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Future Technology and the Arts
Frederick TurnerTechnology is created to serve human interests. How will human interests change duringthe coming century? Often we don’t recognize our true economic interests until we havealready wasted much time pursuing obsolete ones. The first European explorers of theAmericas indeed misunderstood their own interests: they were looking for preciousmetals (which though abundant were never as much so as their seekers wished) when thereal riches of the new world were the great precolumbian food and stimulant crops, andthe fertile land and rich base metal resources of the western continents. The gold andsilver brought back by the Spanish monarchy had the complex economic effect of impoverishing and depopulating Spain and enriching its enemies, England and Holland.In Iberia profitable farming, with the dense population it supports, was priced out of thesocial market, to be replaced by flocks of voracious goats that ate the vegetation, damagedthe soil, and dried out the climate. Bankers along the Rhine, the Danube, the Po, and thecoasts of the North Sea and Baltic grew rich on high-interest loans taken out by Hapsburg
monarchs to finance the defenses of their far-flung empires; the accumulation of capitalfuelled the northern European industrial revolution, whose raw materials were themundane bulk commodities the Hidalgos had scorned. The true beneficiaries of theColumbian discovery were not the aristocrats, sailors and warriors but the farmers andplanters that followed them, and the businessmen and industrial entrepreneurs thatfollowed
them
.The basic wealth of feudal aristocrats, what they correctly perceive it in their interest topossess, is land with an established peasant population. The way to obtain this wealth isby conquest or marriage, and the pool of such wealth is limited: one warlord's gain isanother's loss, there is an unchanging pie to be divided according to the courage,intelligence, charisma and luck of the individual. The secondary wealth of such leaders isportable works of precious metals and other rare durable materials, embodying finecraftsmanship--objects that can alleviate the drabness of a subsistence economy, that cansymbolize the magical powers of command and education at the disposal of the elite, thatcan be given as rewards for service to a faithful thane or samurai, and that can honor theGod of Christendom (or the mandate of Heaven, or the pyramid of Tlaloc). It is suchgoods that the conquistadors were seeking; but at the moment they found it, the gamechanged, the pie started to get bigger, wealth changed its colors, other currencies began toharden. Free farmers could get more out of the soil than could serfs; traders couldmultiply the local value of things by the alchemy of the market; craftsmen could leverageproduction upward by new technologies; city republics could bankrupt counts and dukes.The very meaning of America, as a resource and as a set of interests, changed as theEuropean conquest proceeded.2
Thus by analogy if we are to get an accurate picture of the future of technology, we mustrecognize the successive waves of economic energy through which our presentcivilization is passing, the changes of paradigm whereby the nature of wealth changes andthe interests that drive human effort migrate and transform. A modern economy is notlike the old notion of a balanced ecology, in which every species occupies its own fixedecological niche and a mysterious set of feedbacks preserves a homeostatic harmonyamong them; instead, it is much more like the present model of ecological succession,where clusters of species rise, replace their predecessors at the top of the food chain, andare demoted, giving way to others, and the very shape and identity of the ecologicalniches undergo continuous irreversible metamorphosis. We live in a world of economictransvaluation, in which each wave of succession reaches and passes its point of maximum capital flow, employment, and cultural influence, to be succeeded by a furtherwave. Obsolescence disrupts people's lives, and at the same time society as a wholebecomes--erratically but inevitably--richer and more full of opportunities for thosewilling to use them. As each new wave comes along, the disparities in wealth betweenthe rich and the poor first increase, and then decrease, leaving the average person withmuch more disposable income than before.Two hundred years ago America was an agrarian nation, in which 90% of the peopleworked on farms and 90% of the capital commitment and cultural energy was going intoagricultural production. Prices were relatively high enough, and the production systemlabor-intensive enough, to support a large rural population. Wealth was widelydistributed, reinforcing the American political ethic of equality that de Tocquevillecelebrated. Then with the introduction of such devices as the cotton gin and the combineharvester, the cost of production dropped rapidly, prices collapsed, production sharplyincreased, the number of workers needed fell off sharply, and, after an initial increase in3
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