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The Limits of Technology

Posted by eric on June 11th, 2010

In the vein of keeping this discussion on technology going, I wanted to bring up an article I read in The New Yorker a few weeks back that raised some interesting questions about the limits of technology in solving certain global challenges.

The article focused around this badass inventor named Saul Griffith, who early on in his career had an idea for creating cheap eyeglasses for people in third world countries–places where large percentages of the population lacked proper eye care. Typically, making lenses for glasses requires huge quantities of very precise, unique and expensive molds. His response to this came in the form a contraption that consisted of two easily adjustable membranes, in-between which a lens material could be poured, allowing for the easy and relatively cheap creation of essentially an infinite number of lens shapes.

He got all kinds of grant money to make this thing, but in the end it flopped. This happened for two reasons. First, as it turns out, once you already have all of the numerous, more expensive molds made, making lenses from them is actually really cheap; you just have to pay for postage to have them shipped from the factory. Second, and more importantly, the real cause of poor eye health in the third world isn’t the unavailability of cheap eyeglasses, but rather the lack of adequate medical care.

Griffith’s (however brilliant) lens-making device is illustrative of the limits of technology in solving certain problems. Throwing a new piece of technology at a problem doesn’t necessarily get at the root of things and might not be the automatic best approach, as we often tend to think of it. In many cases, the real solution is a societal or cultural one.

To further illustrate the point, Griffith, who has moved on to doing some kickass work in renewable energy research these days, has done some shocking calculations regarding the current state of our global energy affairs. As he sees it, in correlation with current views from climatologists, to get greenhouse gasses under control with a global temperature increase of only 2 degrees, we would need to replace 72% of our current global energy use (which is 13 trillion of a total 16 trillion watts, by the way) with renewable, carbon free sources–the equivalent of building “…a hundred square meters of new solar cells, fifty square meters of new solar-thermal reflectors, and one Olympic swimming pool’s volume of genetically engineered algae (for biofuels) every second for the next twenty-five years; one three-hundred-foot-diameter wind turbine every five minutes; one hundred-megawatt geothermal-powered steam turbine every eight hours; and one three-gigawatt nuclear power plant every week.”

If we’re being realistic, all of that’s not probably going to happen. And if we want to further extrapolate, just like the eyeglasses scenario, the solution to the problem of sustainable energy isn’t likely to come from a brilliant piece of new technology. All the while, most of us look glossy-eyed to the scientists of the world for the magical answer to our impending energy emergency. To fix this problem, we will have to take responsibility for it on a personal level. As a society of energy consumers, we’re going to have to change how we think about our energy use and run our lives in a more conscious way.

Robots are still totally awesome though. I don’t think we have to get rid of robots necessarily.

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2 Responses to “The Limits of Technology”

  1. June 12th, 2010 at 1:57 pm

    BLin says:

    I read this same article and I think that it is definitely a good point. On the other hand, I think this falls into a different sort of category other than a larger indictment of the limits of technology, namely that of romanticization of the scientific process.

    I ran into this a little bit with my father last weekend, who is convinced that there will be some sort of magic bullet scientific solution to our energy crisis, and the only reason it hasn’t been discovered yet is entirely due to incentive structures pointing in other directions. While this may have some effect (see California and refrigerator efficiency), but I think it is largely off-base. There’s a big problem with this line of thinking, which has the grandiose vision of super-smart, lab-coat-wearing scientists, toiling away in windowless rooms solving the world’s problems. It’s the we-can-solve-anything-if-we-put-our-minds-to-it mindset that is largely at odds with a huge portion of scientific discoveries.

    A huge number of things were discovered by accident. Another huge number of things were invented for something else, thrown into the junk heap, only to be re-applied in an ingenious fashion. And on top of this, most things in science happen incrementally. One guys finds out a little nugget, another guy builds on it, and, one day, anti-climactically, we have some awesome tech.

    I think this is the thing largely missing from the discussion on energy. Efficiency gains will be the single greatest weapon against global warming, and these efficiency gains will happen slowly, without fanfare, and with little visibility into the “technology” that they are built on.

    Take the world of digital electronics, for example, specifically mobile devices. While there have been improvements to battery technology, the large majority of improvements that allow for better devices come in the form of efficiency gains. The new iPhone benefits from a custom designed efficient ARM-based chip, better size efficiency of other hardware which allows for a larger battery, and a more efficient screen. In tandem, these relatively small incremental improvements produce a better device using less power that lasts longer than before. In essence what we have here is a microcosm of an energy crisis.

    Now we can say that the grandiose image of technology failed, because a new awesome battery technology hasn’t emerged, or we can laud the specific efficiency-boosting engineering solutions as the great pieces of technological improvement that they are. I’ll take the latter.

    Then again, I never was much of a romantic. :)

  2. June 14th, 2010 at 6:05 am

    brad says:

    Thanks for introducing this Eric, I’m enjoying these lenghthy discussions.

    There’s also been some talk about the limits of technology in terms of the catastrophe in the Gulf.

    BLin, thanks for painting a clear picture about the importance of efficiency improvements. There are companies that work on energy efficiency improvements in buildings, which are very complex and will have a huge influence on society’s ‘sustainability’. I think in general, technological developments in HVAC (Heating Ventilating and Air Conditioning) and other building techs are largely taken for granted. Most buildings are more or less custom designed; an energy efficient, elegant HVAC system can take hundreds of man hours to get right. And few people really understand the benefits of good insulation and insulated glass.

    I am also pretty deeply concerned about Griffith’s renewable energy replacement calculation. I think it’s becoming more and more clear that no technological advancement would provide a magic bullet to the energy solution. I’m concerned that there is no feasible technological effort that can sustain the average western lifestyle, and to me that means that there needs to be a relatively quick change of habit, although I’ll be happy to hear a more optimistic opinion.

    Actually, there is a book that’s pretty optimistic about the future called “The Rational Optimist”. It’s by Matt Ridley, a really clear and thoughtful pop science writer. I haven’t read it yet, but I’d like to.

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