Category: General

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama once identified transhumanism as the “the world’s most dangerous idea”. Perhaps a handful of bioconservatives share this view, but I suspect few others do. After all, transhumanism is hardly part of the mainstream. It has a few high profile spokesmen, and it has its vociferous adherents on the internet, but that’s not unusual. The wealth, prominence, and technical credibility of some of its sympathisers – drawn from the elite of Silicon Valley – does, though, differentiate transhumanism from the general run of fringe movements. My own criticisms of transhumanism have focused on the technical shortcomings of some of the key elements of the belief package – especially molecular nanotechnology, and most recently the idea of mind uploading. I fear that my critique hasn’t achieved much purchase. To many observers with some sort of scientific background, even those who share some of my scepticism of the specifics, the worst one might say about transhumanism is that it is mostly harmless, perhaps over-exuberant in its claims and ambitions, but beneficial in that it promotes a positive image of science and technology.

But there is another critique of transhumanism, which emphasises not the distance between transhumanism’s claims and what is technologically plausible, as I have done, but the continuity between the way transhumanists talk about technology and the future and the way these issues are talked about in the mainstream. In this view, transhumanism matters, not so much for its strange ideological roots and shaky technical foundations, but because it illuminates some much more widely held, but pathological, beliefs about technology. The most persistent proponent of this critique is Dale Carrico, whose arguments are summarised in a recent article, Futurological Discourses and Posthuman Terrains (PDF). Although Carrico looks at transhumanism from a different perspective from me, the perspective of a rhetorician rather than an experimental scientist, I find his critique deserving of serious attention. For Carrico, transhumanism distorts the way we think about technology, it contaminates the way we consider possible futures, and rather than being radical it is actually profoundly conservative in the way in which it buttresses existing power structures.

Carrico’s starting point is to emphasise that there is no such thing as technology, and as such it makes no sense to talk about whether one is “for” or “against” technology. On this point, he is surely correct; as I’ve frequently written before, technology is not a single thing that is advancing at a single rate. There are many technologies, some are advancing fast, some are neglected and stagnating, some are going backwards. Nor does it make sense to say that technology is by itself good or bad; of the many technologies that exist or are possible, some are useful, some not. Or to be more precise, some technologies may be useful to some groups of people, they may be unhelpful to other groups of people, or their potential to be helpful to some people may not be realised because of the political and social circumstances we find ourselves in. Continue reading “Does transhumanism matter?”

This long blogpost is based on a lecture I gave at UCL a couple of weeks ago, for which you can download the overheads here. It’s a bit of a rough cut but I wanted to write it down while it was fresh in my mind.

People talk about innovation now in two, contradictory, ways. The prevailing view is that innovation is accelerating. In everyday life, the speed with which our electronic gadgets become outdated seems to provide supporting evidence for this view, which, taken to the extreme, leads to the view of Kurzweil and his followers that we are approaching a technological singularity. Rapid technological change always brings losers as well as unanticipated and unwelcome consequences. The question then is whether it is possible to innovate in a way that minimises these downsides, in a way that’s responsible. But there’s another narrative about innovation that’s growing in traction, prompted by the dismally poor economic growth performance of the developed economies since the 2008 financial crisis. In this view – perhaps most cogently expressed by economic Tyler Cowen – slow economic growth is reflecting a slow-down in technological innovation – a Great Stagnation. A slow-down in the rate of technological change may reassure conservatives worried about the downsides of rapid innovation. But we need technological innovation to help us overcome our many problems, many of them caused in the first place by the unforeseen consequences of earlier waves of innovation. So our failure to innovate may itself be irresponsible.

What irresponsible innovation looks like

What could we mean by irresponsible innovation? We all have our abiding cultural image of a mad scientist in a dungeon laboratory recklessly pursuing some demonic experiment with a world-consuming outcome. In nanotechnology, the idea of grey goo undoubtedly plays into this archetype. What if a scientist were to succeed in making self-replicating nanobots, which on escaping the confines of the laboratory proceeded to consume the entire substance of the earth’s biosphere as they reproduced, ending human and all other life on earth for ever? I think we can all agree that this outcome would be not wholly desirable, and that its perpetrators might fairly be accused of irresponsibility. But we should also ask ourselves how likely such a scenario is. I think it is very unlikely in the coming decades, which leaves for me questions about whose purposes are served by this kind of existential risk discourse.

We should worry about the more immediate implications of genetic modification and synthetic biology, for example in their potential to make existing pathogens more dangerous, to recreate historical pathogenic strains, or even to create entirely new ones. Continue reading “Responsible innovation and irresponsible stagnation”

It’s easy to be ambivalent about nuclear power, as my last post illustrated. Nuclear power does provide a low carbon source of energy at scale – if we are serious about decarbonising our energy systems we are going to need a new wave of nuclear power stations, not least to replace an earlier generation of ageing reactors. But nuclear enthusiasts seriously underestimate the scale of the problems that need to be overcome to achieve a large scale expansion of nuclear power. Civil nuclear power has a troubled history everywhere; in Japan consequences of the Fukushima disaster are very much part of current affairs, whose repercussions have spread to countries like Germany. To move beyond this troubled history, to a future in which nuclear power does provide safe and affordable low-carbon energy, we need to understand how this technology got to its current state.

The way in which the technology of civil nuclear power has unfolded was not inevitable; it was the result of the specific circumstances in which it was born and developed. In this sense nuclear power is a great example of the way in which technological trajectories are not pre-ordained; there are many possible paths that nuclear energy could have gone down. What has happened is an example of “technological lock-in” – the particular historical environment in which nuclear power was born put the technology on one particular trajectory, from which it is difficult to make a big jump (as argued in this article by Robin Cowan). This is important because it explains why the current state of the technology is probably not the best place to be given the problems we need to solve.

We can’t understand where we are with nuclear power without appreciating its roots in military technology. Continue reading “Moving beyond nuclear power’s troubled history”

One slightly dispiriting feature of the current environmental movement is the sniping between “old” environmentalists, opposed to nuclear power, and “new” environmentalists who embrace it, about the relative merits of nuclear and solar as low carbon energy sources. Here’s a commentary on that dispute, in the form of a pair of graphs. In fact, it’s two versions of one graph, showing the world consumption of low carbon energy from solar, nuclear and wind over the last forty years or so, the data taken from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013.

The first graph is the case for nuclear. Only nuclear energy makes any dent at all in the world’s total energy consumption (about 22500 TWh of electricity in total was generated in the world in 2012, with more energy consumed directly as oil and gas). Although nuclear generation has dropped off significantly in the last year or two following the Fukushima accident, the experience of the 1970’s and 80’s shows that it is possible to add significant capacity in a reasonable timescale. Nuclear provides the world with a significant amount of low-carbon energy that it’s foolish to imagine can be quickly replaced by renewables.

The second graph is the case for solar. It is the same graph as the first one, but with a logarithmic axis (on this plot constant fractional growth shows up as an increasing straight-line). This shows that world solar energy consumption is increasing at a greater than exponential rate. For the last five years, solar energy consumption has been growing at a rate of 66% a year compounded. (Wind-power is also growing exponentially, but currently at a slower rate than solar). Although in absolute terms, solar energy is only now at the stage that nuclear was in 1971, its growth rate now is much higher than the maximum growth rate for nuclear in the period of its big build out, which was 30% a year compounded in the five years to 1975. And even before Fukushima, the growth in nuclear energy was stagnating, as new nuclear build only just kept up with the decommissioning of the first generation of nuclear plants. Looking at this graph, solar overtaking nuclear by 2020 doesn’t seem an unreasonable extrapolation.

The case for pessimism is made by Roger Pielke, who points out, from the same data set, that the process of decarbonising the world’s energy supply is essentially stagnating, with the proportion of energy consumption from low carbon sources reaching a high point of 13.3% in 1999, from which it has very gently declined.

Of course, looking backwards at historical energy consumption figures can only take us so far in understanding what’s likely to happen next. For that, we need to look at likely future technical developments and at the economic environment. There is a lot of potential for improvement in both these technologies; not enough research and development has been done on any kind of energy technology in the last few years, as I discussed here before – We sold out our energy future.

On the economics, it has to be stressed that the progress we’ve seen with both nuclear and solar has been the result of large-scale state action. In the case of solar, subsidies in Europe have driven installations, while subsidised capital in China has allowed it rapidly to build up a large solar panel manufacturing industry. The nuclear industry has everywhere been closely tied up with the state, with fairly opaque finances.

But one thing sets apart nuclear and solar. The cost of solar power has been steadily falling, with the prospect of grid parity – the moment when solar generated electricity is cheaper than electricity from the grid – imminent in favoured parts of the world, as discussed in a recent FT Analysis article (£). This provides some justification for the subsidies – usually, with any technology, the more you make of something, the cheaper it becomes; solar shows just such a positive learning curve.

For nuclear, on the other hand, the more we install, the costlier it seems to get. Even in France, widely perceived to have been the most effective nuclear building program, with widespread standardisation and big economies of scale, analysis shows that the learning curve is negative, according to this study by Grubler in Energy Policy (£).

What is urgent now is to get the low-carbon fraction of our energy supply growing again. My own view is that this will require new nuclear build, even if only to replace the obsolete plants now being decommissioned. But for nuclear new build to happen at any scale we need to understand and reverse nuclear’s negative learning curve, and learn how to build nuclear plants cheaply and safely. And while the current growth rate of solar is impressive, we need to remember what a low base it is starting from, and continue to innovate, so that the growth rate can continue to the point at which solar is making a significant contribution.

I have a post up on the blog of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute – The failures of supply side innovation policy – discussing the connection between recent innovation policy in the UK and our current crisis of economic growth. Rather than cross-posting it here, I tell the same story in four graphs.

1. The UK’s current growth crisis follows a sustained period of national disinvestment in R&D

Red, left axis. The percentage deviation of real GDP per person from the 1948-1979 trend line, corresponding to 2.57% annual growth. Sources: solid line, 2012 National Accounts. Dotted line, March 2013 estimates from the Office for Budgetary Responsibility.
Blue, right axis. Total R&D intensity, all sectors, as percentage of GDP. Data: Eurostat.

Continue reading “Innovation policy and long term economic growth in the UK – a story in four graphs”