Machine
Why would anyone in their right mind write a book right now that is called “Beyond the Age of Machines”? With all the recent excitement about “artificial intelligence,” with so much breakneck technological progress all around us, are we not just about to properly enter this age? Why is this book not called “Into the Age of Machines,” or even “Hail the Age of Machines?” Is it some sort of reactionary treatise? Are we against technological progress, trying to slow, stop, or even reverse it? Even if we were not, why would we want to move “beyond the age of machines?” Technology has brought so many benefits to humans. We may not always realise it, but we live in the best of times. It is undeniably true: we are, on average, more peaceful, better nourished and educated, wealthier and healthier than ever before. We are enjoying unprecedented personal and political liberties, and we have more energy and gadgetry available than any previous human civilization. At least in the Global North, the ordinary person enjoys luxuries that would be the envy of ancient queens and kings.
Most of this is driven by the seemingly unstoppable evolution of our technology. It has been going on for millenia, but greatly accelerating in recent times. Why would we want to exit or change this dynamic now? What does it even mean to go “beyond the age of machines?” And why is it important to think and write about this topic at this particular point in human history?
Where shall we begin? Maybe it’s good to start by clarifying a central point: “the age of machines,” as we will use the term, refers to a worldview, not a stage of technological development. If it were the latter, we could argue that humanity has been in the age of machines since our ancestors created the first flintstone tools in the lower palaeolithic, a bit more than 3 million years ago. Ancient civilisations were heavily driven by technology. Then there is the industrial revolution or, in fact, a whole series of industrial revolutions. Some people claim that we are currently going through the fourth iteration, which is blurring the lines between the physical and virtual world. We’ll come back to that. But for now we just want to point out that our main focus is not on tools or technology, not on actual machines. We do not want to stop technological innovation. Quite the contrary. We want to improve its overall quality and long-term sustainability. For this, we need a different philosophical and scientific foundation, a different view of the world, than the one we currently have.
It may well be that we live in the best of times. Yet, humanity is in deep trouble. It would be a grave mistake to overestimate the power and reach of our past achievements, and to project them linearly into the future. It is quite obvious that, despite all our current prosperity, we find ourselves at a crucial turning point in human history — a kairos. We are experiencing a series of interlocking ecological, psychological, social, political, and economic crises that combine into a true metacrisis. The pickle humanity is in has many different causes, and manifests itself in various seemingly disconnected ways. The metacrisis is the ultimate hyperobject of our age. It defeats our traditional approach to problem solving. And underneath it all lurks a problem that is deeply philosophical in nature. It is an existential confusion that deeply affects our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world.
The prevalent worldview of our age is based on a number of assumptions we actually know, deep down, to be false. Yet we stick with them anyway, out of convenience or laziness, perhaps, or maybe out of a craving for comfort. The world can be an intimidating and bewildering place. When thinking clearly, we realise it is far beyond our grasp. Whatever we do, there are almost always unintended consequences. In fact, there are more and more of these as the complexity of our lives and of our societies rapidly increases. Sometimes, we cannot face such radical uncertainty, we cannot admit our own cluelessness, and so we wrap ourselves in an illusory blanket of certain knowledge and total control.
This creates a dangerous problem. It prevents us from seeing the seriousness of our situation. To put it simply: humanity is suffering from a pretty bad case of mistaking the map for the territory. Once more, there is a spectre haunting our world — the spectre of foolishness. We consistently misjudge and overestimate ourselves and our abilities. This leads to a profound lack of wisdom when we need wisdom most. We are suffering from a widespread shared delusion that ends up causing self-destructive individual and collective behaviours which now pose an existential threat to the future of our species. Isn't it ironic that it may be a form of toxic optimism that will do us all in?
The particular map we are confusing for the territory, the delusion we are suffering, is the idea that the world and everything in it is a machine. In recent times, as a consequence of the onset of the information age and the emergence of a global cyberspace, we have further narrowed this delusion down to the peculiar notion that the world behaves as if it were a (human-built) computer. Many of our most famous thinkers (and others, less sophisticated but often more opinionated) believe that every physical process in the universe is equivalent to some kind of computation. This belief (no longer a mere metaphor) is so well established in our minds that we don’t realise anymore that it is not grounded in any evidence. We’ll talk about how this unfortunate and bizarre situation has come about in the next section.
For now, we just want to highlight the psychological appeal of this view: it renders the world predictable, understandable, controllable — a manipulable mechanism. We imagine ourselves to be the operators of a vast and powerful machine. We believe that we are in charge and that we know what is going on. This allows us to anticipate with some confidence what will happen next. It’s not difficult to see that this view provides comfort in an age where old certainties are no more, and we are left without any solid metaphysical footing.
There is only one problem: the world is not a machine, and very few processes within it actually correspond to the workings of a computer. Most of these we’ve actually built ourselves: they are our machines, built according to our own specifications. We begin to see how circular the machine view really is. The claim that everything else in the world should also behave like our latest invention is, frankly, absurd and very parochial. A human illusion of grandeur. We are not even sure the idea works well as a metaphor, we are not sure whether it is a useful map. But it certainly is not the territory! The machine view is an idea that we need to unlearn if we are to see our dilemma (and our world) more clearly. It is an idea we need to unthink if we want to regain a better grip on reality.
This is what going “beyond the age of machines” means to us: to go beyond the view of the world as a machine. And this is what this book is about: it suggests a different philosophical worldview and, based upon it, an alternative kind of framework for doing science in the 21st century. We urgently need a new foundation for how we invent, deploy, and organise our technology. More generally, we need a new way by which we relate to the world. We need to apprehend our situation more clearly.
A civilization built upon technology is not the problem. But a civilization treating itself and the whole world as a machine definitely is.
Why would anyone in their right mind write a book right now that is called “Beyond the Age of Machines”? With all the recent excitement about “artificial intelligence,” with so much breakneck technological progress all around us, are we not just about to properly enter this age? Why is this book not called “Into the Age of Machines,” or even “Hail the Age of Machines?” Is it some sort of reactionary treatise? Are we against technological progress, trying to slow, stop, or even reverse it? Even if we were not, why would we want to move “beyond the age of machines?” Technology has brought so many benefits to humans. We may not always realise it, but we live in the best of times. It is undeniably true: we are, on average, more peaceful, better nourished and educated, wealthier and healthier than ever before. We are enjoying unprecedented personal and political liberties, and we have more energy and gadgetry available than any previous human civilization. At least in the Global North, the ordinary person enjoys luxuries that would be the envy of ancient queens and kings.
Most of this is driven by the seemingly unstoppable evolution of our technology. It has been going on for millenia, but greatly accelerating in recent times. Why would we want to exit or change this dynamic now? What does it even mean to go “beyond the age of machines?” And why is it important to think and write about this topic at this particular point in human history?
Where shall we begin? Maybe it’s good to start by clarifying a central point: “the age of machines,” as we will use the term, refers to a worldview, not a stage of technological development. If it were the latter, we could argue that humanity has been in the age of machines since our ancestors created the first flintstone tools in the lower palaeolithic, a bit more than 3 million years ago. Ancient civilisations were heavily driven by technology. Then there is the industrial revolution or, in fact, a whole series of industrial revolutions. Some people claim that we are currently going through the fourth iteration, which is blurring the lines between the physical and virtual world. We’ll come back to that. But for now we just want to point out that our main focus is not on tools or technology, not on actual machines. We do not want to stop technological innovation. Quite the contrary. We want to improve its overall quality and long-term sustainability. For this, we need a different philosophical and scientific foundation, a different view of the world, than the one we currently have.
It may well be that we live in the best of times. Yet, humanity is in deep trouble. It would be a grave mistake to overestimate the power and reach of our past achievements, and to project them linearly into the future. It is quite obvious that, despite all our current prosperity, we find ourselves at a crucial turning point in human history — a kairos. We are experiencing a series of interlocking ecological, psychological, social, political, and economic crises that combine into a true metacrisis. The pickle humanity is in has many different causes, and manifests itself in various seemingly disconnected ways. The metacrisis is the ultimate hyperobject of our age. It defeats our traditional approach to problem solving. And underneath it all lurks a problem that is deeply philosophical in nature. It is an existential confusion that deeply affects our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world.
The prevalent worldview of our age is based on a number of assumptions we actually know, deep down, to be false. Yet we stick with them anyway, out of convenience or laziness, perhaps, or maybe out of a craving for comfort. The world can be an intimidating and bewildering place. When thinking clearly, we realise it is far beyond our grasp. Whatever we do, there are almost always unintended consequences. In fact, there are more and more of these as the complexity of our lives and of our societies rapidly increases. Sometimes, we cannot face such radical uncertainty, we cannot admit our own cluelessness, and so we wrap ourselves in an illusory blanket of certain knowledge and total control.
This creates a dangerous problem. It prevents us from seeing the seriousness of our situation. To put it simply: humanity is suffering from a pretty bad case of mistaking the map for the territory. Once more, there is a spectre haunting our world — the spectre of foolishness. We consistently misjudge and overestimate ourselves and our abilities. This leads to a profound lack of wisdom when we need wisdom most. We are suffering from a widespread shared delusion that ends up causing self-destructive individual and collective behaviours which now pose an existential threat to the future of our species. Isn't it ironic that it may be a form of toxic optimism that will do us all in?
The particular map we are confusing for the territory, the delusion we are suffering, is the idea that the world and everything in it is a machine. In recent times, as a consequence of the onset of the information age and the emergence of a global cyberspace, we have further narrowed this delusion down to the peculiar notion that the world behaves as if it were a (human-built) computer. Many of our most famous thinkers (and others, less sophisticated but often more opinionated) believe that every physical process in the universe is equivalent to some kind of computation. This belief (no longer a mere metaphor) is so well established in our minds that we don’t realise anymore that it is not grounded in any evidence. We’ll talk about how this unfortunate and bizarre situation has come about in the next section.
For now, we just want to highlight the psychological appeal of this view: it renders the world predictable, understandable, controllable — a manipulable mechanism. We imagine ourselves to be the operators of a vast and powerful machine. We believe that we are in charge and that we know what is going on. This allows us to anticipate with some confidence what will happen next. It’s not difficult to see that this view provides comfort in an age where old certainties are no more, and we are left without any solid metaphysical footing.
There is only one problem: the world is not a machine, and very few processes within it actually correspond to the workings of a computer. Most of these we’ve actually built ourselves: they are our machines, built according to our own specifications. We begin to see how circular the machine view really is. The claim that everything else in the world should also behave like our latest invention is, frankly, absurd and very parochial. A human illusion of grandeur. We are not even sure the idea works well as a metaphor, we are not sure whether it is a useful map. But it certainly is not the territory! The machine view is an idea that we need to unlearn if we are to see our dilemma (and our world) more clearly. It is an idea we need to unthink if we want to regain a better grip on reality.
This is what going “beyond the age of machines” means to us: to go beyond the view of the world as a machine. And this is what this book is about: it suggests a different philosophical worldview and, based upon it, an alternative kind of framework for doing science in the 21st century. We urgently need a new foundation for how we invent, deploy, and organise our technology. More generally, we need a new way by which we relate to the world. We need to apprehend our situation more clearly.
A civilization built upon technology is not the problem. But a civilization treating itself and the whole world as a machine definitely is.
Descartes
How did we get ourselves into this metaphysical mess? Even though it seems without alternatives at present, the view of the world as a machine is a very recent invention. Historians are arguing about when exactly the scientific revolution occurred, whether it was a properly definable historical event, and who exactly was involved and affected by it and when. Be that as it may, we can date the appearance of the idea of the world (and ourselves) as a machine quite precisely, and it correlates tightly with the emergence of what we call the age of modernity.
It may be hard to believe today, but up to the late 16th and early 17th century, humanity had never made an explicit distinction between living and non-living matter, between organism and mechanism. Our prehistoric ancestors had an animistic worldview. Their universe was filled with living spirits. The whole world was alive. Similarly, later polytheisms (across the globe) personified natural elements and events in anthropomorphic pantheons. More abstract ideas about nature arose in China, India, and Europe during the Axial Age, about 800 to 300 years BCE. The emerging Western monotheistic traditions, for example, discouraged picturing their all-encompassing deities as human-shaped, even though they never quite managed to get rid of the folkloristic image of a bearded old man. In contrast, the Dao is a principle that is entirely shapeless and unutterable, yet the ultimate source of everything. Still, it is not entirely abstract or transcendental, as it can be directly experienced by adept and wise human beings. In Greece, Anaximander of Miletus claimed that nature is governed by laws, not deities. He is sometimes called the first “scientist,” but this is an anachronism because that term was only invented in the 19th century. Anaximander called the indefinite and boundless that is the source of all things apeiron. Yet, even this most abstract of pre-Socratic worldviews is not mechanistic in the modern sense. The undefinable nature of the apeiron isn’t anything like a machine.
The most dominant conceptual framework among ancient and mediaeval sages in the West was Aristotelianism. It made a very clear distinction between the natural and the artificial. In fact, it completely separated the two. Nature, in this view, is the exact opposite of a machine! This is where the phrase “art imitates nature” comes from: what humans create is mere mimicry, a pale reflection of the real thing. You cannot learn anything about nature from studying human artefacts. This is why experiments were not seen as legitimate philosophical practice at the time.
On top of that, Aristotelianism had an idea of motion that was intrinsically purposive: the four natural elements on Earth are naturally drawn to their predetermined resting state, which explains change and decay in the terrestrial realm. Earth and water go down, air and fire go up. (The “quintessence” of the heavens, in contrast, was thought to be immutable and perfect.) In this sense, Aristotelian physics, which continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was modelled more on the goal-directed behaviour of an organism rather than the preprogrammed functioning of a machine.
This only changed with the advent of the scientific revolution, and it changed radically. The natural philosophers of the early 17th century explicitly defined themselves as “moderns,” in opposition to the Aristotelianism of the ancients. To overcome Aristotelian teleology, that is, the principle that all earthly objects somehow “know” where they belong, they pictured the world as a lifeless machine, and founded what they called mechanical philosophy, an early form of what we call mechanicism today. Francis Bacon, in his Instauratio Magna of 1620 (which includes the famous New Organon) was the first to declare that “the artificial does not differ from the natural in form or essence.” But this is not yet exactly the same as saying the world is a machine.
That second leap was made by René Descartes, and this is the exact date on which the age of machines begins. Well, the date is not that exact: Descartes wrote two treatises between 1630 and 1633 called The World and Treatise of Man. Both were only published after his death. In these two essays, he outlines his version of mechanical philosophy, which he later puts on what was then judged to be a solid metaphysical basis in his most famous works, Discourse on the Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). Descartes not only explicitly frames the world as a machine, a mechanism, in which all objects are composed exclusively of interacting material components, but also sees the implication this has for living beings, including us humans. In the Treatise, Descartes writes that “the human body is indistinguishable from a perfectly designed automaton.” Later, in his Description of the Human Body (1648), he explains why a description of this automaton amounts to a complete explanation of the organism.
A more mundane factor also played an important role in the acceptance of these ideas: the increasing prevalence of mechanical clocks in European cities, and the effects they had on people’s lives at the time. These clocks were the culmination of technological evolution, their intricate fine-tuned mechanisms keeping precise track of the passing hours, independent of the changeable rhythms of days and nights, the phases of the moon, and the natural seasons. They mechanised our lives, before they mechanised our worldview when they were quickly adopted as the perfect metaphor for the physical world. Johannes Kepler first mentioned that “the machine of the universe is not similar to a divine animated being, but similar to a clock.” Descartes then elaborated on this analogy, and extended it to the body of living beings. Robert Boyle later concluded that the whole world was “a great piece of clock-work.” Thus, the high-tech of the age became a model of the world. Sounds familiar somehow, does it not?
Mechanical philosophy not only set the goal of the emerging modern science as providing mechanistic accounts of nature, but also made experimental studies acceptable — the investigation of natural processes by artificial means. A scientific theory was no longer deemed correct because it grasped the nature of a phenomenon through human intuition, but only if it was confirmed empirically. It is hardly controversial to say that these changes in how we gain knowledge of the world deserve the term “revolution.” The first scientific revolution was a giant leap forward for humanity. It enabled the modern world. The rest, as they say, is history. Only reactionaries would want to undo this. And whatever we may be, reactionaries we are not.
How did we get ourselves into this metaphysical mess? Even though it seems without alternatives at present, the view of the world as a machine is a very recent invention. Historians are arguing about when exactly the scientific revolution occurred, whether it was a properly definable historical event, and who exactly was involved and affected by it and when. Be that as it may, we can date the appearance of the idea of the world (and ourselves) as a machine quite precisely, and it correlates tightly with the emergence of what we call the age of modernity.
It may be hard to believe today, but up to the late 16th and early 17th century, humanity had never made an explicit distinction between living and non-living matter, between organism and mechanism. Our prehistoric ancestors had an animistic worldview. Their universe was filled with living spirits. The whole world was alive. Similarly, later polytheisms (across the globe) personified natural elements and events in anthropomorphic pantheons. More abstract ideas about nature arose in China, India, and Europe during the Axial Age, about 800 to 300 years BCE. The emerging Western monotheistic traditions, for example, discouraged picturing their all-encompassing deities as human-shaped, even though they never quite managed to get rid of the folkloristic image of a bearded old man. In contrast, the Dao is a principle that is entirely shapeless and unutterable, yet the ultimate source of everything. Still, it is not entirely abstract or transcendental, as it can be directly experienced by adept and wise human beings. In Greece, Anaximander of Miletus claimed that nature is governed by laws, not deities. He is sometimes called the first “scientist,” but this is an anachronism because that term was only invented in the 19th century. Anaximander called the indefinite and boundless that is the source of all things apeiron. Yet, even this most abstract of pre-Socratic worldviews is not mechanistic in the modern sense. The undefinable nature of the apeiron isn’t anything like a machine.
The most dominant conceptual framework among ancient and mediaeval sages in the West was Aristotelianism. It made a very clear distinction between the natural and the artificial. In fact, it completely separated the two. Nature, in this view, is the exact opposite of a machine! This is where the phrase “art imitates nature” comes from: what humans create is mere mimicry, a pale reflection of the real thing. You cannot learn anything about nature from studying human artefacts. This is why experiments were not seen as legitimate philosophical practice at the time.
On top of that, Aristotelianism had an idea of motion that was intrinsically purposive: the four natural elements on Earth are naturally drawn to their predetermined resting state, which explains change and decay in the terrestrial realm. Earth and water go down, air and fire go up. (The “quintessence” of the heavens, in contrast, was thought to be immutable and perfect.) In this sense, Aristotelian physics, which continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was modelled more on the goal-directed behaviour of an organism rather than the preprogrammed functioning of a machine.
This only changed with the advent of the scientific revolution, and it changed radically. The natural philosophers of the early 17th century explicitly defined themselves as “moderns,” in opposition to the Aristotelianism of the ancients. To overcome Aristotelian teleology, that is, the principle that all earthly objects somehow “know” where they belong, they pictured the world as a lifeless machine, and founded what they called mechanical philosophy, an early form of what we call mechanicism today. Francis Bacon, in his Instauratio Magna of 1620 (which includes the famous New Organon) was the first to declare that “the artificial does not differ from the natural in form or essence.” But this is not yet exactly the same as saying the world is a machine.
That second leap was made by René Descartes, and this is the exact date on which the age of machines begins. Well, the date is not that exact: Descartes wrote two treatises between 1630 and 1633 called The World and Treatise of Man. Both were only published after his death. In these two essays, he outlines his version of mechanical philosophy, which he later puts on what was then judged to be a solid metaphysical basis in his most famous works, Discourse on the Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). Descartes not only explicitly frames the world as a machine, a mechanism, in which all objects are composed exclusively of interacting material components, but also sees the implication this has for living beings, including us humans. In the Treatise, Descartes writes that “the human body is indistinguishable from a perfectly designed automaton.” Later, in his Description of the Human Body (1648), he explains why a description of this automaton amounts to a complete explanation of the organism.
A more mundane factor also played an important role in the acceptance of these ideas: the increasing prevalence of mechanical clocks in European cities, and the effects they had on people’s lives at the time. These clocks were the culmination of technological evolution, their intricate fine-tuned mechanisms keeping precise track of the passing hours, independent of the changeable rhythms of days and nights, the phases of the moon, and the natural seasons. They mechanised our lives, before they mechanised our worldview when they were quickly adopted as the perfect metaphor for the physical world. Johannes Kepler first mentioned that “the machine of the universe is not similar to a divine animated being, but similar to a clock.” Descartes then elaborated on this analogy, and extended it to the body of living beings. Robert Boyle later concluded that the whole world was “a great piece of clock-work.” Thus, the high-tech of the age became a model of the world. Sounds familiar somehow, does it not?
Mechanical philosophy not only set the goal of the emerging modern science as providing mechanistic accounts of nature, but also made experimental studies acceptable — the investigation of natural processes by artificial means. A scientific theory was no longer deemed correct because it grasped the nature of a phenomenon through human intuition, but only if it was confirmed empirically. It is hardly controversial to say that these changes in how we gain knowledge of the world deserve the term “revolution.” The first scientific revolution was a giant leap forward for humanity. It enabled the modern world. The rest, as they say, is history. Only reactionaries would want to undo this. And whatever we may be, reactionaries we are not.
Progress
So here we are today, and it seems more than just a little bit ironic that we find ourselves the victims of our own success. In the past 400 years, since Descartes declared the world a machine, we have dispelled multitudinous mistaken metaphysical beliefs, have radically refashioned scientific methodology, have put this refashioned methodology to work to attain an enormous amount of empirical scientific and technological progress, and have progressively reformed our societies to make the world a better place. In this book, we are not going to challenge or doubt this tremendous achievement, and modern science’s indispensable role in it. The problem lies elsewhere. It lies deeper.
In fact, there are two interrelated problems.
The first problem lies in our narrative of unbridled and unrestricted progress itself, which grows out of our ability to invent and build ever more complicated, effective, and powerful technologies. But what we should not forget: the past 500 years of human history have been truly exceptional. Physicist Tom Murphy illustrates this most powerfully in his “Simple Story of Civilization” by condensing the approximately 2.5–3 million year long history of the genus Homo into the 75-year life span of an average contemporary Homo sapiens. Rescaled this way, the entire modern age (starting with the scientific revolution) only takes a little less than five days — one single week that does not even include the weekend! Our current narrative of progress and our view of the world as a machine, are completely confined to this one short week of condensed human history. It’s crucial to keep this in perspective.
It has not been a typical work-week either, but a week of debauched revelry like no other. During these five metaphorical days, we have experienced an utterly anomalous period of energy abundance, a carbon pulse characterised by our extractive and wasteful burning of fossil energy, which accelerated greatly over the last 150 years (or 36 hours of condensed human history). This abundance is extremely unlikely to continue for more than a few decades or centuries (if we are lucky), which amounts to a few more hours or days (at most) in the condensed lifespan of humanity. Actually, both the rate of our energy consumption and the impact of its detrimental effects have been accelerating exponentially over the past 50 years (i.e., 12 hours). This is the exact opposite of long-term sustainability. If you are not seriously worried about this situation, you do not properly understand it.
It should be plain and simple: we won’t be able to continue at this level of reckless consumption for much longer. That’s not a political opinion. It’s physics. Don’t be fooled by any overly optimistic narrative. Technology won’t save us. There is no miracle breakthrough in sight that will allow us to replace the sources of cheap and effective materials and energy that we are currently depleting. Even if we did somehow manage to overcome this obstacle, we would likely continue on our path of planetary (self-)destruction. We are burning through our local entropy gradient like there is no tomorrow. This means that extracting more materials and energy will take an increasing amount of effort in the coming years (both in terms of work and energy invested).
Humanity is not on a trajectory of ever-increasing abundance. Instead, we are on a straight path towards diminishing returns. Moore’s “Law” (which is, in fact, a rough heuristic at best) is just about coming to an end. Western democracy, as it turns out, is not the end of history. Capitalism is eating itself. Ecological collapse and climate change are rapidly unravelling. Star Trek will never be real. Fully automated luxury communism is a dangerous and foolish illusion. The unusual pace of scientific, technological, and societal innovation over the past 500 years is tightly coupled to the unusual amount of affordable energy we had available during this short-lived blip in human history. Nothing lasts forever. Our current kind of progress will come to an end. There are limits to growth on a finite planet, even if we may have managed to avoid them a little bit longer than expected. It is really difficult to escape this simple conclusion. This is another way in which the age of machines is coming to an end: it is not just the end of a worldview, but also the end of an epoch of abundance.
This raises a number of questions. Given we have all the scientific knowledge to recognize our situation, why are we not acting upon it? What societal role does science have to play if it is to fulfil its function in the coming transition to a post-growth world? What kind of science can guide us to true sustainability? And what kind of science and technology do we need to survive and thrive in such a post-abundance world? These are extremely urgent and important questions, but they will not be the main focus of this book. We’re sorry. Our concerns are less immediately practical, but no less important, we think.
So here we are today, and it seems more than just a little bit ironic that we find ourselves the victims of our own success. In the past 400 years, since Descartes declared the world a machine, we have dispelled multitudinous mistaken metaphysical beliefs, have radically refashioned scientific methodology, have put this refashioned methodology to work to attain an enormous amount of empirical scientific and technological progress, and have progressively reformed our societies to make the world a better place. In this book, we are not going to challenge or doubt this tremendous achievement, and modern science’s indispensable role in it. The problem lies elsewhere. It lies deeper.
In fact, there are two interrelated problems.
The first problem lies in our narrative of unbridled and unrestricted progress itself, which grows out of our ability to invent and build ever more complicated, effective, and powerful technologies. But what we should not forget: the past 500 years of human history have been truly exceptional. Physicist Tom Murphy illustrates this most powerfully in his “Simple Story of Civilization” by condensing the approximately 2.5–3 million year long history of the genus Homo into the 75-year life span of an average contemporary Homo sapiens. Rescaled this way, the entire modern age (starting with the scientific revolution) only takes a little less than five days — one single week that does not even include the weekend! Our current narrative of progress and our view of the world as a machine, are completely confined to this one short week of condensed human history. It’s crucial to keep this in perspective.
It has not been a typical work-week either, but a week of debauched revelry like no other. During these five metaphorical days, we have experienced an utterly anomalous period of energy abundance, a carbon pulse characterised by our extractive and wasteful burning of fossil energy, which accelerated greatly over the last 150 years (or 36 hours of condensed human history). This abundance is extremely unlikely to continue for more than a few decades or centuries (if we are lucky), which amounts to a few more hours or days (at most) in the condensed lifespan of humanity. Actually, both the rate of our energy consumption and the impact of its detrimental effects have been accelerating exponentially over the past 50 years (i.e., 12 hours). This is the exact opposite of long-term sustainability. If you are not seriously worried about this situation, you do not properly understand it.
It should be plain and simple: we won’t be able to continue at this level of reckless consumption for much longer. That’s not a political opinion. It’s physics. Don’t be fooled by any overly optimistic narrative. Technology won’t save us. There is no miracle breakthrough in sight that will allow us to replace the sources of cheap and effective materials and energy that we are currently depleting. Even if we did somehow manage to overcome this obstacle, we would likely continue on our path of planetary (self-)destruction. We are burning through our local entropy gradient like there is no tomorrow. This means that extracting more materials and energy will take an increasing amount of effort in the coming years (both in terms of work and energy invested).
Humanity is not on a trajectory of ever-increasing abundance. Instead, we are on a straight path towards diminishing returns. Moore’s “Law” (which is, in fact, a rough heuristic at best) is just about coming to an end. Western democracy, as it turns out, is not the end of history. Capitalism is eating itself. Ecological collapse and climate change are rapidly unravelling. Star Trek will never be real. Fully automated luxury communism is a dangerous and foolish illusion. The unusual pace of scientific, technological, and societal innovation over the past 500 years is tightly coupled to the unusual amount of affordable energy we had available during this short-lived blip in human history. Nothing lasts forever. Our current kind of progress will come to an end. There are limits to growth on a finite planet, even if we may have managed to avoid them a little bit longer than expected. It is really difficult to escape this simple conclusion. This is another way in which the age of machines is coming to an end: it is not just the end of a worldview, but also the end of an epoch of abundance.
This raises a number of questions. Given we have all the scientific knowledge to recognize our situation, why are we not acting upon it? What societal role does science have to play if it is to fulfil its function in the coming transition to a post-growth world? What kind of science can guide us to true sustainability? And what kind of science and technology do we need to survive and thrive in such a post-abundance world? These are extremely urgent and important questions, but they will not be the main focus of this book. We’re sorry. Our concerns are less immediately practical, but no less important, we think.
Limits
The second problem with our current narrative of scientific progress is that we have completely lost track of our own limitations. It is on these that we will focus our reflections. 500 years of modernity may be a very short time in human history, but they are a very long time compared to our individual frames of reference. Like the frog slowly being simmered to death in its pot, humanity has grown accustomed to its highly unusual recent situation. Our crazy historical moment has become ordinary to us, and we have difficulties seeing some of the less obvious dangers inherent in its curious nature. The pace of our progress has been breathtaking, and the reach of our knowledge has expanded to areas we never even knew existed. We are boldly going where no one has gone before.
In the process, both our inner and outer worlds have been transformed beyond recognition. Humans are famously flexible and adaptable creatures though. Nothing seems impossible to us, and indeed there is a good argument to be made that there are indeed no concrete questions we know we will never be able to answer. We should always try to push our boundaries. Anything is possible in this sense. Our current collective creative burst may go on forever. After all, there are no fixed limits to what can be known about the world, and we will only find the limits of what we can do by trying to do it. Who are we to disagree? We don’t want to spread defeatism or despair.
So, let us proclaim: it is reasonable to always try and move forward, to tackle new challenges, to ask and answer new questions. In fact, this is basic human nature. There is no point in attempting to stop it. Our quibble is not about whether doing science or inventing new technology is a good thing (it is!), but about the direction in which science and technological innovation should be going, and the kind of worldview we need to support them sustainably. We want more (and better) science, not less; and we want more (and better) technology, wielded with wisdom and charity, not egotism and greed.
But here is the crux of the matter: ignoring one’s limits is the epitome of foolishness. Let us move forward indeed, but we ought to proceed with utmost caution, aware of our own constraints. Knowledge of the world must be rooted in the best available knowledge of our relationship with it, the best available knowledge of ourselves. A fool is not necessarily ignorant, does not automatically lack knowledge of the world. To be foolish is not the opposite of being knowledgeable. In fact, the biggest fools are often highly educated, seemingly sophisticated, and widely admired for their (often very publicly advertised) virtues. Instead, to be foolish is to lack wisdom, to be wrong about ourselves, to grossly misjudge our own abilities, to misunderstand our relation to the world. To get a better grip, we must become less foolish. Only then can we allow ourselves to become even more knowledgeable, even more powerful.
Our path to wisdom should therefore start with the Socratic suspicion that we do not really know what we think we do. We must fundamentally reexamine who we are and how we relate to the world. A kind of Cartesian meditation for the 21st century (more on this later). It makes all the difference. Only by reassessing our most basic assumptions can we relearn to separate map from territory. And the first fundamental assumption we ought to reassess is that the world is a machine. So let us proceed. Let us open our eyes (and all our other senses) to learn afresh what the world is, and how it appears to us. But before we can start our meditative philosophical practice, we must first slay a beast. We must destroy it utterly. So this is what we shall do first.
The second problem with our current narrative of scientific progress is that we have completely lost track of our own limitations. It is on these that we will focus our reflections. 500 years of modernity may be a very short time in human history, but they are a very long time compared to our individual frames of reference. Like the frog slowly being simmered to death in its pot, humanity has grown accustomed to its highly unusual recent situation. Our crazy historical moment has become ordinary to us, and we have difficulties seeing some of the less obvious dangers inherent in its curious nature. The pace of our progress has been breathtaking, and the reach of our knowledge has expanded to areas we never even knew existed. We are boldly going where no one has gone before.
In the process, both our inner and outer worlds have been transformed beyond recognition. Humans are famously flexible and adaptable creatures though. Nothing seems impossible to us, and indeed there is a good argument to be made that there are indeed no concrete questions we know we will never be able to answer. We should always try to push our boundaries. Anything is possible in this sense. Our current collective creative burst may go on forever. After all, there are no fixed limits to what can be known about the world, and we will only find the limits of what we can do by trying to do it. Who are we to disagree? We don’t want to spread defeatism or despair.
So, let us proclaim: it is reasonable to always try and move forward, to tackle new challenges, to ask and answer new questions. In fact, this is basic human nature. There is no point in attempting to stop it. Our quibble is not about whether doing science or inventing new technology is a good thing (it is!), but about the direction in which science and technological innovation should be going, and the kind of worldview we need to support them sustainably. We want more (and better) science, not less; and we want more (and better) technology, wielded with wisdom and charity, not egotism and greed.
But here is the crux of the matter: ignoring one’s limits is the epitome of foolishness. Let us move forward indeed, but we ought to proceed with utmost caution, aware of our own constraints. Knowledge of the world must be rooted in the best available knowledge of our relationship with it, the best available knowledge of ourselves. A fool is not necessarily ignorant, does not automatically lack knowledge of the world. To be foolish is not the opposite of being knowledgeable. In fact, the biggest fools are often highly educated, seemingly sophisticated, and widely admired for their (often very publicly advertised) virtues. Instead, to be foolish is to lack wisdom, to be wrong about ourselves, to grossly misjudge our own abilities, to misunderstand our relation to the world. To get a better grip, we must become less foolish. Only then can we allow ourselves to become even more knowledgeable, even more powerful.
Our path to wisdom should therefore start with the Socratic suspicion that we do not really know what we think we do. We must fundamentally reexamine who we are and how we relate to the world. A kind of Cartesian meditation for the 21st century (more on this later). It makes all the difference. Only by reassessing our most basic assumptions can we relearn to separate map from territory. And the first fundamental assumption we ought to reassess is that the world is a machine. So let us proceed. Let us open our eyes (and all our other senses) to learn afresh what the world is, and how it appears to us. But before we can start our meditative philosophical practice, we must first slay a beast. We must destroy it utterly. So this is what we shall do first.
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The authors acknowledge funding from the John Templeton Foundation (Project ID: 62581), and would like to thank the co-leader of the project, Prof. Tarja Knuuttila, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna for hosting the project of which this book is a central part.
Disclaimer: everything we write and present here is our own responsibility. All mistakes are ours, and not the funders’ or our hosts’ and collaborators'.
Disclaimer: everything we write and present here is our own responsibility. All mistakes are ours, and not the funders’ or our hosts’ and collaborators'.
