce opposition from local diets, estate, parliaments, etc. So much so that Joseph's successor Leopold II reversed his brother's policies and abolished all his unpopular, centralizing laws.
What you said about Great Britain is true. Yes, a better balance between Crown and Parliament was worked out than in many other parts of Europe. What makes me feel a bit chilly this, tho, was the anti-Catholicism mixed into it.
If the Estates General in France had not fallen into disuse after 1614, something similar might also have been worked out in France--a strong Crown and a strong Estates General working together. France might have been spared the French Revolution, the dictatorship and wars of Napoleon, and the recurrent political instability it has suffered since the Revolution.
Sean
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