The fix is in

I was talking with a fellow once, at a bus stop. (To quell rumors that I hang around bus stops: I used to ride the city bus to my college classes.) We were talking about the rapid growth of the Albuquerque area. But, I said, availability of water would ultimately be the limiting factor.

"I'm not worried about water," he said. He waved a casual hand at the Sandia Mountains. "The scientists, they'll take that mountain apart and fuckin' turn it into water!"

I have carried that phrase with me ever since, for it is the perfect expression of what Kirkpatrick Sale calls the technofix - a near-religious belief that whatever problems humanity can create our technology will fix for us. And I use the term near-religious with due consideration, for faith in the technofix is akin to the faith which many religious folks carry with them: though things may not be ideal now, after ____________ (conversion, death, the Second Coming, the Rapture) everything will be heavenly. Faith in the technofix allows, almost encourages, ignoring the present while dreaming about the future.

I am just finishing reading Charles Stross' "Accelerando". Astute readers may point out that I recently said that I was reading Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near", which is correct. I am reading the books in parallel, and they work well together - Kurzweil projects trends, backed by charts and graphs, and Stross takes the trends and runs with them, discussing the human impact.

Stross has given me quite a bit to mull over. One area which I would not have considered is finance - how does trade work, when our paradigms of production have shifted? What serves as money? One very interesting concept presented by Stross is reputation as currency, one's "interest rating" itself being a marketable commodity (even traded on exchanges). Further thought is due, on this.

But both books inherently promote the technofix as inevitable and proper. Offhand and passing references are made to some potential problems, but each time momentum and more technofix serve to gloss over the problem. Technology as a hot quarterback, carrying the ball of humanity over the broken field to the dizzy heights of the touchdown.

I can see the attraction of such a view. Myself raised on the futurism which science fiction espoused, the idea of rapidly-accelerating change drawing us forward is exciting to me. Exhilarating. Intoxicating.

But I was also raised in a garden, with the ebb and flow of the seasons very apparent, and with cause and effect an inherent and understood foundation for progress and success. The garden is most "successful" when you understand nature, and work with it.

So if there was ever a fellow of two minds, you are looking at him.

I understand why few will challenge technological advancement, why the technofix seems natural to most and those who cry warning are considered as pessimistic neo-Luddites. It is because, by many measures and to most observers, for the last few decades the technofix has seemed to work. And I say "seemed" very carefully, because whether the fixes have actually worked or not is largely a matter of the timeframe being used:

In the shortterm: antibiotics seem to have subdued many life-threatening conditions

In the longterm: over-use of antibiotics has produced resistant and increasingly-virulent forms of diseases


In the shortterm: hybridized plants, artificial fertilizers and pesticides have greatly increased agricultural production

In the longterm: monocropping is increasing the likelihood of crop collapse, artificial fertilizers upset the balance of soil biota, and pesticides have challenged insects to evolve more rapidly


In the shortterm: increased availability of food resources has led to better nutrition for many humans on the planet

In the longterm: injudicious distribution and utilization of food resources has led to endemic obesity and health problems


I said above that I was a gardener. I have been gardening all of my life; my father grew food, my mother grew flowers. Working the soil for this year's crop and preparing it for the next is very natural for me. Wherever and however I have lived I have gardened, even if it was just a few houseplants or a patch of flowers outside the door. No pun at all: gardening keeps me rooted.

In the last 40 years the gardening catalogs have steadily increased the numbers of hybrid seeds made available. They are often featured as "sure-fire" choices. And no doubt about it - the plants resulting from the hybridized seeds are usually more robust, more resistant to disease and insects, and produce better than non-hybridized varieties.

But in that timeframe I have also noticed that there are more and more diseases which need to be countered. Plant diseases which were once no big problem in the home garden are now threatening crops, and newly-bred seeds and plants are continually being presented as offering resistance. The hybridization challenged the diseases, making them evolve faster.

This is something which the "singularitarians" seem to gloss over on a regular basis. Technological change does not occur in a vacuum, especially where natural processes are concerned. Blithe discussions of dropping nanotech into our natural world is all fine and well, nanotech has many exciting possibilities, but there is already a nano-biota in place on our planet, one which has developed over millions of years and the complexities of which we are only just beginning to understand.

I'll say that again: we only understand a very small fraction of just how the microorganisms of our planet work. A dynamic balance/imbalance is at the core of how these microorganisms interact, cooperate and challenge one another, a complex dance the steps of which have arisen over millenia. And what happens when someone attempts to join a complex dance without knowing the steps? Chaos, collisions, and people falling down.

You may have noticed that I above said that microorganisms both cooperate with and challenge each other. This is a part of evolution which many people only faintly grasp: cooperation is competition, and competition is cooperation. "The survival of the fittest" is at the core of Darwinism, but the quality of the prey dictates the quality of the predator. The predator "cooperates" with the prey (as a species) by removing the weak and improving the line of the prey as a whole. And the more challenged a predator is, the more rapidly it improves as a predator.

Human beings carry with them a smugly subsumed notion that they are at the top of the heap, evolution-wise. With our tools we have put ourselves above the predators which once ate our ape ancestors, with our technology we have stepped aside from many of the challenges with which other organisms must deal. We can live in any environment, control our immediate environment, and expand far beyond the natural restrictions for our species. As far as humanity is concerned, we have short-circuited evolution.

But it is again a matter of timeframe. We may pride ourselves as having no predators; beastie-wise, we are unchallenged. But the role of the predator in evolution is to remove the weakest. Having removed ourselves from predation, we inherently preserve our weakest. But it is only a temporary thing - regardless of our views, nature carries on. And new predators will emerge - are emerging - to thin the herd. In the absence of swift natural predators, there are two new predators looming on the horizon: diseases, and other humans. And disease may prove to be a swift predator after all - with their shorter individual lifespans, diseases which we challenge with our technological counters can evolve at a very rapid rate compared with our relatively much longer lives. We are a large and unexploited biomass on this planet, and we are breeding our own predators.

Technology is sexy, it is captivating, it is the shiny toy we all want as a child. The singularity is wow, it is the Star Trek holodeck, it can make you giddy with considering the possibilities. Human beings can jump very high, and very far.

But we had better first understand, and understand well, the point from which we are leaping off.