Class Essay 10/21

10/21 Essay: After Dan’s lecture, I would like to reinstall a bit of empirical optimism regarding the progress of humanity. Despite the very real difficulties data scientists, humanitarians, developers, and other leaders face, progress is being made over large time scales. Go to this website (a supplement to Peter Diamandis’s 2012 book “Abundance”) which illustrates various forms of progress across multiple dimensions of human well-being. Pick a topic heading. Write a description of each of the trends you see, i.e., for each figure. Do you think each trend actually represents progress? If not, why do you think? Finally, with Dan and A. Sen in mind, what do you think could be barriers to progress in each topic? (another way to think about this is: why do you think progress hasn’t occurred even more rapidly?) You have until 10:15.

I do first want to address the bias that the website itself and its concept has. By only including graphs and trends that display the possibility of progress, it is excluding all of the ways in which humanity has not progressed. Thus, this website can instill a false sense of optimism in those who visit it and can serve as an epistemic bubble of sorts in which only seeing hopeful trends displaying progress increase people’s pre-existing ideas about progress. That being said, I will subsequently discuss the topic “Increasing Technological Abundance”.

The majority of the trends depicted under the Increasing Technological Abundance topic deal with decreasing costs for technological advancements over time. For example, the cost to start an internet start-up company has decreased from five million dollars in 2000 to 5 thousand dollars in 2011, and it is likely even less now. Additionally, the bandwidth, computing, and storage cost-performance have decreased from $1,245 per gigabit/sec, 222 dollars per million transistors, and $569 per gigabyte, respectively, to less than ten dollars, less than six cents, and zero dollars, respectively. Lastly, the cost of sequencing a genome has decreased from 100 million dollars in 2001 to approximately 3 thousand dollars in 2014. I believe that these examples of decreasing the costs of technology are examples of human progress. Due to the decreasing costs, technology is more widely available globally and crosses many socioeconomic barriers. The increase in technological opportunities sparks further innovation, which can benefit the lives of people, such as sequencing genomes in order to study diseases and find possible cures. This specific increase in the availability of genome editing is also a trend depicted on the website and the graph shows that the number of publications on genome editing has increased from approximately 50 or fewer publications in 2010 to a thousand in 2016. Other trends depicted in this topic show that cell phones have eclipsed the need for other individual pieces of technology, such as camcorders or separate GPS devices. This points to the usefulness of cellphones, as it makes the internet and essentially the world available at your fingertips in ways that previous generations wouldn’t have even been able to imagine. I think that potential barriers to progress in this topic would be the training and education levels that it would take to make these technological advancements truly widespread available. Even though the technology exists, it sometimes could be useless if there are no proper systems in place to train people to use complicated systems, or there is a lack of infrastructure in place in developing countries to support massive amounts of technology, such as lack of wifi or ways to repair broken technology. Additionally, even though phones have made many technologies available at a lower cost, as shown by the table depicting how systems such as video chat and GPS are essentially “free” now with a smartphone, phones are not free and they are expensive. Thus, though these advancements might seem to be free, they are actually not affordable for many people, which hinders true human progress because there are exclusions of people from global connectivity. With true progress, everyone would be able to participate in globalization.

There is one chart that sticks out to me as not belonging to the topic “Increasing Technological Abundance”. This is the chart that shows a decrease in the US population living on farms, from 98 percent in 1800 to 42 percent in 1900 to 2 percent in 2000. I don’t think that this trend points to increasing technological progress and abundance as much as it points to increased urbanization. I believe that urbanization does represent progress, however, as it signifies increasing ability to live not just for survival, but for happiness, which Amartya Sen believes is the essential goal after we achieve developing all freedoms in society. However, urban societies have their own problems such as crime, pollution, and disease that some might view as counterintuitive to human progress.

Overall, the topic “Increasing Technological Abundance” depicts trends that show decreasing costs of technology and increasing availability of technology, which can contribute to the development and spread of ideas and further technology, but can still leave some groups out of the picture, thereby hindering their development.