This blog post explores whether humanity’s technological progress will persist and the possibility that its side effects could halt the future, analyzing the social impact.
We currently live in a world of constant advancement. While many may disagree with this proposition from an ethical or moral standpoint, there is little dispute that humanity has been on an unstoppable run in terms of science, technology, and economics—even if we occasionally falter or stumble. And at the core of this driving force lies humanity’s relentlessly active intellect and desire. Yuval Noah Harari, author of Homo Deus, anticipates the future brought by this relentless progress and expresses concern in this book. Through it, we envision that future together and ponder how we might avoid it.
Yet, his narrative of an advanced future rests on one premise: that human technology will continue to advance as it always has. At first glance, this premise seems self-evident. Progress has been an inseparable concept in capitalist society, and humanity has always walked the path of advancement in technological, economic, and scientific aspects. Yet, in this era where technology creates not just machines that efficiently repeat tasks, but technologies surpassing humans, can we truly believe technology will progress as it always has? Are there no other possibilities?
To consider this possibility, we need to look back at how technological progress has affected us. Throughout its advancement, technology has brought humanity numerous benefits. Technological progress lifted us from an era of traveling between cities by horse-drawn carriage and grinding grain with waterwheels, leading us to an age where we traverse continents by airplane and generate immense energy through nuclear power. It has also created intelligence capable of performing calculations and analyses beyond human capability. Yet, there have always been side effects lurking in the shadows. Airplanes have been used to bring down skyscrapers in foreign lands, killing countless people. Nuclear power has been employed to take human lives and destroy the environment. Furthermore, while technological progress has increased work efficiency, it has simultaneously created a surplus of unnecessary people. However, these side effects have not yet halted the overall advancement of technology. Why is that? To understand this, we must examine why and by what means technology advances.
First, considering what is necessary for technological advancement brings several factors to mind, but following the fundamental principle of capitalist society—the law of supply and demand—we can broadly divide these into two categories. The first involves factors related to the demand for technological advancement. For technology to progress, whether in laboratories or corporate research teams, capital is essential to cover labor costs, experimental expenses, maintenance fees, and more. Capital is raised through stock sales or corporate funding, ultimately stemming from the demand of those who believe they can profit from technological advancement. Only when entities possessing this demand invest capital can technology progress.
The second category involves factors related to the supply of technological advancement. Beyond money, other necessities exist for technological progress. It requires the entities driving development—technicians and engineers—along with laboratories for them to conduct experiments and a system that recognizes and utilizes their research outcomes. These technicians and engineers are referred to as human capital, while facilities like laboratories are called physical capital. Both demand and supply elements are essential for technological advancement.
However, the side effects arising as technology advances threaten these demand and supply elements. For example, on May 8, 2018, Google announced a technology called ‘Google Duplex’. This technology enables artificial intelligence to make phone calls autonomously based on user requests, such as scheduling appointments or booking hair salon appointments. Watching a demonstration of this technology, most people would likely be unable to distinguish between what the AI says and what a human says. Machines now know what answers to give to certain questions and with what nuance, and they can learn to fill in gaps. In such an environment, is there still a need for telephone customer service representatives? While some may be retained to handle potential AI errors, for most cases, companies would benefit from replacing them with AI. This example alone shows that people in jobs AI can replace will become unnecessary. Can unemployed call center agents re-enter society and find new jobs? Even if there are specialized professions AI hasn’t yet taken over, most former call center agents lack the knowledge to perform such specialized work. They also lack the time to undergo years of training or the money to pay for it, making specialized careers difficult to pursue. Even if they go to fast-food restaurants seeking simple jobs most people can do, machines taking orders have already replaced counter staff, and cleaning machines have taken over those roles.
So, can the government rescue these people as it did in the past? Just as President Roosevelt created jobs through large-scale public works projects during the Great Depression in the United States, similar approaches might generate employment today. But in a situation where using machines costs less than employing people, is there really a reason to hire people for public works? Even if people are hired as part of a relief effort, the nature of the competitive market means this approach has inherent limitations. Moreover, the number of professions that machines cannot replace is steadily decreasing. For instance, in the field of medicine, once considered a professional domain, AI systems like ‘Watson,’ trained on big data, now advise on patient treatments and analyze medical imaging data. Deep learning authority Geoffrey Hinton declared at an AI event in 2016, “It is obvious that within five years, AI will surpass radiologists,” and AI has indeed made that prediction a reality.
While this increasing loss of human jobs might raise the possibility of a renewed Luddite movement, it seems unlikely that fragmented modern crowds would destroy anything in today’s environment of enhanced security systems and an era centered on information-based resources. Therefore, unemployment is bound to rise, and as the number of unemployed increases, the market will stagnate. When the market stagnates, there is no guarantee that goods produced will sell, making people more likely to adopt a skeptical attitude toward the benefits achievable through technological advancement. Ultimately, the demand for technological progress collapses.
When demand collapses, problems also arise in the supply elements of technological advancement. Without demand, companies reduce their investment in research, physical capital like laboratories diminishes, and human capital decreases as fewer positions exist for engineers. This also reduces the vitality of systems like academia, deactivating the environment necessary for technological advancement. Furthermore, the scale of unpredictable accidents or disasters arising from technological progress is also increasing. In the era of horse-drawn carriages, accidents between carriages resulted in only a few injuries or deaths. Today, however, a single plane crash can kill dozens. Technological progress has also caused global disasters like global warming. In the future, the scale of such disasters could grow even larger, potentially undermining the justification for technological advancement and leading to its restriction.
Now, we can explain why technology advanced despite its side effects in the past, and why that might no longer be the case today. In the past, technological progress also created jobs that became obsolete or unnecessary. However, new occupations emerged that utilized intellect or emotion—areas once considered uniquely human. Governments and societies could provide jobs through these, maintaining a certain number of people with purchasing power. But now, there are no longer any uniquely human domains. Intelligence, once called the exclusive domain of humans, has been gradually eroded since computers began performing calculations, and when AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, it ceased to be solely human territory. Furthermore, even in the artistic realm, often thought to utilize human emotion, artificial intelligence is creating works so excellent they are easily indistinguishable from those of great composers. AI that understands human emotions and engages in conversation or counseling is also advancing. In this situation, finding work uniquely suited to humans will be extremely difficult, meaning the demand for technological advancement could collapse.
If the demand and supply for technological advancement collapse like this, technological progress could halt. Just as a product no one needs disappears from the market, technological advancement could meet the same fate. Various possibilities exist for how technological advancement might halt. A negative scenario could involve a massive depression triggered by the failure to implement effective countermeasures against workforce reduction, leading to a society where only those possessing wealth and technology survive. Conversely, a slightly more positive future might envision a society where governments successfully regulate technological advancement, and companies maintain the economy by assigning people to jobs. We will discuss the various possible futures in more detail later. For now, let’s first address the questions raised by the discussion so far.
Many people might object to the earlier claim that technological progress is ultimately driven by demand. For example, while cars today seem to have a clear purpose, they were not originally invented to meet a demand for transportation. When Nikolaus Otto built the first gas engine in 1866, people had already been accustomed to land transportation using horses for thousands of years, and it was a time when horses were being replaced by railroads. Horses were readily available, and there was little dissatisfaction with railroads. Consequently, people felt little need for Otto’s gas engine, or truck. However, after World War I, the military recognized the necessity of trucks. Truck manufacturers and the military lobbied to convince the public of this necessity, and trucks gradually began replacing horse-drawn carriages. This example suggests that invention and development can sometimes create new demand.
To explain this idea, I will borrow the perspective presented by Professor Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. In this book, Diamond explains that invention and development can sometimes create new needs. For example, the phonograph was originally invented for office use, but is now widely used for playing music. However, he explains that such development is the result of accumulated previous developments and innovations, and that these accumulated developments and innovations occurred when society felt unmet needs. To summarize, certain developments ultimately stem from other technologies that evolved in response to existing demand. Based on this perspective, addressing the earlier question leads to the conclusion that in a future lacking demand for technological advancement and innovation itself, the foundational technologies for new developments would be absent, potentially halting technological progress.
While we’ve discussed a future where technological progress stops, other possible futures are equally plausible. For instance, it is conceivable that another uniquely human domain beyond intellect and emotion might be discovered. Or, similar to how the United States successfully overcame the Great Depression by modifying capitalism through New Deal policies, it is possible to predict that society might undergo a comprehensive restructuring to prevent the collapse of demand for technological advancement. And since this narrative is fundamentally a prediction based on current social structures and technology, it may inherently contain a narrow and limited perspective. However, as Yuval Harari noted in Homo Deus, the very act of envisioning a future holds meaning in itself. I hope this narrative is considered with that ‘meaning’ in focus. Furthermore, I hope readers who encounter this piece will form their own opinions about the possibilities presented above and prepare for the approaching future accordingly.
