“Wild Tech” gets legs (and arms) in and out of the fire and ice.
Tech is human innovation.
Wild human technology-innovation appears in the paleo-record as a new emergent order of evolution.
“…it took four thousand years to go from the invention of the plow to figuring out how to hitch a plow up to a horse…65 years to go from the first flight in a heavier-than-air machine to landing a man on the moon…[and] over a billion people…watched it happen.” 1
Robert William Fogel
“…the only way we can think about technology is in evolutionary terms.” 2
Joel Mokyr
Surviving the deep ice and great volcanic fires, our ancestors turned fire on itself long before (+1 million years ago) we were fully “human.” They used fire to protect themselves in the deep night, and they began to cook their food.
Tech is wild because it advances before and ahead of culture, or human’s ability to control it, and especially ahead of our ability to get an ethical handle on its impacts. This is most obvious in the history of human violence and warring capacities: inventions like the atlatl, the cross-bow, gunpowder, and the atom bomb have entered the evolutionary record and radically reshaped human history.
Early humans and even proto-humans started to “make things…homo faber.” Artificial things. Things not found in nature itself. Things created by humans. Especially tools of the hunt and the kill and the fireside.
Someone even came along and made the “atlatl.”
It’s just a stick. But “whittled,” shaped. Yet still…just a stick. Or not? It’s now, possibly, something different. It’s a tool. But the atlatl-stick is meaningless, itself, without the spear. Or the arm.
It’s now an “extension,” a kind of prosthesis – it’s manufactured…synthetic…artificial. It’s not powerful, until, the hand and arm take hold of it. Voilà! The atlatl-ed-arm is now a hyper-arm…!
The atlatl changes the human arm – but the arm itself has not changed. It’s still “natural.” Or is it? OK, alone, it is the “same.” But with the atlatl, and spear, not “quite.” By taking hold of the atlatl, and the spear, the human arm now commands a radically new and synthetic power, synthetic because it’s a new “synthesis” of nature itself transformed by human intelligent innovation. It’s more powerful because the atlatl increases by as much as 300% the distance a spear can be thrown effectively. The atlatl thrower is an entirely new evolutionary phenomenon. An innovation-order of evolution.
So what’s “natural” or “un-natural” here? And what, if anything, do we gain by making the difference? OK, the whole game is different. We have the atlatl, for heaven’s sake (!), and lots more meat, and now everyone in the neighborhood is running. Away. Quickly. Suddenly, we rule the grassy or the forested roost. For now. Until…the next big-small thing, the next atlatl-like gadget, the next crossbow or atomic bomb, comes along…
The reader can wrestle with their own take on the “natural” question. In WG’s take, though, the question just doesn’t track out in a serious way. It’s just not a helpful distinction. Possibly even a distraction.
Our technologies, from the atlatl to the atom, trace the footprints of a new order of nature – human innovation-intelligence driven evolution. Nature’s own experiment. But now hyper-nature. Wild…wilder.
Examples of “Wild Tech”
The Internet: “The internet will change everything. The industrial Revolution brought together people with machines in factories…the Internet revolution will bring together people with knowledge and information…And it will have every bit as much impact on society as the Industrial Revolution. It will promote globalization at an incredible pace. But instead of happening over a hundred years, like the Industrial Revolution, it will happen over seven years.”3
The iPhone or “Mobile” in the Arab Spring: “The effect of mobiles, computers, satellites – there is a generation coming that is outside the traditional controls…something else is happening.”4
Big Data: “…Because the internet was measurable, it was authoritative. It defined morals around what behaviors really are, not vice versa. Any aspiration to see things from a perspective beyond that of day-to-day reality came to seem pointless and risible. Western religion in all its expressions was undermined. Less well understood was that the internet approach to data, and to reality, undermined all types of thinking aimed at understanding systems from the outside – not just religion but also science, political ideology, and deductive reasoning. Big Data worked by correlation, not by logic. …The information-gathering capacities of the new internet firms brought them into both collusion and competition with government. Google claimed to predict the onset of flu season better than the CDC. SWIFT…could generate precise measure of total economic activity in a society by using the data from the bank transfers it handles. …Google and SWIFT were private companies – yet their regulatory and public information roles made them look like governments in embryo. …The problem was not the expansion of government until it crowded out the private sector – it was the expansion of the private sector until it became a kind of government.”5
- 1 Robert William Fogel, interview with Kling & Schulz, From Poverty to Prosperity- intangible assets, hidden liabilities, and the lasting triumph over scarcity, New York & London, Encounter Books, 2009; republished as Invisible Wealth – The Hidden Story of How Markets Work, New York & London: Encounter Books, p. 58)
- 2 Ibid, Joel Mokyr, in interview with Kling & Schulz, p. 115.
- 3 John Chambers, President, Cisco Systems, in interview with Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999, P. 117.
- 4 Egyptian historian Mohamed Haykal describing the 2010 “Arab Spring,” quoted by Gerald F. Seib, “Now Dawning: The Next Era of Middle East History,” WSJ, 2-1-2011.
- 5 Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement – America Since the Sixties, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2020, pp. 191-192.