Is Marc Andreessen right that tech just saved the world?; the degrowth delusion; a flashback to Logan's Run; the case against space; and more ...
"We can ill afford to rest on our laurels, even to pause in retrospect. Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future." - Walt Disney
Inside this Issue:
⚙ Marc Andreessen is right that technology saved the world, but now we need to keep on building
📉 The degrowth delusion
🎬 Remembering the domed dystopian classic Logan’s Run
🌌 The case against space expansionism
⚙ Marc Andreessen is right that technology saved the world, but now we need to keep on building
The need for “Technology Saves the World,” a new essay from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, becomes more obvious when you recall the Before Times. In the years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, technological advances were widely bashed as creating an inequality-riven panopticon society rather than a boomy, high-productivity economy of fast-rising living standards. Oh, and the robots were starting to take all the jobs.
Indeed, Andreessen offered his own critique of technological progress at the start of the outbreak in March 2020. In another essay, “It’s Time to Build,” he lamented the lack of transformational improvement in areas such as education, housing, and transportation. As Andreessen wrote back then, “Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?”
But also: Where are the masks, therapies, and vaccines? His answers point to more investment from and less regulation by government, as well as more imagination and physical-world creation by entrepreneurs: “We need to demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another. We’re all necessary, and we can all contribute, to building.”
No hyperloops yet, of course, but the vaccines are here and much sooner than many expected or even dreamed. And that wonderful surprise is one of the world-saving advances noted and praised by Andreessen in his new piece:
The most amazing COVID technology story has to be the vaccines. Moderna, a product of the American venture capital system, created the first mRNA COVID vaccine within two days of receiving the genetic code for COVID by email. It’s hard to overstate the tremendous advance in both speed and effectiveness of this new technological platform — and now that we know how well mRNA vaccines work, we can look forward to decades of new vaccines both for potential COVID variants and for many other health threats. We now have the technological tools to quite literally code nature, and the payoff to human flourishing will be profound.
More broadly, Andreessen offers a paean to how technology allowed the world to muddle through a pandemic in ways that wouldn’t have been possible just a couple of decades ago, whether working from home, learning from home, worshipping from home, or not going crazy at home (thanks to laptops, the internet, Zoom, and Netflix). And looking forward, Andreessen sees a “civilizational shift” from the permanent “divorcing [of] physical location from economic opportunity,” including cities having to compete for business and talent like never before.
But wait — does this mean that Andreessen’s gloomy 2020 essay was widely off the mark given what America has been able to accomplish? Time for a retraction? I don’t think so. While definitely critical of the state of American preparedness and capabilities (and that of other rich nations), “It’s Time to Build” was not one of those “America is a failed state” hot-takes that were popping up back then. Rather, I read it as an aspirational call to imagine a better future — one being prevented only by our lack of will to make it happen. And as it turns out, that call was supported by a surprising number of big advances last year. Now we need to keep the momentum going, both in terms of attitude and actions.
📉 The degrowth delusion
The following alarmist, apocalyptic quote from teen climate activist Greta Thunberg (spoken at a UN meeting in 2019) has stuck with me: “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” It’s a perfect summation of the degrowth outlook that embraces stagnation of living standards, or even reversal.
A more technical version of this view can be found in a new Scientific American op-ed, “The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth,” by two physicists who focus on the climate. The piece’s subhed: “Even ‘sustainable’ technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines face unbreachable physical limits and exact grave environmental costs.”
Of course, what these “limit to growth” arguments amount to, really, are “end of history” arguments. Their proponents are dismissive of claims that technological progress can constantly raise the ceiling of what is possible. They scoff at claims that even now global growth is “dematerializing” such that growth is essentially decoupled from nature. Example: Andrew McAfee, author of the 2019 book More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources ― and What Happens Next, told me in a podcast chat back then: “We are just treading more lightly on the planet. Total energy use in this country has been basically flat for about a decade, even though our economy is, I think, at least 15 to 20 percent bigger.”
Thunbergians counter that dematerialization is merely buying time, and therefore “proposals for ecocidal deep-sea and fantastical exoplanetary mining are an unsurprising consequence of a growth paradigm that refuses to recognize these inconvenient truths,” the SA piece concludes.
I mean, I guess so. There might well be obvious limits to growth — if those limits are self-imposed. Putting aside when, exactly, those limits might be reached, what is so “fantastical” about asteroid mining? Such a statement seems to more reflect a distaste for humanity exploiting nature than a sober evaluation of technological potential. And both deep-sea and exoplanetary mining seem more likely than, say, persuading the three-quarters of humanity that live in poverty — as rich countries would define it — to forever stay in such a position.
🎬 Remember domed dystopian classic Logan’s Run
The opening title sequence of the 1976 sci-fi film Logan’s Run neatly encapsulates the enviro-pessimism of the decade, as filtered through Hollywood screenwriters:
Sometime in the 23rd century… the survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind lives only for pleasure, freed by the servo-mechanisms which provide everything.
There's just one catch: Life must end at 30 unless reborn in the fiery ritual of carrousel.
Such environmental concerns really began to emerge in the 1960s, thanks in part to the best-selling books Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich. Indeed, the film Logan’s Run was based on a 1967 book of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. (One difference between the two works is the cut-off age. It’s 21 in the book, which is also a commentary on the youth culture of the day.) For an evening’s viewing, it pairs nicely with perhaps the greatest dystopian film of the era, Soylent Green from 1973. (Unfortunately a Logan’s Run remake is stuck in developmental hell.)
Yet in that “great domed city” of the film, one can still see a bit of surviving postwar techno-adventurism. While the idea of urban environments under glass (or some other material) popped up in early 20th century science fiction and futurism, the notion became the subject of more serious discussion in the 1960s. In 1960, for instance, engineer R. Buckminster Fuller proposed a two mile "geodesic dome” spanning Midtown Manhattan (from the East River to the Hudson River, from 21st Street to 64th Street) that would regulate weather, control pollution, and limit energy use. From an interview with Fuller:
I found that the surface of buildings [that] stood below our dome were 80 times the surface of my dome, which would mean that if you just had the covering over there, you’d reduce heat losses in New York 80 times. We would reduce down to about 20% of the amount of energy input you’d have to put in today . . . I began to figure out about a dome over Manhattan, finding I’d reduced the amount of surface [through] which it could gain or lose heat 80 times. Then I found once the covering was up there and as big as that, the rate of its loss of heat out from the dome to the outer world would be very, very greatly reduced. Therefore, the energies that you would have in your buildings, just for electric lights in New York City, would give you enough heat to take care of absolutely everything, just bouncing lights through the window. You would conserve the whole thing.
Fuller’s influence could also be seen in the ambitious plans for the never-built Minnesota Experimental City, a planned community in rural northern Minnesota, part of which would have been under a dome. The broader vision outlined by idea creator Athelstan Spilhaus, according to Smithsonian magazine, was for a “noiseless, fumeless, self-sustaining city [that] included underground infrastructure for transporting and recycling waste; a mass transit system that would slide cars onto tracks, negating the need for a driver; and computer terminals in every home that would connect people to his vision of the Internet—a remarkable prediction, given that computers of the era occupied entire rooms and no one was sending email. Spilhaus envisioned the city holding a population of 250,000 and costing $10 billion 1967 dollars, with 80 percent private funding and 20 percent public.”
Even though the dome idea was a response to growing environmental concerns, it still saw technology as a solution, very much fitting with the idea that technology solves problems, then creates problems, then solves those, too, as civilization keeps moving forward. That attitude is different than what we usually see now, where the notion that big problems can be tackled and solved has been replaced by risk aversion (such as with climate engineering research) and a lurid taste for catastrophism.
🌌 The case against space expansionism
The Expanse on Amazon Prime Video takes place several hundred years in the future when humanity has spread throughout the Solar System. It’s science fiction of the geopolitical-thriller variety. When the series begins, war is brewing between Earth and Mars, even as the oppressed colonists of the asteroid belt push for independence. It’s a scenario treated as a serious possibility by Daniel Deudney, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. He’s the author of the fascinating Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity, released in March 2020. In my recent Political Economy podcast, he sketched out his concerns. Doesn’t humanity need to expand beyond Earth, I asked him, if for no other reason than to guarantee the survival of humanity? Deudney’s response:
So let’s look at what would be entailed in humanity becoming a multi-planetary species: colonization of Mars, colonization of asteroids, and so forth. This would almost certainly produce an interstate anarchy. The assumption that the advocates make, and I think it’s well-founded, is that any colony which is big enough to provide existential risk insurance will be big enough to become politically independent. And once it becomes politically independent, we have to expect the same types of dynamics that have been characteristic of Earth history and interstate anarchy. … What is going to be the likelihood that we’ll have — as we have on Earth — wars and violent rivalries in what I call the Solar Archipelago? … The historical record on Earth is that frontiers are very violent places. Rivalries for making claims will be very likely.
Another factor: To what degree are the units like one another? On Earth, we think that units that are like one another — particularly if they are democracies — are less war-prone towards one another, and I think that colonies in space are likely to become very different than places on Earth. The advocates all say this. It seems intuitively obvious. And the most important difference that will invariably emerge will be a very fundamental one: biological species radiation. This is to say that the human species will start branching. This will occur inevitably, slowly, through processes of Darwinian evolution. But many of the advocates insist that we will do this more quickly with genetic engineering. And so it’s not only that we’re going to have multiple bodies in the solar system inhabited, they will be inhabited over time, almost inevitably, by intelligent species — at least as intelligent as us, with at least our levels of technology. But they will be radically different in their biological character than humans on the Earth.
It’s an interesting argument, but one which, I fear, would result in paralysis and stagnation in a forever Earth-bound civilization. (Indeed, the argument could have been made in the past to reject exploration of the New World.) I would rather humanity take its chances on moving forward, reaping the scientific and economic benefits of space, and solving problems as they come up rather than hoping an asteroid doesn’t strike us or a supervolcano doesn’t erupt or a gamma-ray burst doesn’t destroy the ozone layer. And perhaps the lack of nuclear conflict since WWII suggests Deudney’s worst-case scenarios aren’t inevitable.
How to solve the puzzle of missing productivity growth - Erik Brynjolfsson, Seth G. Benzell, and Daniel Rock | “Lastly—and most importantly—slowing productivity growth may be the result of technologies taking time to reach their full economic potential. We find this argument most convincing because of the nature of general-purpose technologies (GPTs) like artificial intelligence—those that are generally pervasive and can improve over time but require complementary investments that are both intangible (e.g. in data collection, employee training) and physical (e.g. computers, 5G towers).”
Fracking techniques could be used to generate energy with no carbon emissions - Andy Kessler, The Wall Street Journal | A good primer for the uninitiated on the promise of geothermal energy. And given its placement on the WSJ editorial page, perhaps a sign that a pro-abundance approach to environmental economics will soon gain some momentum on the right. A classic case, maybe, of building a permission structure to deal with climate change.
CRISPR injected into the blood treats a genetic disease for first time - Jocelyn Kaiser, Science | “Researchers have injected a CRISPR drug into the blood of people born with a disease that causes fatal nerve and heart disease and shown that in three of them it nearly shut off production of toxic protein by their livers. Jennifer Doudna, who shared a Nobel Prize last year for developing the gene editor CRISPR from a bacterial immune system and co-founded Intellia, sees even bigger prospects. The new work, she says, is “a critical first step in being able to inactivate, repair, or replace any gene that causes disease, anywhere in the body.”
Fear of Geoengineering Is Really Anxiety About Cutting Carbon - Gernot Wagner, Bloomberg | I’m not concerned about cutting carbon as long as that does not mean cutting living standards or the pace of progress. “Many—perhaps most—of those opposed to geoengineering research are afraid of a “moral hazard” of sorts. Merely looking into geoengineering technologies, the logic goes, would be a distraction from cutting CO2 emissions. It must not be.”