7 ms·

One of my concerns as someone who is part of the tech community is the innovation delusion. Many of us are focused on "magic pill" technology solutions to get u

One of my concerns as someone who is part of the tech community is the innovation delusion. Many of us are focused on "magic pill" technology solutions to get us out of this. Things like fusion, carbon capture, electric cars, etc... As someone with an engineering background, I've been guilty of this type of thinking too. Whenever I encounter a problem I think about how I could apply technology to solve it. However, I think it's a bad idea to gamble our future on the hope that unproven technologies will save us from this disaster. We consume so much more than we need to have a good life. I believe we should drastically cut back consumption now and then let the technologies that may allow us to consume more prove themselves before we scale back up. But like many things, it's easy to pander with innovating our way out of this problem. It's more convenient for people to not have to change when they can buy into greenwashed technology ideas. The saddest part to me is that much of our excess consumption isn't even making us happier. Seems to be making us unhappy, really.

seiferteric 5y ago
I've come to believe the opposite. Expecting the whole world to give stuff up is more of a "magic" solution than developing new technology it seems.
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  Unrealistic and magic aren’t synonymous. In one case you are betting on something that is at best hopefully possible, while in the second case, it is quite clearly possible, it’s just not likely to happen.
  - seiferteric 5y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of "magical thinking"
    - wbsss4412 5y ago
      Perhaps it is magical thinking. At the same time, physical reality doesn’t seem to care much about our opinions, thoughts and feelings about any of this subject. We can continue to live our lives with the hope of technology coming to our rescue, we can go on living the way we do without considering making changes, and the natural world around us will continue down the path that it’s on, utterly unconcerned with our desires.
- bdamm 5y ago
  Not only that, but even the idea itself has become weaponized. Corporations seem to be pushing the agenda that if consumers could <X> then our problems will be solved, where X is {recycle, reuse, reduce, sort the trash, eat less meat, use less plastic, be smarter, be more efficient, breed more selectively, vote, drive less, bike more, take transit, read food labels, get educated, etc.} And this is completely to distract from the reality that only large scale policy is going to have meaningful effect on our climate outcomes. Product and technology leaders like Tesla can help catalyze change, but without meaningful market policy and adjustment in which there will definitely be losers and winners it is all for naught. And the losers are fighting with every weapon at their disposal to prevent being displaced from the status quo, including brainwashing people into believing that if they sort their plastic waste then something will magically happen to help the world. Individual actions do matter, but not very much, and not usually in the way that people think it does. Individual actions only matter because they affect the future of what policy gets emphasized in governmental decisions.
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    > Corporations seem to be pushing the agenda that if consumers could <X> then our problems will be solved, where X is {recycle, reuse, reduce, [...]) Not just that, ever since the 90s they have actively (and quite successfully) tried to get everybody to forget or ignore the "reuse" and "reduce" (and "repair"!) parts which, of course, would cut into their profits if people actually started consuming less. Reusability and repairability have both gone way down instead during the past 30 years or so.
- mberning 5y ago
  How many of these people “deeply concerned” with climate change are living it in their lifestyle? Very few in my experience. They don’t invest in solar panels for their home, geothermal HVAC, severely curtail their lifetime travel habits, etc. they might buy a prius or a tesla, but a dubiously “green” car is right in line with their actual commitment to the environment.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  I agree. Telling the world to consume less while the population continues to grow doesnt work. Especially when the majority of pollution comes from corporations who have a financial incentive to continuing operating the same way.
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    That wasn’t the dichotomy. It’s technical solutions vs social political ones. Not collective vs individual.
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  If people don't give things up, the tragedy comes to pass. It's not the fault of engineers and scientists to not cover for the general public's unsustainable lifestyle that they've become accustomed to. If you are trapped in an area with limited oxygen, you should reduce your breathing and activity to a minimum to buy time for rescue. You should not complain about it impacting your lifestyle, blame lack of progress on the rescuers, and go along with life as normal.
ryeights 5y ago
I don’t understand why this is downvoted. This is exactly my perception as well: techno-optimism is dangerous, and there really is no excuse for the amount of pointless conspicuous consumption that occurs in modern life.
- seiferteric 5y ago
  So techno-optimism is dangerous, but social/political optimism is not? At least we somewhat know how to make technology, but I don't think anyone knows how to force this social change on the world.
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    It’s not optimism, it’s about where the solution lies. In one case we are wishing for a solution to fall out of some genuis minds. In the other we are taking responsibility for changing behavior which we have control over. That’s not optimism, it’s pragmatism.
    - seiferteric 5y ago
      > In the other we are taking responsibility for changing behavior which we have control over. Okay, propose concrete actions, political, legal even military if needed that you think will help accomplish this and could actually work globally?
      - wbsss4412 5y ago
        Im going to speak to the US as I am American, but most of this could be implemented in other countries. Global action requires diplomacy and global agreements, but these policies could be replicated in other places/it’s not like there isn’t buy in around the world to varying degrees. In no particular order: institute carbon taxes, tie in climate based criteria for fha loans including weatherization, electrification and neighborhood planning, drive industrial policy towards the expansion of green industries including renewable energy, but also on the demand planning and efficiency side (ex heat pumps in buildings, EVs etc). Shift agricultural policy to focus more heavily on climate impacts and discourage fossil fuel intensive methods. Dramatic shifts in federal fleets away from fossil fuel vehicles, etc. I’m not an expert on this stuff but these are just obvious things. Actual policy could be crafted to address these things on a number of different levels.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 5y ago
I don't see any alternative, people will not accept lower living standards, except possibly minor inconveniences. There may not be a single magic pill but there are multiple technologies in concert that can be utilized to slow this down and possibly stablize things (e.g. there are multiple alternative energy sources)
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  That attitude is a self fulfilling prophecy. People have rarely been presented with any realistic trade offs between the climate and their own consumption. Typically it’s been “become and aesthetic and give up all material goods or it’s pointless”. Large portions of waste and pollution are already accounted for by the time individuals are presented with a choice.
  - fullshark 5y ago
    Whats your suggestion exactly, and what's a realistic trade off that you think will have dramatic impacts? Economic nudging I think can do some things, certainly taxes and gov't investments (i.e. build a nuclear power plant, people don't care how they get power largely as long as they get power). We have people recycling a generation later even though it's annoying but now that's supposedly terrible among environmentalists anyway so you can do some things I grant. But if your plan is decrease global consumption (not even per capita, just absolute consumption cause the environment doesn't care how many people there are) X% it doesn't even matter what that number is you will fail.
    - wbsss4412 5y ago
      You overestimate the number of decisions people make consciously and underestimate how much people are simply responding to their environment and taking the path of least resistance. “Decreased consumption” only means less resource utilization in this instance, it doesn’t mean that people are necessarily materially worse off. An obvious and example would be efforts to expand awareness about the longevity and repairability of consumer electronics. Many people don’t want to continually throw things away when they break.
germinalphrase 5y ago
Even if we wanted to, how would you even go about curbing consumption for the same of curbing consumption? People would lose it.
qgin 5y ago
You’re not wrong, but hoping people will choose anything other than the default thing is going to result in failure. If you lay out cities for cars, people will use cars. If you build massive urban areas in places that stay in the 90s with high humidity, people are going to blast the AC. If disposable things are cheaper than longer lasting things because there’s no cost to throwing it away, people are going to do it. People just follow the path of least resistance in a given environment and only an extreme minority are ever going to be persuadable to consciously go against that at all. If we want different behavior, we’d need to bulldoze most of America and start over.
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  I think that was the point they were making. Techno-optimism is saying “don’t worry, we don’t need to change anything, technology will save us!”
- spongechameleon 5y ago
  Agree. The climate-friendly path must become the path of least resistance if we want to have any hope of staying within the 1.5C threshold. Three step process to get there: 1. Identify the optimal "climate path" for every need- transportation, consumer goods, etc... 2. Disincentivize all other paths via penalties (taxes & regulations) 3. Incentivize the climate path via subsidies It will take large scale government action first. Technological solutions will come as a result of the new financial rules of the game.
norcon4 5y ago
Exactly - it's not a smart bet to make on technology on behalf of billions of humans who stand to suffer or perish if technological progress does not keep up. Sure, the neolib Steven Pinkers of the world have been right so far that we're not sleepwalking into a malthusian trap, but you only have to be wrong once to spell incalculable consequences for humanity and the planet. The greatest challenge of this century will be moving human activity globally to operate within the safe planetary boundaries, of which we are currently exceeding 5. Our global society is certainly playing with some very risky dice right now.
JamesBarney 5y ago
How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off? We can't pass a carbon tax in the US, imagining China or India doing that with much lower standards of livings is insane. How many times in the past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through technology? We already have the technology, we can just build a bunch of nuclear reactors. Just as management can underestimate how hard solving technology problems, technologists can wildly underestimate how hard it is to solve people problems. Climate change is hard people problem. The effects are diffuse and far in the future. People are terrible about planning 30-40 years in the future and terrible about making sacrifices to help people they don't know in small ways that are statistical and abstract.
- acdha 5y ago
  > How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off? People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc. Each and every time they've been completely wrong, and this will be even more powerfully so because one very consistent finding has been that the costs of not dealing with climate change are MUCH greater than the mitigation measures, especially because they happen at uncontrollable intervals whereas you can make plans around something like the need to buy an EV instead of an ICE car.
  - twblalock 5y ago
    > People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc. Almost all of the things in that list were solved by technological solutions which replaced things people had with better things and made people better off, not by people sacrificing their quality of life.
dlnovell 5y ago
We have to do everything. There's no either/or... we HAVE to reduce consumption, we HAVE to find lower-carbon alternatives for everything we continue to consume, and we HAVE to create technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere. It's not gambling or a delusion to say we must create new technologies to have a prayer of solving the problem. And of course there's no "magic pill" - we need to innovate in a thousand different ways, simultaneously. The scale of the problem is hard to truly wrap ones head around, but it's crystal clear that voluntary sacrifice and curtailing consumption as the primary solution is a non-starter. That's not how humans work. Also, what about developing countries? Are we going to tell them they have to consume less too? Seems unreasonable. So we're going to ask the developed world to consume less, and some of us might reduce a little bit... nowhere near the scale of emissions reductions that are necessary. Seems more like a rounding error than an actual impact.
- blurker 5y ago
  FWIW, I am not saying we shouldn't try to innovate and I do very much want us to invest in science and technology that could be helpful. I don't think we should count on these things such that we don't also take direct steps (cutting consumption where we can) to directly tackle this problem until we have the other options figured out.
bshoemaker 5y ago
I think it's pretty reasonable to bet on people being incredible stupid and stuck in their ways; concluding that we have a better chance of innovating out of it than changing human behavior is a pretty worthy hedge.
lamontcg 5y ago
We could just try to subsidize carbon neutral energy and establish a carbon tax. People could consume more carbon neutral energy than they're consuming carbon-based energy right now. This is one of those "we've done literally nothing and we're all out of ideas" problems because we refuse to put a finger on the scale and tip the balance economically towards carbon-neutral energy. The ghost of Adam Smith will apparently punish us in the afterlife if we ever think of doing that.

seiferteric 5y ago

I've come to believe the opposite. Expecting the whole world to give stuff up is more of a "magic" solution than developing new technology it seems.

wbsss4412 5y ago
Unrealistic and magic aren’t synonymous. In one case you are betting on something that is at best hopefully possible, while in the second case, it is quite clearly possible, it’s just not likely to happen.
- seiferteric 5y ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of "magical thinking"
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    Perhaps it is magical thinking. At the same time, physical reality doesn’t seem to care much about our opinions, thoughts and feelings about any of this subject. We can continue to live our lives with the hope of technology coming to our rescue, we can go on living the way we do without considering making changes, and the natural world around us will continue down the path that it’s on, utterly unconcerned with our desires.
bdamm 5y ago
Not only that, but even the idea itself has become weaponized. Corporations seem to be pushing the agenda that if consumers could <X> then our problems will be solved, where X is {recycle, reuse, reduce, sort the trash, eat less meat, use less plastic, be smarter, be more efficient, breed more selectively, vote, drive less, bike more, take transit, read food labels, get educated, etc.} And this is completely to distract from the reality that only large scale policy is going to have meaningful effect on our climate outcomes. Product and technology leaders like Tesla can help catalyze change, but without meaningful market policy and adjustment in which there will definitely be losers and winners it is all for naught. And the losers are fighting with every weapon at their disposal to prevent being displaced from the status quo, including brainwashing people into believing that if they sort their plastic waste then something will magically happen to help the world. Individual actions do matter, but not very much, and not usually in the way that people think it does. Individual actions only matter because they affect the future of what policy gets emphasized in governmental decisions.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  > Corporations seem to be pushing the agenda that if consumers could <X> then our problems will be solved, where X is {recycle, reuse, reduce, [...]) Not just that, ever since the 90s they have actively (and quite successfully) tried to get everybody to forget or ignore the "reuse" and "reduce" (and "repair"!) parts which, of course, would cut into their profits if people actually started consuming less. Reusability and repairability have both gone way down instead during the past 30 years or so.
mberning 5y ago
How many of these people “deeply concerned” with climate change are living it in their lifestyle? Very few in my experience. They don’t invest in solar panels for their home, geothermal HVAC, severely curtail their lifetime travel habits, etc. they might buy a prius or a tesla, but a dubiously “green” car is right in line with their actual commitment to the environment.
AlwaysRock 5y ago
I agree. Telling the world to consume less while the population continues to grow doesnt work. Especially when the majority of pollution comes from corporations who have a financial incentive to continuing operating the same way.
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  That wasn’t the dichotomy. It’s technical solutions vs social political ones. Not collective vs individual.
throwaway5752 5y ago
If people don't give things up, the tragedy comes to pass. It's not the fault of engineers and scientists to not cover for the general public's unsustainable lifestyle that they've become accustomed to. If you are trapped in an area with limited oxygen, you should reduce your breathing and activity to a minimum to buy time for rescue. You should not complain about it impacting your lifestyle, blame lack of progress on the rescuers, and go along with life as normal.

ryeights 5y ago

I don’t understand why this is downvoted. This is exactly my perception as well: techno-optimism is dangerous, and there really is no excuse for the amount of pointless conspicuous consumption that occurs in modern life.

seiferteric 5y ago
So techno-optimism is dangerous, but social/political optimism is not? At least we somewhat know how to make technology, but I don't think anyone knows how to force this social change on the world.
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  It’s not optimism, it’s about where the solution lies. In one case we are wishing for a solution to fall out of some genuis minds. In the other we are taking responsibility for changing behavior which we have control over. That’s not optimism, it’s pragmatism.
  - seiferteric 5y ago
    > In the other we are taking responsibility for changing behavior which we have control over. Okay, propose concrete actions, political, legal even military if needed that you think will help accomplish this and could actually work globally?
    - wbsss4412 5y ago
      Im going to speak to the US as I am American, but most of this could be implemented in other countries. Global action requires diplomacy and global agreements, but these policies could be replicated in other places/it’s not like there isn’t buy in around the world to varying degrees. In no particular order: institute carbon taxes, tie in climate based criteria for fha loans including weatherization, electrification and neighborhood planning, drive industrial policy towards the expansion of green industries including renewable energy, but also on the demand planning and efficiency side (ex heat pumps in buildings, EVs etc). Shift agricultural policy to focus more heavily on climate impacts and discourage fossil fuel intensive methods. Dramatic shifts in federal fleets away from fossil fuel vehicles, etc. I’m not an expert on this stuff but these are just obvious things. Actual policy could be crafted to address these things on a number of different levels.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fullshark 5y ago

I don't see any alternative, people will not accept lower living standards, except possibly minor inconveniences. There may not be a single magic pill but there are multiple technologies in concert that can be utilized to slow this down and possibly stablize things (e.g. there are multiple alternative energy sources)

wbsss4412 5y ago
That attitude is a self fulfilling prophecy. People have rarely been presented with any realistic trade offs between the climate and their own consumption. Typically it’s been “become and aesthetic and give up all material goods or it’s pointless”. Large portions of waste and pollution are already accounted for by the time individuals are presented with a choice.
- fullshark 5y ago
  Whats your suggestion exactly, and what's a realistic trade off that you think will have dramatic impacts? Economic nudging I think can do some things, certainly taxes and gov't investments (i.e. build a nuclear power plant, people don't care how they get power largely as long as they get power). We have people recycling a generation later even though it's annoying but now that's supposedly terrible among environmentalists anyway so you can do some things I grant. But if your plan is decrease global consumption (not even per capita, just absolute consumption cause the environment doesn't care how many people there are) X% it doesn't even matter what that number is you will fail.
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    You overestimate the number of decisions people make consciously and underestimate how much people are simply responding to their environment and taking the path of least resistance. “Decreased consumption” only means less resource utilization in this instance, it doesn’t mean that people are necessarily materially worse off. An obvious and example would be efforts to expand awareness about the longevity and repairability of consumer electronics. Many people don’t want to continually throw things away when they break.

germinalphrase 5y ago

Even if we wanted to, how would you even go about curbing consumption for the same of curbing consumption? People would lose it.

qgin 5y ago

You’re not wrong, but hoping people will choose anything other than the default thing is going to result in failure. If you lay out cities for cars, people will use cars. If you build massive urban areas in places that stay in the 90s with high humidity, people are going to blast the AC. If disposable things are cheaper than longer lasting things because there’s no cost to throwing it away, people are going to do it. People just follow the path of least resistance in a given environment and only an extreme minority are ever going to be persuadable to consciously go against that at all. If we want different behavior, we’d need to bulldoze most of America and start over.

wbsss4412 5y ago
I think that was the point they were making. Techno-optimism is saying “don’t worry, we don’t need to change anything, technology will save us!”
spongechameleon 5y ago
Agree. The climate-friendly path must become the path of least resistance if we want to have any hope of staying within the 1.5C threshold. Three step process to get there: 1. Identify the optimal "climate path" for every need- transportation, consumer goods, etc... 2. Disincentivize all other paths via penalties (taxes & regulations) 3. Incentivize the climate path via subsidies It will take large scale government action first. Technological solutions will come as a result of the new financial rules of the game.

norcon4 5y ago

Exactly - it's not a smart bet to make on technology on behalf of billions of humans who stand to suffer or perish if technological progress does not keep up. Sure, the neolib Steven Pinkers of the world have been right so far that we're not sleepwalking into a malthusian trap, but you only have to be wrong once to spell incalculable consequences for humanity and the planet. The greatest challenge of this century will be moving human activity globally to operate within the safe planetary boundaries, of which we are currently exceeding 5. Our global society is certainly playing with some very risky dice right now.

JamesBarney 5y ago

How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off? We can't pass a carbon tax in the US, imagining China or India doing that with much lower standards of livings is insane. How many times in the past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through technology? We already have the technology, we can just build a bunch of nuclear reactors. Just as management can underestimate how hard solving technology problems, technologists can wildly underestimate how hard it is to solve people problems. Climate change is hard people problem. The effects are diffuse and far in the future. People are terrible about planning 30-40 years in the future and terrible about making sacrifices to help people they don't know in small ways that are statistical and abstract.

acdha 5y ago
> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off? People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc. Each and every time they've been completely wrong, and this will be even more powerfully so because one very consistent finding has been that the costs of not dealing with climate change are MUCH greater than the mitigation measures, especially because they happen at uncontrollable intervals whereas you can make plans around something like the need to buy an EV instead of an ICE car.
- twblalock 5y ago
  > People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc. Almost all of the things in that list were solved by technological solutions which replaced things people had with better things and made people better off, not by people sacrificing their quality of life.

dlnovell 5y ago

We have to do everything. There's no either/or... we HAVE to reduce consumption, we HAVE to find lower-carbon alternatives for everything we continue to consume, and we HAVE to create technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere. It's not gambling or a delusion to say we must create new technologies to have a prayer of solving the problem. And of course there's no "magic pill" - we need to innovate in a thousand different ways, simultaneously. The scale of the problem is hard to truly wrap ones head around, but it's crystal clear that voluntary sacrifice and curtailing consumption as the primary solution is a non-starter. That's not how humans work. Also, what about developing countries? Are we going to tell them they have to consume less too? Seems unreasonable. So we're going to ask the developed world to consume less, and some of us might reduce a little bit... nowhere near the scale of emissions reductions that are necessary. Seems more like a rounding error than an actual impact.

blurker 5y ago
FWIW, I am not saying we shouldn't try to innovate and I do very much want us to invest in science and technology that could be helpful. I don't think we should count on these things such that we don't also take direct steps (cutting consumption where we can) to directly tackle this problem until we have the other options figured out.

bshoemaker 5y ago

I think it's pretty reasonable to bet on people being incredible stupid and stuck in their ways; concluding that we have a better chance of innovating out of it than changing human behavior is a pretty worthy hedge.

lamontcg 5y ago

We could just try to subsidize carbon neutral energy and establish a carbon tax. People could consume more carbon neutral energy than they're consuming carbon-based energy right now. This is one of those "we've done literally nothing and we're all out of ideas" problems because we refuse to put a finger on the scale and tip the balance economically towards carbon-neutral energy. The ghost of Adam Smith will apparently punish us in the afterlife if we ever think of doing that.