Beware of the techno-optimists!

Again and again, I read articles in magazines which are claiming that some new technology will save the world’s poor or hungry, produce food with almost no environmental impact or make cities independent on that boring “junk space” called countryside. I am astonished how people cling to these news and uncritically spread propaganda from individual researchers seeking more funds or startups needing investors. The latest months it has been new “impossible foods“, the lab burgers (again), 3 D printing, green skyscrapers, aquaponics, you name it. Genetic engineering and precision farming are perennial such tales. 

The romantic ideal of small organic farms providing everyone with healthy natural food is impossible on a planet of seven billion people, soon to be nine or ten billion, argues Jayson Lusk (a food and agriculture economist at Oklahoma State University). In his new book, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World. In his view, not only is it impossible, it is also not desirable as it would mean that we reject the multiple benefits that the modern food system already has given us. And there is a lot more to come if we embrace modern food technology. Lusk presents the readers with stories how innovation and technology have found new solutions for, among others, production of eggs, 3-D food printing, robot cooks, synthetic biology, food fortification, genetic engineering, precision farming, meat tissue culture and food safety. 

According to Lusk, we don’t have to choose between prohibitively expensive organic eggs and eggs from hens held in miniscule cages. Instead we can design smart cages that combine the industrial scale with better consideration of the needs of the hen. Smart cages are just an example of how technology can solve most of our problems. “Sustainability and using agricultural technology is one and the same”, he states boldly – without providing any convincing evidence for it. 

Lusk relates many stories about new technologies. The relevance of the stories varies and a critical analysis is often lacking. Lusk readily admits that 3-D printing of food is expensive, incredibly slow (start your dinner while eating your lunch), demanding (3-D printers require CAD software) and not capable of making most of the food we like to eat - today. But he thinks those are all teething problems. My concern is more that 3-D printing of food and robocooks seems to be far-fetched solutions to marginal problems, and it certainly has nothing to do with “solving the world’s largest food and farming problems” as the jacket of the book claims.

Lusk claims that everything we eat is the result of hundreds or thousands of years of unnatural selection: “Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and kale didn’t exist before humans came along. All these veggies are descendants of the same plant, and they originated through artificial selection.” In the same vein he argues that genetically modified organisms are simply the next step in our technological evolution. Lusk states that the main obstacle to success is that the precautionary principle is taken too far. 

There is no doubt that technology has improved life for huge numbers of people. Plant and animal breeding have given us a variety of useful crops and livestock products – it is another thing if we should call breeding “unnatural”. Mechanical devices and tractors have made farming a lot easier. Food processing methods have made food safer to eat and sometimes tastier (think cheese). Sometimes, innovations have improved nutritional quality and the environment, but probably more often not. Technology and innovation will also in the future sometimes make wonders and other times wreck havoc. Some precaution has merit. 

But most importantly, technology can’t at all solve all problems of our food system. Like so many other techno-enthusiasts, Lusk forgets or neglects that food is a lot more than the intake of exact prescribed quantities of nutrients and that farming is an important tool for mankind’s stewardship of nature. He forgets that farmers and other actors in the food chain to a very large extent make their choices based on profitability, which is very different than making choices based on “science” or best practice. He seems to forget that trade-offs are not only mediated by technology or markets but more often by governments, local communities, farmers themselves or food activists. 

The messages of the techno-optimists is both deceptive and dangerous as it makes people believe that most problems can be solved by technological innovation which in turn make them passive in the political, social and economic arena. Of course, we can always improve technology, but in essence we already have (know) the technologies to feed the world’s population with healthy food in a sustainable way. The obstacles are economic, social and political. And that is where the struggle should be.

Nuclear power only possible with state backing.

'The Dream that failed' is the headline of the special report on nuclear energy in The Economist.Despite generous government research-and-development programmes stretching back decades, a new spring for nuclear does not look likely. The Economist says
"Innovation tends to thrive where many designs can compete against each other, where newcomers can get into the game easily, where regulation is light. Some renewable-energy technologies meet these criteria, and are getting cheaper as a result. But there is no obvious way for nuclear power to do so. Proponents say small, mass-produced reactors would avoid some of the problems of today’s behemoths. But for true innovation such reactors would need a large market in which to compete against each other. Such a market does not exist."

It is interesting that one of the reasons for why such markets don't exist any longer is the kind of de-regulation that The Economist has promoted for decades, and which most governments have adopted. It is then only logic that  it is almost only in countries where the government is regulating heavy that nuclear power has a future, for example in China. But not even in China is the future that bright. The Chinese plan to install more wind power than nuclear power the decades to come. But China is simply so weary of its energy future that it makes bets on all sorts of energy, well knowing that many of them will fail, and that NO energy source can quench the thirst of a business as usual Chinese expansion. 

The journal has also a realistic take on safety, giving some credit to those that highlighted the dangers: 'nuclear plants can be kept safe only by constantly worrying about their dangers'. 

Usually, techno-optimist the Economist, dismiss putting much faith in heavily promoted Generation III or Generation IV nuclear power plants. The fundamentals are simply not there and in more than fifty year, despite enormous money spent on research there have been no major break through for practical workable solutions, just a lot of hyped "new" technologies that never result in any commercially viable solutions. 

The Economist concludes that renewable energy is likely to play a much bigger role than nuclear in the future. Energy from renewable sources has also become much cheaper as new technologies develop and innovations come into play - while nuclear energy is just getting more and more expensive for every year.

And still we are not really calculating the true price for that technology. The costs for keeping storage for thousands of years are obviously not at all covered by anybody today. In the end they will end up neglected like other tombs for eternity, such as the pyramid - and then at a certain point tomb raiders, or some kids will fall into them....

Technology is rarely neutral

This is a sad hoax, for industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil. 

(Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society, 1971)

The Greeks knew the power of steam and built the first steam engine as a plaything; they even knew the principle behind electricity. Water toilets were developed in Egypt some 5000 years ago and were used by the Romans, but it took thousands of years before they came into common use. The wheel was known in Latin America, but was not used productively before Columbus. The first faxes were developed in the nineteenth century but it took another 100 years for them to become common.[1] Fuel cells, which are seen as technology for the future, have been around for more than 150 years, but never reached the stage of a technological breakthrough. The first steam engines in Sweden stood idle, collecting dust, mainly because they were not profitable and partly because there were no competent operators (Hård and Jamison 2005), a situation similar to that of a lot of technologies that are, mistakenly, introduced in developing countries today. All these examples show clearly that the existence or the knowledge of a technology doesn’t mean it will be used. 

Many reasons exist for why a technology is or is not used. The word technology comes from Greek techne, meaning ‘art’, and we know that a lot of technology was (and still is) used for pleasure, for the demonstration of power or for religion. Realms with a large population and a small elite whose wealth is based on extortion of the masses most likely developed very few productive innovations, the majority being developed to amuse and entertain the rulers. Therefore, technological development was very slow in the big agrarian empires.

War and conflict have been forceful drivers of innovation, comprising examples of the importance of government-supported innovation. The Egyptians knew of the wheel, yet their slaves used sledges to pull boulders for the pyramids. But the use of the wheel rapidly spread in its military application in the form of the chariot. One can also compare the spread of the saddle and the spur with the spread of the harness. The saddle and the spur were of critical military importance and gave a marked advantage to the armies using them, so they spread rapidly. The harness was mainly used for draught animals in farming and spread across the world very slowly (Lönnroth 1977). Modern examples of innovations with a military origin are pasteurization, the Internet and antibiotics. Communications is another area in which innovation was (and still is) very strong. Innovations in shipbuilding or navigation played a major role in determining which people would rule. The supple Viking ships could reach into narrow fjords and rivers and were key to the Viking expansion; later the cogs of the Hanseatic League took over, owing to greater capacity (Lönnroth 1977). Thus, societies that developed quicker or safer means of communication or those of higher capacity had a marked advantage over others. 

The Chinese emperors were sceptical to technological development as it threatened stability. The Japanese are another example. Japan first came in contact with guns in the sixteenth century. In the early seventeenth century, it produced more and better guns than any other country in the world. However, the samurai, the military nobility, felt threatened by this foreign invention and gradually managed to curb production and licensing. Ultimately production ceased altogether, and resumed only when the first American warships appeared in Japanese waters in 1853 (Diamond 1997). In France, the scythe was not allowed to replace the sickle for a long time because there were communal rights to graze cattle on stubble, the value of which would be lost if a scythe were used (Boserup 2005). 

Technology is not neutral. It serves the interest of the social group that develops it. With its symbolic power it supports the legitimizing ideology of society and the worldview it represents. Think of the steam engine or the space ship not to speak of the atomic bomb. Schiermeier et al. write that nuclear energy has ‘benefited from decades of expensive research, development and purchases subsidized by governments; without that boost it is hard to imagine that nuclear power would currently be in use’ (2008: 18). Technology has also enabled development of the modern city and the relative independence of its hinterland. The early cities were, with a few exceptions, built on the relationship with the surrounding agrarian landscape. A lot of production occurred in the farms and the economy of the city and its hinterland was interwoven. With the Industrial Revolution, the transport revolution and capitalism, cities could free themselves from ties to their hinterland for raw materials, labour and markets. Thus, workers in Manchester spun cotton from the United States, picked by African slaves, and sold the fabrics in India.  

Technology also creates or cements power relationships and patterns of exploitation in various ways. Mostly, technological developments lead to suppliers of raw materials getting a rough deal compared to those who use the products of a certain technology. This is the basis for accumulation of capital, for profit, in industrial processes where ‘raw materials + work + cost of production’ has a lower value than the product resulting from these inputs. The same holds true in international trade or in the international division of labour. Alf Hornborg (2009) goes as far as stating that technology in a fundamental way is about such price relationships and a tool for exploitation; there is no technological rationality separate from issues of distribution.

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[1]            To soon be forgotten again. Young readers will probably have to look up ‘fax’ in Wikipedia to check what it is.

The business plan of the factory is to produce externalities

To a very large extent, many of our industrial technologies are about producing "externalities". The industrial capitalist model extracts resources in distant places (destroying other peoples' nature and possibly livelihoods), it has workers do something with them and pay them only part of the added value, the cost of pollution is carried by the local communities, the cost of health care is footed by society, the cost of schooling the workers is covered by society etc. The products are sold at a profit and the waste is someone else's problem. Our natural and social "commons" are resource pools and dumping grounds for the factory. Those that are most successful in externalising their costs are the most successful. "The rationale of machine technology is to (locally) save and liberate time and space, but (crucially) at the expense of time and space consumed elsewhere in the social system" as summarized by Alf Hornborg (2006). When one realise this, one see that what economists are calling "externalities" as if they were some kind of mistake in the process, are part and parcel of the business plans that are behind factories. Of course, there are tools and machines that are producing very few externalities or where those externalities are very small. By and large, however, competition drives industries into increasing externalities. The most apparent example is re-location of factories, to the emerging economies, where salaries are lower and regulations laxer. Many more trends in modern manufacturing can be viewed with that perspective. There is always a counter-movement from society to pressurise industries to take care of those externalities, as they are indeed damaging.

Hornborg (2009) shows how the unequal exchange underlying machine technology can be exposed by measuring the net flows of biophysical resources such as energy, matter, embodied land (ecological footprints), or embodied labour. The mechanical ‘power’ of the machine is to a large extent also an expression of the economic and ideological ‘power’ through which it is sustained. Ultimately, what keeps our machines running are global terms of trade, where the poor get a raw deal. Like with so many other discussions it is hard to discern cause and effect. Is it technology, the machine, as such that creates this imbalance in power, or is the imbalance in power that skews the application of technology into favouring the powerful? I think that they are mutually reinforcing, like so many other issues. In the market place, it is clearly technologies - and organizational forms - that tilts the terms of trade in your favour that will survive. Technology has created the illusion that economic processes can "produce" resources; that we through technological and economic transformation of raw materials into consumer goods can make more resources available; for the price of a particular consumer good, we can buy more material than were used for the production of the good. This is also reflected in the extraction of added value from labour. The value (price) of a good is higher than the work embedded in it, after deduction of other costs, which means that the capitalist can buy more work. These are also the mechanism by which capitalism, technology and economic growth are intrinsically intertwined, and one more reasons for why sustainable capitalism is an oxymoron.

Hornborg, Alf 2006, Footprints in the cotton fields: The Industrial Revolution as time-space appropriation and environmental load displacement, Ecological Economics, Volume 59 Issue: 1, Pages: 74-81

Hornborg, Alf 2009, Zero-Sum World Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System, International Journal of Comparative Sociology Vol 50(3–4): 237–262