But first I do want to clarify that I meant the original essay as a pretty straightforward complement to the post Mike wrote on the CRN blog rather than as the "response" to it many seem to think I intended. The piece spent half its time simply summarizing Mike's argument along with that of the Choi piece he linked to, and only then did I go on to make my own point. I prefaced my case with this sentence:
I want to be clear about this: I am not suggesting that Treder and other technoprogressive nanotechnology enthusiasts (of whom I am one, after all) are frustrating the contemporary address of these problems by projecting their eventual solution onto some hypothetical more technologically sophisticated future.
One of the best things about Mike's response to my own essay was that he used it as an occasion to make the broader CRN case to the WorldChanging audience -- that we need to anticipate and plan for the dangers and disruptions sophisticated nanotechnology will likely engender.
I simply assumed -- I think, correctly -- that CRN knows that tools are available to redress poverty and suffering cheaply today and that to the extent that we value ameliorating those problems we should make use of those tools today to do so just as we hope to use the better tools that will be available later to do so better when we can.
The point I was trying to make, and I guess I wasn't as clear as I would like to have been is that (and these are quotes from the original essay)
there may be a much tighter connection than is evident on first glance between such an attitude [that we should use whatever tools we have whenever we have them to do what we can when we can] and the likelihood that we actually will use more superlative technologies eventually to better address these problems in the future.
And so, the kicker for me was this:
Counterintuitive though it may seem, cheap insecticide treated mosquito nets have everything to do with advanced nanotechnology -- to the extent that what we hope for from such emerging superlative technological developments is the redress of injustice, poverty, and human suffering.
What I assumed (and still assume) was that Mike already shared my attitude that we should address social problems with the tools we have, as well as sharing my hope that nanotechnological tools will some day soon emancipate humanity from poverty and suffering altogether. But then what my essay went on to propose was that there is a tight connection between these attitudes, that the latter hope is much less likely to come true unless the former attitude is inculcated here and now.
I didn't and don't know whether or not Mike would agree with that, but making that point was what I hoped would be my own modest contribution to the conversation. That's really all there is to it.
Quite a few people objected to a throwaway line in the essay: "There are a lot of market libertarian technophiles who like to handwave about abstract indefinite futures in which injustice will somehow evaporate so as to help justify their own ugly indifference to injustice today."
I'm sorry if that offends the wrong people. I was quite careful to insist that I don't think anybody officially affiliated with CRN exemplifies this attitude. But I do fear this attitude is widespread among American technophiles and I discuss it regularly here on my blog and elsewhere.
I would assume most people who are offended to be corralled together with the meanspirited in this way would actually not be meanspirited themselves and so I think they should cheerfully exempt themselves from my claim (which was, after all, a qualified rather than universal one) and work with me to address the problems of poverty and avoidable suffering we share then. Surely, they're just as aware of and annoyed by the meanspirited people I'm talking about as I am anyway.
Comments on the CRN blog itself are especially exemplary of the sorts of attitudes with which technoprogressives must grapple continuously. One response there seems to propose we bypass the contentious but necessary public redress of social ills altogether and focus on engineering questions instead and hope for the best, while another response seems to suggest people who hope to maximize social justice should act more like "capitalists" or at any rate "reformers" (just some oddball constituency apparently) should trust to capitalism to provide and, again, hope for the best.
Both of these are quite familiar, even prototypical, objections to arguments like mine, and needless to say seem to me conspicuously inadequate.
First, what we mean by "technology" is never only a matter of engineering -- its inspiration, funding, regulation, marketing, and the distribution of its developmental costs and risks as well as its eventual benefits are all importantly political matters.
There is no getting around politics, and so technophiles need to get considerably better at it.
The examples of nuclear power and genetically modified foods both provide ample recent evidence of this sort of thing.
Scientists, of course, were perfectly aware of the long-term disposal problems which, among other things, make nuclear power a disastrously nonviable technology for now. But their focus on the engineering and insensitivity to politics helped faciliate the hijacking of their work by scientifically illiterate politicians and also vast corporations itching to retain their wartime prominence in a postwar society. Eventually the outrage and suspiciousness inspired by atomic-age hype contributed in turn to the transformation of the once techno-utopian left into a generation of technophobes whose blanket hostility to reckless corporate-sponsored technological development paved the way for the current unspeakably damaging bioconservative hostility to technoprogressive funding and regulation of emerging so-called "enhancement" medicine and nanoscale manufacturing altogether. And this techno-cynicism continues to bear disastrous fruit as an often uncritically technophobic left allies itself surreally with anti-abortion conservatives on issues of genetic medicine, and allies with drug war conservatives on issues of neuroceutical medicine.
Meanwhile, even more recently, genetically modified foods, despite their potentially incomparable global benefits to humanity, are languishing under an almost unbearable stigma, again importantly because of the public-relations tone-deafness of technophiles whose focus was engineering rather than politics.
(I will get e-mails complaining that this is further proof of the problem of "politicizing" science, as if pouting and stamping one's foot at reality ever solved a problem in the first place. Look: Consensus science is a profoundly democratic process in which people collaborate in the context of well-managed societies to apply shared standards to the solution of problems. This is a matter of good politicized science working better than perniciously politicized science -- the latter in the service of, say, fundamentalist Christianity or polluters or tobacco companies who couldn't care less what the best account of the facts on offer happen to be. That scientific and technological development have political dimensions is ineradicable from the enterprise of each. What is wanted is good politicization. What is required for that is a recongition of what constitutes and supports this good politicization. Pretending not to be political, or decrying the political, or striving sanctimoniously to be oblivious to the political are remarkably inept strategies, whatever their apparent ubiquity among otherwise sensible champions of scientific culture.)
As it happens, one of the best things about CRN in my view is that Mike and Chris both recognize these sorts of connections and seem among the rarest few people who focus on emerging technologies who have an almost equally sophisticated grasp of the political/cultural terrain on which technological development unfolds as well as the relevant science on which it likewise depends.
Finally, as far as "capitalism" goes, I cannot know what that term means to any particular commentor since in America it is a word that gets freighted sometimes with unexpected associations and emotions. Certainly I agree with, say, Lawrence Lessig that pricing signals make an indispensable contribution to the ongoing regulation of human affairs, along with social norms, laws backed by threats of force and the supportive cultural paraphernalia of hegemonic legitimacy, and finally what Lessig describes as "architectural" constraints. That is a decent straightforward characterization of the actual scene on which we intervene to induce the developmental effects we want, and it doesn't make much sense to me either to claim to "oppose" or to "champion" it on this level of generality.
Anyway, in the actual essay itself I talk about the importance of sustainability and especially of redressing conspicuous poverty, treatable illness and unecessary suffering around the world. These are concerns CRN clearly shares. That's another reason CRN is such a worthy project.
There are resources available now to address these problems but the problems are simply not being addressed sufficiently. Among the available technologies are insecticide-treated mosquito nets and any number of comparable tools of a kind you can find nearly every day on sites like WorldChanging, among other places.
It seems to me "capitalists" should be able to recognize the value of a healthy environment in which to live and work (a point that becomes more fraught when genetic therapies and rejuvination medicine are factored into the picture) as well as to recognize the contribution that could be made to creative expression, useful work, ongoing innovation, and social stability by healthy, comfortable, rights-bearing people who are not pointlessly starving or dying of cheaply treatable malaria and the like in the so-called developing world.
Nevertheless, this does not seem to be happening, does it? And so I cannot share the apparent optimism of some of my critics that this will change anytime soon unless more than what often passes for "capitalism" among some of its enthusiasts is mobilized to make necessary and beneficial change happen now and for the good of all.
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