Progress Trap
= "a short-term social or technological improvement that turns out in the longer term to be a backward step". [1]
URL = http://www.progresstrap.org/
Discussion
Paul Kingsnorth:
"IN HIS BOOK A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright coins the term “progress trap.” A progress trap, says Wright, is a short-term social or technological improvement that turns out in the longer term to be a backward step. By the time this is realized—if it ever is—it is too late to change course.
The earliest example he gives is the improvement in hunting techniques in the Upper Paleolithic era, around fifteen thousand years ago. Wright tracks the disappearance of wildlife on a vast scale whenever prehistoric humans arrived on a new continent. As Wright explains: “Some of their slaughter sites were almost industrial in size: 1,000 mammoths at one; more than 100,000 horses at another.” But there was a catch:
The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game. Most of the great human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our moveable feasts.
This is the progress trap. Each improvement in our knowledge or in our technology will create new problems, which require new improvements. Each of these improvements tends to make society bigger, more complex, less human-scale, more destructive of nonhuman life, and more likely to collapse under its own weight.
Spencer Wells takes up the story in his book Pandora’s Seed, a revisionist history of the development of agriculture. The story we were all taught at school—or I was, anyway—is that humans “developed” or “invented” agriculture, because they were clever enough to see that it would form the basis of a better way of living than hunting and gathering. This is the same attitude that makes us assume that a brushcutter is a better way of mowing grass than a scythe, and it seems to be equally erroneous. As Wells demonstrates, analysis of the skeletal remains of people living before and after the transition to agriculture during the Paleolithic demonstrate something remarkable: an all-around collapse in quality of life when farming was adopted.
Hunter-gatherers living during the Paleolithic period, between 30,000 and 9,000 BCE, were on average taller—and thus, by implication, healthier—than any people since, including people living in late twentieth-century America. Their median life span was higher than at any period for the next six thousand years, and their health, as estimated by measuring the pelvic inlet depth of their skeletons, appears to have been better, again, than at any period since—including the present day. This collapse in individual well-being was likely due to the fact that settled agricultural life is physically harder and more disease-ridden than the life of a shifting hunter-gatherer community.
So much for progress. But why in this case, Wells asks, would any community move from hunting and gathering to agriculture? The answer seems to be: not because they wanted to, but because they had to. They had spelled the end of their hunting and gathering lifestyle by getting too good at it. They had killed off most of their prey and expanded their numbers beyond the point at which they could all survive. They had fallen into a progress trap.
We have been falling into them ever since. Look at the proposals of the neo-environmentalists in this light and you can see them as a series of attempts to dig us out of the progress traps that their predecessors knocked us into. Genetically modified crops, for example, are regularly sold to us as a means of “feeding the world.” But why is the world hungry? At least in part because of the previous wave of agricultural improvements—the so-called Green Revolution, which between the 1940s and 1970s promoted a new form of agriculture that depended upon high levels of pesticides and herbicides, new agricultural technologies, and high-yielding strains of crops. The Green Revolution is trumpeted by progressives as having supposedly “fed a billion people” who would otherwise have starved. And maybe it did; but then we had to keep feeding them—or should I say us?—and our children. In the meantime it had been discovered that the pesticides and herbicides were killing off vast swaths of wildlife, and the high-yield monoculture crops were wrecking both the health of the soil and the crop diversity, which in previous centuries had helped prevent the spread of disease and reduced the likelihood of crop failure.
It is in this context that we now have to listen to lectures from the neo-environmentalists and others insisting that GM crops are a moral obligation if we want to feed the world and save the planet: precisely the arguments that were made last time around. GM crops are an attempt to solve the problems caused by the last progress trap; they are also the next one. I would be willing to bet a lot of money that in forty years’ time, the successors of the neo-environmentalists will be making precisely the same arguments about the necessity of adopting the next wave of technologies needed to dig us out of the trap that GM crops have dropped us neatly into. Perhaps it will be vat-grown meat, or synthetic wheat, or some nano-bio-gubbins as yet unthought of. Either way, it will be vital for growth and progress, and a moral necessity. As Kurt Vonnegut would have said: “so it goes.” (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277)
==via James Gien Wong
"I’ve thought for years that unless science develops a new theoretical and critical field of study on progress traps, we will continue having them emerge haphazardly and then scrambling to deal with them. We simply cannot afford to not study progress traps any longer because as progress mulitplies exponentially due to technology multiplying exponentially, the permutations of unintended consequences multiply super-exponentially. If we enlist exponentially more powerful knowledge tools like AI to assist us, they could also backfire as a progress trap spectacularly as well. When AI makes a decision at exponentially faster speeds using machine logic that is beyond human understanding, we may not have enough time to recover from acting upon machine learning recommendations. Human reaction time in response to time compression of machine learning may become fatal. Creating a new field of progress traps is urgently needed if we are to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of super-exponential growth of collective unintended consequences. The rigorous definition of a new scientific concept recognises a pattern worthy of study. Until the definition of a new abstract concept, we simply do not converge and collate the set of observations into a recognizable pattern. Indeed, the definition is the recognition that a pattern is worthy of study. In science, until an important pattern is first recognized, and then defined, the pattern’s expression, as cause or effect, does not affect our sense-making . Hence, it can have no impact on rational decision-making. We desparately need a critical theory that recognizes the unintended consequences of progress. As leading technologists and thought leaders like Bill Gates and Stephen Pinker construct one sided arguments in favor of technology, without a critical theory of progress’s shadow side, we cannot offer a systematic countervailing argument. We need a new language which can expose the inherent danger and risks of the toxic combination of technology, venture capitalism and short-termism that has laid to waste the potential of progress, creating the perfect storm of crisis now before us. Under such a theoretical foundation, we have a rich source of technologicaly harmful goods and services which have been retroactively documented for the past two centuries since the industrial revolution. We can search for patterns of failures through integrating the big dataset of science, engineering, technology, patents, production, and media, civil society and legal datasets to derive causal, subsequent social and ecological impacts. Additional post-techological production scientific research often yields harmful impacts not discovered or supressed at the time of initial research. We are all guinea pigs for new technology. Once it is out of the research lab, no models are sufficiently powerful to predict what will happen in the real world. Based on research that emerges from this new field, we can construct cogent arguments that may predict that some risky tecnologies may require centuries of research, others decades, and others years. At least we may have a systematic, evidence-based way to assess risk and mitigate future progress traps. This can possibly prevent short term market gains from driving risky and premature technological scaling. Dan O’Leary is an early researcher on progress traps who wrote the book Escaping the progress trap." (fb, October 2019)