"Science has enjoyed broad public support as a foundation for technology. But as science increasingly tells us what we can’t expect to do in a world of diminished resources and compromised environment—rather than only opening up new possibilities—we’ll see how popular science remains." Read more: The future needs an attitude adjustment.
20 posts categorized "Quotes"
Greens and Numbers
"My feeling is that the green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers. Its single-minded obsession with climate change, and its insistence on seeing this as an engineering challenge which must be overcome with technological solutions guided by the neutral gaze of Science, has forced it into a ghetto from which it may never escape. Most greens in the mainstream now spend their time arguing about whether they prefer windfarms to wave machines or nuclear power to carbon sequestration."
"They offer up remarkably confident predictions of what will happen if we do or don’t do this or that, all based on mind-numbing numbers cherry-picked from this or that ’study’ as if the world were a giant spreadsheet which only needs to be balanced correctly. What is missing here is stories, and an understanding of the importance of stories in getting to the bottom of what is really going on. Because at root, this whole squabble between worldviews is not about numbers at all – it is about narratives."
"The fight between the pro-nukers and the anti-nukers, for example, is actually quite archetypal. Though both sides pretend to be informed by ’science’ and ‘facts’ both are actually informed primarily by prejudice. Whether you like nuclear power or not is a reflection of the kind of worldview you have: whether you are a confident embracer of the Western model of progress or whether it frightens or concerns you; whether you trust science or tend not to; whether you are cautious or reckless; whether you are ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative.’ On issues ranging from GM crops to capitalism, these are the underlying stories that actually inform the green debate. That they are then supported by a clutch of cherry-picked facts – easy to come by, after all, in the age of Wikipedia – is a footnote to what’s really going on."
Read more: The quants and the poets. Illustration.
Characteristics of Modern Technique (3)
"The type of work which modern technology is most successful in reducing or even eliminating is skilful, productive work of human hands, in touch with real materials of one kind or another. In an advanced industrial society, such work has become exceedingly rare, and to make a decent living by doing such work has become virtually impossible. A great part of modern neurosis may be due to this very fact; for the human being, defined by Thomas Aquinas as a being with brains and hands, enjoys nothing more than to be creatively, usefully, productively engaged with both his hands and his brains."
"Modern technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he does not enjoy at all."
"All this confirms our suspicion that modern technology, the way it has developed, is developing, and promises further to develop, is showing an increasingly inhuman face, and that we might do well to take stock and reconsider our goals."
Quoted from: "Small Is Beautiful", E.F. Schumacher, 1973.
Characteristics of modern technique (2)
Characteristics of modern technique (1)
The Industrialization of Traffic: Why Bicycles are Faster than Cars
"The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it."
"The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry."
"Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. The bicycle lifted man’s auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible."
"Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems."
Quoted form "Energy and Equity", Ivan Illich, 1978. The image was found on the website Old Woodies. Previously: Cars, out of the way. More bicycle posts.
Characteristics of Modern Technique (2)
"The great feat of medieval technics was that it was able to promote and absorb many important changes without losing the immense carryover of inventions and skills from earlier cultures. In this lies one of its vital points of superiority over the modern mode of monotechnics, which boasts of effacing, as fast and as far as possible, the technical achievements of earlier periods, even though the result, as in the case of monotransport by motor car or jet plane alone, may be far less flexible and less efficient than the more diverse and many-paced system which preceded it."
Quoted from "Pentagon Of Power: The Myth Of The Machine, Vol. II
Characteristics of modern technique (1).
Characteristics of modern technique (3).
Has There Been Progress Since 1250?
"Even in backward mining communities, as late as the sixteenth century more than half the recorded days were holidays; while for Europe as a whole, the total number of holidays, including Sunday, came to 189, a number even greater than those enjoyed by Imperial Rome. Nothing more clearly indicates a surplus of food and human energy, if not material goods. Modern labor-saving devices have as yet done no better."
Quoted
from "Myth of the Machine : Technics and Human Development
Has There Been Progress Since 1250?
"Fourastié [A French economist] is right in putting the case
numerically to dramatize the shortening of the work week and the
enormous transformation in living standards and in the qualitative
nature of life. The case is indeed simple if 1950 is compared with 1815.
But it is no longer quite so simple if 1950 is compared with 1250. It
is important to consider, for labor, not only time but intensity."
"It is possible to make a meaningful comparison between the
fifteen-hour workday of a miner in 1830 and the seven-hour workday of
1950. But there is no common denominator between the seven-hour day of
1950 and the fifteen-hour day of the medieval artisan. We know that the
peasant interrupts his workday with innumerable pauses. He chooses his
own tempo and rhythm. He converses and cracks jokes with every
passer-by."
"We cannot say with assurance that there has been progress from 1250 to 1950. In so doing, we would be comparing things which are not comparable. Therefore, it is advisable to limit ourselves to saying that there has been progress since the beginning of the industrial era, which was founded on the breakup and destruction of the non-comparable and vanished old order."
Quoted from "The
Technological Society
Characteristics of Modern Technique (1)
"The one best way": so runs the formula to which our technique corresponds. When everything has been measured and calculated mathematically so that the method which has been decided upon is satisfactory from the rational point of view, and when, from the practical point of view, the method is manifestly the most efficient of all those hitherto employed or those in competition with it, then the technical movement becomes self-directing. I call the process automatism. (...).
A surgical operation which was formerly not feasible but can now be performed is not an object of choice. It simply is. Here we see the prime aspect of technical automatism. Technique itself, ipso facto and without indulgence or possible discussion, selects among the means to be employed.
The human being is no longer in any sense the agent of choice. Let no one say that man is the agent of technical progress and that it is he who chooses among possible techniques. In reality, he neither is nor does anything of the sort. He is a device for recording effects and results obtained by various techniques. He does not make a choice of complex and, in some way, human motives. He can decide only in favor of the technique that gives the maximum efficiency. But this is not a choice. A machine could effect the same operation.
Quoted from "The Technological Society
Characteristics of modern technique (2)
Characteristics of modern technique (3)
The declining marginal return of research and development
The decreasing benefits from specialized, derivative work, viewed from the perspective of the overall history of science, are acquired at substantially greater cost. The costs to societies of early support of science tended to be minimal. Generally, as in the ancient Mediterranean or Medieval Europe, it consisted of little more than the support of individual naturalists or mathematicians and their students, or the support of religious specialists who also performed scientific inquiry. Science today, in contrast, is a costly process involving complex institutions, sophisticated technology, and large, interdisciplinary research teams.
This costly science certainly produces astonishing results, but these cannot be claimed to be more valuable than the generalized knowledge of earlier, less expensive science. As impressive, for example, as modern travel technology is, it is hard to argue that it is of greater consequence than the development of the wheel, or of water craft, or of the steam engine. As astounding as it is to put human beings on the moon, this is not of greater import than the principles of geometry or the theory of gravity. However valuable may be genetic engineering, the benefits of this complex process must always be attributed in part to the nearly cost-free work of Gregor Mendel. (...). Exponential growth in the size and costliness of science, in fact, is simply necessary to maintain a constant rate of progress.
Quoted from: "The Collapse of Complex Societies
City Life - Lessons in Vanity
"Already in the western world and Japan millions of city-dwellers and suburbanites have grown accustomed to an almost hermetically sealed and sanitized pattern of living in which very little of their experience ever impinges on non-human phenomena. For those of us born to such an existence, it is all but impossible to believe that anything is any longer beyond human adjustment, domination, and improvement. That is the lesson in vanity the city teaches us every moment of every day. For on all sides we see, hear, and smell the evidence of human supremacy over nature - right down to the noise and odor and irritants that foul the air around us. Like Narcissus, modern men and women take pride in seeing themselves - their products, their planning - reflected in all that they behold. The more artifice, the more progress; the more progress, the more security. We press our technological imperialism forward against the natural environment until we reach the point at which it comes as startling and not entirely credible news to our urban masses to be told by anxious ecologists that their survival has anything whatever to do with air, water, soil, plant, or animal."
Quoted from (again): "Where the Wasteland Ends
Good Question
"How much of what we readily identify as 'progress' in urban-industrial society is really the undoing of evils inherited from the last round of technological innovation?" Quoted from: "Where the Wasteland Ends
