Vaclav Smil
[TODO]
Smil is a profilic author on energy economics and history, and his work is remarkably well evidenced and broad in its scope. His books are
some of the best works of nonfiction I've read, where Energy and Civilisation (EaC) literally changed how I look at the world. In this short piece, I'll try to
articulate some areas of disagreement, where I think he's wrong, without reducing my stance into the sort of blind techno-optimism that is pervasive in 2020 Silicon Valley.
Given below are some broad and strong claims he makes in either EaC or Creating the Twentieth Century (CTTC). Each claim is either mostly unsubstantiated, or just a flat out an opinion
disguised as fact.
Note. CTTC is the title of the book, but I use it to refer to the group of innovations he discusses in the book, innovations made from 1867-1914 (Haber process, x-rays, electricity, telegraph, automobiles, etc) that he believes are far more impactful and epochal than the late computer industry.
- The late computational revolution is less impactful on human life than those of CTTC. My central argument against his belittling of modern innovation is this: it’s true that CTTC innovations were wide-ranging and also deep: energy, agriculture, mechanical/structural engineering, chemistry, electronics, and more, and that modern innovations have been largely limited to software/internet, but I think that’s a reductionist argument/stance for him to take, that just because there were transformative innovations across more fields, it was a better time. I think a fairer lens would be to look at how people’s lives have been changed. I’d argue that since most people spend most of their days in front of screens (like many would spend on the farm centuries ago), the seemingly pedestrian innovations like Google, FB, Uber, AirBnB, Amazon, have an enormous impact in how people live their lives on a day to day level, just as much as the automobile and electric lightbulb put together. I think just as how the liquefaction of air and mass production of electricity are seen as innovations in different domains, the widespread use of technology for transport and technology for e-commerce is also quite different in how users end up using them, despite both being classified as “software” innovations.
- Consumerism and high-energy society is bad and we should not use any more than we need. Instead of trusting energy innovation, we should live within our means.
- Major artistic leaps might not have happened if not for this singularity of technology innovation.
- Human ability to harness increasing amounts of energy more easily is the most important proxy for technological progress. I think this was true throughout history, but starts to break down in times of energy excess (which had never existed before a few decades ago). Even the poorest in the world have access to gas to cook and heat with, and lights to light their houses. If we have enough energy to live above a certain comfortable baseline (much like how Smil draws that baseline in nutrition as having enough calories/diversity to be healthy), then of course you shouldn’t expect huge leaps forward, because it’s a solved problem. I’m not saying energy is “solved” certainly, but as with any system offering diminishing returns, you can’t expect huge leaps in energy if it’s not the bottleneck for human prosperity and survival anymore. And if progress, for Smil, is definitionally tied to the ability to harness increasingly powerful prime movers, you definitionally won’t see progress, which is kind of the case he puts forth.
- Using "how surprised a contemporary scientist would be if they were magically transported to more modern times" as a metric/proxy for technological innovation For all my cynicism that Smil undervalues modern computational technology, I think he’s probably right on this front: going from 1850 to 1920 would be more surprising to competent scientists than 1920 to 1970 or 1970 to today. But two points in defense of modernity:
Sure, some innovations are lower down the abstraction chain and necessary to literally sustain life (Haber process) but I think that those innovations can tautologically only come about once: you can’t revolutionize agriculture from shortage to insane surplus more than once. If it’s largely a solved problem (like food/urban lighting/etc) then there’s no incentive for lots more innovation. I think innovations higher up the abstraction chain are important and revolutionary in the same way as long as they impact the daily life of billions of people in a nontrivial way, which they certainly do.
I also think the idea of invention vs improvement is more subtle than Smil lets on. Take the Hall aluminium process--it was new/step function insofar as that particular manufacturing process hadn’t been seen before, but we could manufacture aluminium before, the Hall process was really just a (massively) improved way. It’s not like manufacturing aluminum was impossible beforehand. Yet Smil counts this as a step function improvement (doing something that literally could not be done before), but then contradicts himself discrediting the invention of the transistor as merely an “incremental computational improvement,” even though it’s a new technology that does something that could be done before, but massively better, just like the Hall/Haber processes. Either massive improvements on existing methods count as step functions or they don’t. You can’t selectively apply that definition and then use your mistaken assumptions to imply modern electronics is “pedestrian” in its contributions. It’s a subtle semantic game he plays, and I think, more generally, incessant use of data (sometimes somewhat irrelevant and distracting) helps him embed these logical inconsistencies with more ease.
Firstly, I also think many modern innovations are very impactful but not visible or tangible in the same way that CTTC innovations were. While illuminating a dark city or taking flight off land are very memorable and iconic, searching web pages for accurate information and allowing people rent cheaper holiday homes pales in comparison, but I don’t think it’s much less valuable just because it’s higher up the abstraction ladder: billions of people get access to exactly the right information they need to navigate every question or decision they face in life at the tap of a finger, for free. Millions of people who would never otherwise choose or be able to afford a memorable and thrilling holiday experience can now do so. From an economic perspective, tons of resources that were left empty before are now being utilised (empty homes via AirBnB, for example). I don’t think these are “pedestrian” just because they’re less sexy.
Secondly, I think tech innovation comes with diminishing returns. String theory is objectively harder than Newtonian physics. Going from starving on a dark farm to eating meat in air conditioning illuminated by mysterious electric light (a jump that happened in probably 20 years) is a bigger leap than going from eating meat in aircon to driving to an office job. Modern society has to work much harder to sustain the same amount of improvements in quality of life, just because most of the big improvements (getting people off dangerous, painful farm work and into houses) has already been done! In this sense, we’re fighting an uphill battle: and this will continue to become harder over the next few centuries, so any singularities of tech innovations from 2020-2500 will be that much more impressive (discontinuities despite most of the low hanging fruit having been picked).
He also slips in somewhat of a straw man: who said that the CTTC era innovations will be gone soon? For the world to move forward, older inventions don’t necessarily have to be supplanted, just built upon. If we go with his line of reasoning--that modern innovation is less than CTTC because we still use many things from that era--I could say we haven’t innovated at all from Han China--we still use wheels, after all! Of course we can expect to use the Haber and Hall processes for the foreseeable future--and I wouldn’t be surprised if they remain the backbone of high-energy civilisation for centuries to come--because they do their job so well there really isn’t much need for additional innovation. Incentives for innovation constantly move to where there’s a bottleneck: once feeding the world has been largely solved (as it has), it is no longer profitable to try and improve on existing solutions. Just because these fields (where basic innovations have been sufficient for human life to not warrant significant improvements) exist doesn’t mean that innovation is dead. That would be silly, yet Smil makes it sound like it’s a legitimate line of reasoning.