Since the start of the Industrial Revolution 150 years
ago technology has brought many material objects as well as the security,
health, leisure time, and education to enjoy these objects. If the fruits
of Watt's steam engine can be summed up in a word, it is choice. People
in the developed countries now have the freedom to select careers, mates,
family size, personal possessions, and travel horizons. Hair transplants
and breast enlargements let us chose our personal appearance. Would you
prefer a busy international city like New York? Maybe a quiet rural community
in Iowa? No problem. Towns in the Great Plains are practically giving
away houses to families who want to move there.
Most of the dissatisfaction with technology today, in
fact, is caused by technological limits, which prevent us from combining
our choices in ways never imagined in the past. We have not quite figured
out (and maybe never will) how to combine the stimulation and opportunities
of New York with the pure air and sense of community that small town Iowa
has. Hydroelectric stations can produce inexpensive electricity, but we
also want undisturbed rivers to enjoy on vacations. Satisfying such combinations
of desires has, quite rightly, always driven technology. In the early
19th century rural workers flocked to Manchester and other English industrial
cities (described by contemporaries as "visions of hell") for
steady wages and better opportunities in spite of the back breaking labor
and smoky, unhealthy conditions. Although progress is still needed, technology
has improved the environment in cities so that the choices for workers
today are not nearly so stark.
What could be better than these choices? And if history
is any lesson, we can be sure that technology will expand these choices
in the future. It is my thesis, however, that such freedom has put an
unexpected strain on mankind and even forced us to make choices that we
do not want and maybe should not make.
THE PRE-INDUSTRIAL WORLD
There is no shortage of books telling what happened in
the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. For the
overwhelming majority of people, however, the most significant fact is
that nothing happened. It is almost impossible for us imagine that for
50 generations life in rural communities (and 95% of people lived in rural
villages) did not change in significant ways. The occasional war, plague,
or crop failure was all that distinguished one century from another. Women
worked in the fields and raised children while men did what their fathers
had done in the village where they were born. The sense of distance and
geography was so limited that when life was disrupted by the occasional
war, a soldier might be 20 miles from his village and never find it because
no one knew anything more than the next village a day's walk away. Highwaymen
and wild animals made it too dangerous to travel farther. Even the path
they walked was very likely a Neolithic trail from thousands of years
past.
When you did have a new idea, which was rare enough since
just staying alive required all your energies, it was best to keep the
idea to yourself. Any modern engineer knows that for every good idea they're
a dozen bad ones, and the margin for error was too slim to try out ideas
that probably would not work. In any case, new ideas might challenge the
existing religious and power relationships and could cause problems regardless
of their technical worth. A good example of this is the cross bow which
was outlawed (not very effectively) in England as unchivalrous. The actual
reason it was outlawed was that it permitted a poor peasant to kill an
armored knight.
Obviously, in such a world choices were few. People ate
the food that had always been grown locally, wore the clothes their parents
did, went into the family profession, married one of the few locally available
men or women, and had the same religious faith as everyone else in the
community. Personal possessions were limited to the absolute necessities.
Women were barren, or children were born and lived or were born and died
according to some unknowable fate, and there was nothing to be done about
it. It was not that choices were very limited; it was that the idea of
choice did not even exist.
THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY
At last the world began to change in the 16th century.
Cities grew. Trade in goods and ideas expanded. The New World was explored.
The Protestant Revolt took place and Galileo and later Newton finally
figured out what force, velocity, and acceleration were. Change was slow--Galileo
was threatened with torture for suggesting that the earth revolves around
the sun--but change was happening and choice started to become a possibility.
Cities were so pestilential that people died often enough that there was
always room for more immigrants from the countryside. Thousands went to
the New World and new lives. Although literacy was still rare, books became
available and with them wider horizons.
Choice, however, did not really expand to the masses
until the Industrial Revolution around 1750 when Newcomen and Watt developed
a practical steam engine. Suddenly (at least by the glacial standards
of the last millenium) the chemical power stored in wood and coal was
available to enormously expand man's capabilities. Factories run by the
new power source developed, and workers gathered in large cities where
there were no centuries old traditions to limit choices. The terrible
wages and working conditions of the early Industrial Revolution were born
by millions of workers first in Europe and later in the United States
in exchange for the freedom and possibilities that the new technology
brought. The same process is taking place in developing countries today.
The "megacities" of Latin America, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and
Buenos Aires, as well as cities such as Lagos in Nigeria are filling beyond
capacity with rural workers seeking the choices that are denied them in
the non-industrial countryside.
The steam engine was made mobile and railroads came into
existence in the 1840's. It is difficult to overestimate the importance
of such an unglamorous vehicle as the steam locomotive. Until their invention
it was impossible to move heavy goods except by water, and large populations
could only exist on rivers or coasts. An interesting example of this transportation
problem was perhaps the greatest crisis of George Washington's presidency--the
Whiskey Rebellion. Congress had imposed a tax on distilled spirits and
the farmers of the then frontier territory of western Pennsylvania rebelled
because transporting their corn to the cities of the east coast by ox
cart was too expensive. The farmers preferred to concentrate their corn
into distilled whiskey and save transport costs. Had their rebellion succeeded
and the western part of the United States formed another country, our
history would be very different.
In the industrialized world today, nearly everything
about our lives is open for selection. "You can be anything you want
to be" is the mantra of every high school guidance councilor. Nearly
every city in the country has a public college or university with a complete
selection of courses to prepare for whatever career you choose. If your
interests or career goals are unusual enough, most colleges even have
a Directed Studies Program that allows you to shape course work to your
individual desires.
The choice of food is independent of season. Fresh fruit is available
year round, and in any most cities, the list of restaurants represents
a decent subset of the United Nations. I recently counted seven different
kinds of olive oil at my rather unchic local grocery store. Several brands
of water are even available. Electricity markets are being deregulated,
and you can buy your kilowatts from nuclear, fossil fuel, or renewable
generating plants.
The number and variety of consumer goods is so large
that billions of dollars are spent annually in advertising trying to attract
our attention to them. Some stores, having already covered the walls,
have resorted to putting advertisements on the floors, and even upscale
restaurants place advertisements over the urinals so it is almost impossible
not to read them.
If the man or woman next door is not to your liking,
the Internet lets you shop the world for possible mates, presorted by
height, weight and smoking habits. Hormones and surgery even let us choose
our sex if we are not happy with our present one.
Until the Industrial Revolution millions had died in
the west over religion. Today, in the industrialized countries your choice
of religion is just another decision like Pepsi or Coke. Bertrand Russell,
the English mathematician and philosopher, tells an amusing story about
how unimportant religion is to most people. When he was entering prison
during World War I for being a conscientious objector, he was asked, among
other questions, what his religion was. After helping the guard to spell
"agnostic", the guard told him, "I guess it doesn't really
matter what you call Him, its all one God."
THE CURSE OF CHOICE
Restricting our choices in any major way is, of course,
unthinkable. Every young person could write on slips of paper every profession
he can imagine and draw one at random, but I doubt if anyone has ever
chosen his life work this way. This freedom, however, is only a couple
of hundred years old and seems to be expanding with a Moore's Law kind
of inevitability. Choice is only the thinnest of veneers on our 20,000
years of physical and societal evolution, and it is quite reasonable to
ask whether all these choices really make us happy--which, of course,
has to be our ultimate goal. The existentialist philosopher Jean Paul
Sartre (although almost certainly not thinking about technology) said
that we are "condemned to be free" because, like it or not,
we must make choices about our lives without guidance. Every parenting
manual tells us that children need and enjoy structure. It would be very
odd indeed if at age eighteen, we suddenly did not need any structure
whatsoever. Colleges no longer even discuss their four year graduation
rate. It is the six-year rate that is important. Maybe young people are
bewildered by the choices of the real world after college and are not
sure what to do. Maybe they are just hesitant to leave the structure that
college provides.
Early pregnancy, marriages, and large mortgages seem to be enduring phenomena
that all limit our choices. Maybe we are happiest that way. In any case,
it is for the sociologists not the engineers to give guidance about how
much and what kind of structure we need, but it seems certain that technology
has given us more choices than we can take advantage of.
Technology, however, has forced another class of less
personal choices on us that may be equally unwelcome. Let us examine some
of these difficult and unwanted choices.
We now have to answer questions like "What is a
living creature?". The great mathematician Alan Turing proposed a
famous test for an "intelligent computer". His test goes as
follows: Suppose a computer with a suitable program is in a closed room
and a person is in another closed room. The person cannot see the computer
and can only communicate using a keyboard. The person is entitled to ask
any questions he or she wants and the computer will answer. According
to Turing's criteria, if the person is unable to determine whether the
computer is in fact a computer rather than a person, we should say that
the computer is intelligent. There are those who dispute the validity
of this test for determining intelligence. For example, if the room had
a man pretending to be a woman and he was able to fool the person asking
questions, no one would say that the man is now a woman.
Nevertheless, the test is certainly a good starting point
for discussing what is intelligence. If such a computer can be made, and
it seems very likely that it will, is it wrong to kill this "intelligence"
by destroying the computer? Most people would say it is not wrong, but
then we have not come into contact with such computers yet. Children become
very attached to their electronic pets, and maybe adults will become similarly
attached to a computer who is always there to listen to their problems,
cheer them up, and give good advice. People have ended marriages based
on nothing more than keyboard conversations over the Internet with people
whose sex they are not even certain of.
Sacrificing some lives so that others may live or prosper
is nothing new. Midwives have had to make the regrettable choice (fortunately,
less often with modern medicine) between the life of a mother and the
life of an unborn child, and generals send soldiers into battle knowing
many will die. Every construction engineer knows how many construction
workers will be lost per story of a skyscraper. These choices are made
by professionals, and one of the reasons that we respect their profession
is that they make these hard choices and their choices are usually wise.
Today, however, we have better information about many aspects of society
and are able to reduce choices to straightforward monetary transactions.
For example, the United States government has recently tried to decide
how much arsenic in drinking water is allowable. Cutting the present standards
to 5 PPM will save many lives but at an estimated cost of seven to fifty
million dollars per life. This seems rather expensive especially since
we do not know whose life we are saving. We will probably be saving the
lives of a couple of serial killers each decade. Maybe we should choose
to spend the money saving the lives of mothers with small children--if,
of course, they are good mothers. If you earn enough money, you can purchase
bottled water. Should such people be able to help decide on a standard
that will not affect their health but will affect their disposable income?
I am not sure people really want to make these sorts of decisions and
will probably force some bureaucrat to make the decision and avoid the
whole issue.
Most people oppose using human embryos to obtain stem
cells that can grow into replacement cells for any organ in the body.
The principle of horizontal versus vertical medicine comes into play in
this situation, however. When we are vertical, health care costs need
to be controlled. When we are horizontal in a hospital, the need to control
health costs is less compelling. If your child needs heart cells derived
from embryonic stem cells to see his fifth birthday, using such stem cells
may not seem so wrong. Actually, the situation is even more complicated.
Recent studies have shown that in mice stem cells can be obtained by transforming
ordinary skin cells. This technique will certainly be extended to human
beings, and most people would say that harvesting skin cells for such
a useful item as stem cells is acceptable. However, technically one step
in the stage of changing ordinary cells into stem cells is making embryos
out of them. Will such artificial embryos be acceptable for medicinal
use?
Our clever biochemists have presented us with another
difficult choice in the drug Thalidomide. During the late 1950's Thalidomide
was widely prescribed in as a sedative for pregnant woman. It was soon
discovered that the drug is teratogenic and children born after their
mothers took the drug had terrible deformities. Only through the vigilance
of Frances Kelsey of the Food and Drug Administration was the drug kept
off the market in the United States, and Dr. Kelsey was justifiably considered
a heroin. Recently, however, other more significant uses have been found
for Thalidomide, including treating cancer and a rare form of leprosy,
and it has been reintroduced into the prescription drug market. The FDA
has specified unprecedented safeguards for its use, but it is clearly
only a matter of time before a pregnant woman will take the drug by accident
and bear a deformed child. The utilitarian argument can always be made
that introducing the drug than will be harmed by it will save more lives,
but I doubt if anyone will be eager to explain this to the deformed people
born as a result of the drug.
For various reasons society has decided that citizens
as a whole should help decide on large public ventures such as power plants
and pipelines. The choice between a fossil fuel fired plant and a nuclear
plant, cost aside, offers very interesting choices. Both alternatives
have relatively well understood near term disadvantages. Fossil fuel plants
emit chemical pollutants with a known health cost in terms of respiratory
diseases that are sometimes fatal. Nuclear plants have an unlikely but
possible worst-case failure mode that involves a core meltdown and hundreds
of lives lost. These are short-term disadvantages that the people who
build the plants must bear and if a wrong decision is made, the people
who made the decision will suffer. Both plants, however, also have long
term disadvantages lasting over hundreds or thousands of years. . Fossil
fuel plants emit CO2 that may have an effect on climate over the next
century. On the other hand, nuclear power plants emit no CO2 but produce
spent radioactive fuel that will be dangerous for millennia unless properly
isolated. Neither of these long term effects are well understood and are
the subject of intensive research. Nevertheless, decisions must be made
today or the United States will face widespread power problems similar
to the problems encountered in California in 2001. What makes this class
of disadvantages particularly troublesome is that the consequences of
the decision will not be born by the people who make the choice today
and probably not even by their grandchildren. Rather the decision must
be made between a cheap (let us say) non-polluting nuclear plant that
may harm people in three hundred years if radioactivity leaks from a disposal
site or a more expensive polluting fossil fuel plant that will not explode
but may raise global temperatures to harmful levels in a few hundred years.
Amidst all the fog of technological uncertainty, how much do we owe to
future generations a thousand years from now? We cannot sacrifice everything
for them or neither their lives nor ours will be very full, but then we
certainly must bear in mind their well-being to some extent.
We have thus seen that technology has given us personal
choices undreamed of a few hundred years ago. Almost everything is up
for selection. I sometimes feel like the famous donkey that was equally
distant from two piles of hay. The poor donkey starved to death because
he could not decide which pile to eat. But in addition, many other societal
choices are being forced on us. We must decide what is life and how much
it is worth. We must choose between risking the lives and wellbeing of
our children or of our descendents hundreds of years in the future. Nevertheless,
it is making choices that makes us human, and unless we bravely and confidently
make these choices, what is the purpose of life anyway?