Chapter 3: Level I and Level II Technology: Effectiveness, Progress, and Complexity. [DRAFT]
[Note: this is an unformatted draft. I haven’t actually finished the last page and a half of the chapter, but it is sleepy and I am bedtime ]
Pleasantly surprised by the title (and use of the Oxford Comma!), I get another surprise as I see we are starting with the second item in the list; progress. S&A observe the competing narratives about progress that can be gleaned from our recent history:
“The eradication of smallpox; the lifting out of poverty of hundreds of millions of people in South and East Asia; the economic and political integration of dozens of European nations that for centuries were at one another’s throats; the defeat of Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism; the creation of an amazingly egalitarian global information network via the Internet” On the one hand, and on the other “The Bomb, AIDS, climate change, continuous concentration of global wealth, a billion malnourished people with no access to clean water, and information overload”. Progress is a question at the heart of many academic inquiries, from science to history to technology and social constructionism, and it is central to transhumanism. S&A identify two reasons. Firstly, because of the connection to the Enlightenment, and secondly, because of the irreversibility we perceive in technological change that invites the frame of progress. We see technology as a continuous expansion of our capabilities that transfoms both the natural and social worlds. It is the practical application of scientific discovery, also oft-mentioned as inherently progressive. For many, technology embodies that Enlightenment ideal of applying rationality to the betterment of mankind.
We now understand, of course, that increased capabilities are not always unambiguously positive. The Bomb wrought a great increase in our capabilities (for destruction, but also for energy generation) but the value of it is contested at best. Moreover, increases in capabilities modify power relations and cultural assumptions. Social systems are really techno-social systems, say S&A, that impose orders of behaviour on our lives and make possible hierarchies; of expertise, of influence… and of exploitation. They are (now) as complex and pervasive as natural systems, to the point that the distinction is no longer particularly meaningful.
Technology renders the question of progress at once more complex and more concrete - and, say S&A, more open to academic discussion.
Against this backdrop, S&A interpret transhumanism as the latest in the long history of claims that technology is progress, just applied specifically to human enhancement, and humans themselves - as is resistance to transhumanism.
Having characterised the debate, they now enter it. Firstly, they reject the idea that they’ll be able to make specific predictions about technologies, and secondly the ‘substitution of doctrine for analysis.’ They then say something I found rather strange; “…let’s enter the fray by positing the existence of something that no person of any intellectual sophistication could possibly believe in anymore: technology itself. For example, we want to claim that the watches we all wear embody a technological function that we find useful: letting us know what time it is.”
They include a long string of disclaimers about colonialism and advertising and cultural expectations and capitalism. Weird, but fine. I don’t disagree with anything they say, they’re engaging with those who do.
They also declare their intent to focus on the immediate; things happening now, in the real world, and to avoid debates about future technological possibility. However, they do make one prediction, that they seem to think is obvious/self-evident; that future dilemmas about human enhancement will evolve ‘much like current ones’. Specifically, they won’t be immediate - we won’t wake up and suddenly find ourselves in a different world, for example with CBIs that double your IQ or gene therapy that halts your aging. New developments will be approached slowly and unevenly. It’ll be very important to keep this assumption in mind when considering to what degree S&A are engaging with different kinds of transhumanist thought.
Having established their assumptions, they begin with a confident claim; technological use and development is part of of being human. Humans cannot meaningfully be separated from their technology - we are and always have been dependent on our basic technological capabilities. They make a (bounded) point about functionality; technologies are cause-and-effect machines, linking a human intent to a particular consequence. They want to use this basic understanding to create a taxonomy, one that bears in mind this characterization and relies on their suggestion that “when people make a decision, they usually intend to achieve the objective at which their decision is aimed. At the level of individual use, we claim, technologies are volition enhancers”. However, they often exist within complex systems - there is the immediate aspect of the technologies effect as used by the individual, and its existence within a broader complex system that supports it. Compare the airplane to the air transportation system; airports, airlines, security, pricing, etc. S&A say the first is Level I, and the second Level II. Level II is ‘less bounded’ than Level I. It includes more things, and often exhibits emergent behaviour arising from the interactions between different Level I units. Technology ‘lock-in’ occurs at level II, when a particular way of doing things becomes so ingrained in the system that changing it, while easy for any given Level I unit, is broadly impossible. Consider the use of oil and the gasoline engine - numerous alternatives exist that could be used right now, in some cases existing things could simply be converted to use one, but the infrastructure is fundamentally set up around gas.
Level II considerations also significantly raise the likelihood of unintended consequences. S&A describe level II as including the way that the functionality of an airplane is implicated in the spread of infectious diseases, and in the possibility of terrorist attacks like 9/11. Sometimes the emergent behaviour of Level II technologies completely subvert the Level 1 functionality they are constituted of (one trivial example is traffic jams). These are often the subject of detailed economic analysis- S&A later discuss overfishing as a conflict between the Level 1 goal of catching more fish and the Level II goal of a healthy fish population and indefinite fishing, However, the interactions between technologies are far broader than this; as S&A point out, the automobile evolved along and bound up with everything from consumer capitalism, individual credit, oil spills, and extraordinary human freedom (especially for women). They call ‘this’ Level III (to be discusses, and presumably more completely characterized, in the next chapter). There are a couple more in-depth examples on pg 40 and 41 I won’t go into.
S&A observe that, when viewed at Level 1, technologies in general often seem like “the whole human commitment to technological innovation could just be reframed as a commitment to the enhancement of human capabilities”. They call this an ‘irksome argument’ that some transhumanist have used to “make sweeping claims on behalf of technological promiscuity”. But on Level II, where the consequences become so much harder both to predict and observe, projecting intent becomes misleading at best, problematizing this simple connection between our intents and the broader capabilities to realize them through technology. They also claim that “many institutions, including more abstract ones such as law and cultural patterns, have a tendency to focus on Level I”, and have problems dealing with adverse level II effects. I’m not sure how right this is - they use the example of fisheries, which prompts me to note that the problem with fishery collapse is one generated on an individual level and only addressed on an institutional.
S&A concede that their focus on different levels of technology is not completely novel, but that the works that helped to define the field, which appropriately discussed the lack of control of complex technological systems, often create confusion because of a failure to consistently observe the level they are addressing. They charge Langdon Winner for failing to recognize that the adaptation of humans to the available technologies is itself not a new thing - though with increasing complexity the description of the dynamics become more difficult - and to note that the problem is endemic to social and economic systems as well. We have to observe the distinction between L1 and L2, but also to see both of them, and see them in context. S&A want to consider the L1 and L2 effects separately, saying “are automobiles the institutionalization of environmental evil, or an expression of personal freedom? …the question is incoherent, for it conflates two different views of the technology system, two different sets of effects, and two unrelated questions of values. Both effects derive from a link between the Level I functionality that attracts people to use cars in the first place and Level II complexity”. To say that the question is incoherent seems too strong to me, for the answer is ‘Both.’
S&A next turn to discussion of vaccines, as a way to push harder on the contrast between local use and the larger system. Vaccines are very effective in curbing disease: they are easy to administer and deliver large effects with reliability. More importantly, they do not seem to rely on extremely effective public health infrastructure - vaccines are not only effectively used in the US, with a healthcare system that “has become an emblem of inefficiency, dysfunction, and inequity,” but also in countries with little public health infrastructure at all. In investigating what makes vaccines so effective, they want to compare them to other approaches to reducing the toll of infectious diseases; specifically, malaria, which has no vaccine. Malarial research has been relatively neglected, presumably due to its burden falling almost entirely on poor countries. In the past decade or two, private philanthropy has stepped in, and research on malaria and malaria vaccines has increased substantially.
They talk about prevention, in the absence of a vaccine, particularly bednet distribution, indoor spraying and ‘other measures’. I’m going to include most of their commentary on this, since I expect my audience will find it interesting.
LARGE DIGREESION ON MALARIA; skip to “While S&A’s reasoning may not” to skip this
”In many ways, insecticide-impregnated bed nets are a very appealing technology: inexpensive, low tech, simple to use. Where such nets are in wide use, the spread of malaria declines rapidly. Yet the first decade of concentrated effort to promote widespread net use in malarial Africa was widely deemed a failure, with the incidence of childhood malaria increasing. Reasons alleged for this failure include policy disagreements over appropriate distribution methods, the bureaucratic incompetence of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the cooperative Roll Back Malaria campaign, and other organizations, and simple lack of use by those who received nets. Despite significant expenditures and effort, by 2005, after a decade of effort, only about 3 percent of African children in malarial regions were sleeping under insecticide-impregnated bed nets. In response to these disappointments, a policy consensus began to emerge in the mid-2000s around an approach called Integrated Vector Management. IVM combines bed nets with other interventions in a way that, according to the organization Africa Fighting Malaria, “means tailoring a variety of preventative interventions to local context.” As described by the World Health Organization, the characteristic features of IVM include “selection of methods based on knowledge of local vector biology … rational use of insecticides … and good management practices. The specific mix of these interventions depends on local factors, such as the type of mosquito and malaria parasite, climate, cost, and available resources.” Very promising preliminary results of IVM in several countries have created a sense of optimism about the prospects for making real progress in combating malaria. A report by McKinsey & Company (commissioned by Roll Back Malaria and released to the public at the 2008 Davos World Economic Forum) suggested the following: [A]n investment [in IVM] of approximately $2.2 billion a year for five years … can achieve full coverage of prevention and treatment measures in the 30 hardest-hit malaria endemic African countries, which together account for an estimated 90 percent of global malaria deaths and 90 percent of malaria cases in Africa… . Over five years, this effort is expected to: • Save 3.5 million lives •
Prevent 672 million malaria cases
• Free up 427,000 hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa
• Generate more than $80 billion in increased GDP for Africa.”
Note: That’s under $700 per life saved. For comparison, Givewell’s estimate for AMF is $3500. Now, sure, economies of scale are a thing, but we should expect the cost to go up with a) further detailed study, and b) as more interventions are carried out, and low-hanging fruit is picked. I’ve found it very difficult to find the report; a press release, but not the original. Links seem to redirect to Malaria No More’s vague Solution page.
“Such a radical reduction in malaria would be a magnificent achievement— true progress that we should all hope for. But it is hard to be optimistic about these predictions, for two very different reasons. Let’s imagine that, instead of applying Integrated Vector Management to the prevention of malaria, we had a reasonably effective vaccine. What would be different? Certain things might be the same. There would, no doubt, be controversies over appropriate policies for vaccine delivery, there would be organizational dysfunction at various levels, and a continued lack of adequate infrastructure for delivering health care in parts of Africa. In response to such hurdles, the essence of IVM, the key to its success, is “tailoring a variety of preventative interventions to local context.” Yet surely the less tailoring that is necessary to achieve a desired result, the more likely success will be. To the extent that IVM depends on responding to local context, it also depends on managing and implementing knowledge and action in ways that are particular to that context. In any particular setting, the appropriate mix of interventions—“a combination of bed nets, medication, spraying, and environmental management”—must be determined, and the institutions and people responsible for delivering the interventions must act appropriately. IVM, that is, is a complex combination of activities that requires organizations to behave in particular ways in particular settings. And, crucially, no single activity embodies the essence of malaria prevention. In complex organizational settings, learning is particularly difficult because it is often not obvious how the lessons from one context might apply to another, and disagreement over competing approaches is common because the links from cause to effect are difficult to specify fully— numerous interpretations of success or failure may be plausible. People and their institutions aren’t nearly as reliable, predictable, or replicable as good vaccines. The main selling point of IVM— its sensitivity to context— is also its weakness. It isn’t that current approaches to controlling malaria shouldn’t be tailored to context— surely they must be. But tailoring to context is hard to do. A really effective intervention is one that, to the greatest possible extent, renders context irrelevant (or, to put it another way, internalizes context in the technology so worrying about context is not necessary). If a reasonably reliable malaria vaccine were to be developed, no doubt there would be challenges related to cost, manufacturing, and social acceptance of the vaccine. But much more of the intervention— the action that leads to the desired outcome— would be embodied in use of the technology itself. What you have to do to succeed is clear and always the same: vaccinate people. If people get vaccinated, they will, with high reliability, be immune, no matter where they live, how they live, or what they believe. People may or may not reliably use the bed nets they are given, but once they have been vaccinated the problem is solved— the locus of reliability shifts from the individual to the technology. Perhaps there will never be effective malaria vaccines, in which case IVM may well be the best path to reducing malaria in poor countries. But IVM is likely to be a very indirect path, one that does not always reach its goal. An effective vaccine would do the job better.
The process of delivering a vaccination is what we might call a shop-floor activity— an activity whose effectiveness depends little if at all on the larger organizational setting. 20 Here we are making a subtle but important distinction between the vaccine itself (a Level I technology) and the process of administering the technology (a Level II activity). As with the airplanes in the dysfunctional transportation system, most of the cause-and-effect elements directly relevant to solving the problem are localized in one particular technology whose performance can be easily measured and is largely insensitive to the surrounding institutional context, and just about everyone agrees on what counts as success. Level II activities can be organized to achieve this success, because its attributes are obvious, and feedbacks from failure are clear (recall that the dysfunctional air transport system can nonetheless organize around the achievement of airline safety). Solving a problem is hard when you don’t have a way to condense the major cause-and-effect elements of the solution into a particular technology or routine that can be administered on the shop floor— that is, at the Level I site where the action takes place, and where the results of the action can be experienced. By our definition, a Level I technology is simple (even if it involves a sophisticated feat of engineering, like a modern jet airliner) in that it can take advantage of capturing both the cause and effect involved in a particular task or activity; but both Level II and Level III involve complex adaptive systems in which causes and effects are difficult if not impossible to isolate.”
There are, I think, two problems with this criticism, neither fatal. The first is the inconsistency in breaking down the L1 and L2 aspects of the problem. The problem of ‘administering the technology’ which S&A identify as a L2 activity with regard to vaccination, seems very much to be the locus of the problems with bednets identified earlier. These issues of sensitivity to local context absolutely crop up in vaccine distribution. Additionally, S&A’s claim that the increased requirement of context-sensitivity of IVM over vaccines makes the latter significantly more difficult is only speculation, and my impression is that the strongest obstacles to effective IVM are fairly contingent. Moreover, even with a vaccine, many aspects of IVM would still be highly relevant, as they are focussed on the institutional sustainability of vector control practices and the integration of interventions across diseases. Vaccines for parasitic diseases, of which a malaria vaccine is the first, have a different use profile to infectious diseases, which benefit more from population immunity. Malaria in particular has a very complex pattern of immunity, and different types of vaccines interact differently with other parasitic interventions (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/15/1409467112.abstract?sid=1252c5ac-72cc-4083-9b08-9daf547c8418, http://www.globe-network.org/sites/default/files/documents/public/resources/conferences/2010/herd-immunity-protection-an-important-indirect-benefit-of-vaccination/herd-immunity-and-malaria.pdf)
Secondly, going through the difficulty of appropriately combining bednet distribution, spraying, and “tailoring a variety of preventative interventions to local context”, while valuable, is not necessary to achieve significant inroads. While not as targeted at eradication or as effective as IVM is, LLIN-distribution alone is an extremely cost-effective public health intervention that is significantly less complicated, as is spraying. We must take care not to overestimate the magnitude of the problem IVM is designed to solve, or it’s improvement - the severtity of early failures in African malarial intervention were largely failures of cost-effectiveness, not impact, and were largely due to a) bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption in the areas requiring intervention, b) technical issues related to cheap, reliable, and effective distribution of bednets in countries without significant infrastructure. Much of the progress of the last decade has been in overcoming these challenges. Though the development and of IVM is not unimportant, it is not itself new - the basic principles were used in the mid 20th century in the US antimalarial efforts and elsewhere. The increase in a global strategic investment in IVM from ‘08 onwards, for example, was as much due to a general increase in efforts to combat neglected tropical diseases than it was a shift from effective to ineffective measures.
Since the publication of the book, the first licensed malaria vaccine, ‘RTS, S’ has been developed and moved through clinical trials. Roll-out for use is expected as early as 2017. It requires four shots and has an efficacy ranging from 25-50%. It is a Pre-erythrocytic vaccine, which interacts in a complicated manner with existing interventions such as bednets - some research indicated that use in tandem could actually be negative, while others indicate RTS’S is most effective in low-transmission environment.
While S&A’s reasoning may not apply as well to a malaria vaccine as they think, they have better examples. They say that this is more in line with their experience in occupational health and safety on shop floors; when manufacturing uses toxic materials, interventions that focus on worker use of protective equipment are “Never as effective” as those that involve redesigning the process to use less toxic materials (due to worker compliance and equipment maintenance issues). They lay out a well known heuristic, the “hierarchy of control”, which is a list of potential responses to risk ordered from most to least ‘efficient’:
substitution of less risky alternatives
isolation of the risk to reduce potential exposure or impact
implementation of engineering controls
implementation of administrative controls
use of personal protective equipment.
They say that the first two operate at L1, while the rest are at L2, “ increasingly rely[ing] on institutional and social systems rather than technological design.” One of S&A was once the executive in charge of environment, H&S for a large firm, so their expertise here is much more reliable than the malaria case. However, many problems cannot be ‘technologically embodied’ in this way. Sometimes the goal we are interested in cannot be so thoroughly internalized in technology. S&A mention the example of wealth creation via malaria reduction - the earlier estimate predicted $80 billion in enhanced wealth creation over five years, for an investement of $10 billion. The mathematical inconsistency aside (the number they quoted earlier was 2.2 billion, I checked), S&A claim that the complexity of the conditions means that any such prediction is ‘at best a vague and hopeful guess’. One wonders how much their willingness to condemn the prediction is specific to this case, which they questioned the optimism of earlier. Would they say the same to predictions made from the individualised increased income capacities shown in long-term RCTs for various public health interventions (including LLIN distribution and deworming). They mention work done by anthropologist Peter Brown who tested the hypothesis ”that malaria was blocking economic development on the island of Sardinia in the period after World War II. He concluded that the “macroparasitism” of landowners drained 30 percent of the production capacity from peasants in the form of rents, while the “microparasitism” of malaria accounted for a reduction of less than 10 percent in their gross production.”
And if wealth creation is your goal, there may be better routes to progress than curing malaria, say S&A - “for example, changing patterns of land tenure, or improving levels of education. But of course these goals are themselves very hard to make progress on.”
But if your goal is wealth creation, it seems very likely to me that one of your best routes is technological development. Moreover, S&A have (sadly) retreated somewhat from the early acknowledgement of other forms of technology that so excited me. Patterns of land tenure, and other economic policy issues are examples of technology! “Law is the technology of social life”, and no less than our legal system are our economic structures an example of a (social) technology. S&A’s insistence on observing the social, economic and cultural aspects of technology cut both ways here. If they want to defend the claim that there is not a technological solution to many important problems, they need to do a lot more work (though if they just want to say that there is not a L1 solution, they may be in a better place. It’s not clear how these broad social and political technologies interact with the L1/L2/L3 taxonomy).
Our understanding of a a technology is an integrated result of a query, one that interacts with a complex underlying system and implicitly treats certain aspects as relevant and others not. This is fine, within its domain of applicability, but when that is used to analyse beyond the boundaries implicit in those assumptions, the legitimacy breaks down. S&A here mention their (problematic) criticism of transhumanism related to cognitive enhancement, identifying the earlier ‘scale-up’ problem as an example of the fallacious extension of L1 analysis to L2 consequences without an understanding of that boundary.
For a more detailed example, they turn to cochlear implants.They cover the standard deaf culture issues, and say that “The appropriate ethical goals, therefore, are to eliminate obstacles to full participation in society by deaf people and to promote complete acceptance of deaf culture”.
Cochlear implants, supposedly, are a threat to these goals and should therefore be resisted.
I want to pause for a moment and reflect on that statement. If they are a threat, why? What is the causal chain between the development of cochlear implants and the prevention of a) full participation in society by deaf people and b) the complete acceptance of Deaf culture?
Let’s consider the second first. I can think of one answer - cochlear implants diminish Deaf culture by reducing the number of deaf people. A culture cannot practically survive if its members diminish too low, and cochlear implants are being adopted fast. From 1985 to 2009, about 190,000 of them had been implanted (mostly after 2000). S&A say that cochlear implants ‘should be resisted’ (how?) presumably so that Deaf culture does not lose so many people to them.
There is something deeply troubling about the proposal that a culture should be preserved by forcing people to stay in it, and that is exactly what ‘resisting’ cochlear implants would ultimately entail in the face of deaf people who freely choose implants (no transhumanist as S&A has characterized us should want to force them on people). Now, in the next paragraph, S&A discuss the question of cochlear implants for young children, who cannot freely choose them (supposedly). Here we need data. How many deaf people would or do freely choose implants, compared to those who would reject them?
The second, the full participation of deaf people in society, I must also infer the threat - my guess would be that it is easier to justify things like expenditures on accessibility for deafness if there is not a quick, easy way for deaf people to hear. My guess is that S&A and Deaf advocates who take this line think that it is easier to resist cochlear implants than explain things like the social model of disability and impairment and Deaf culture to their fellow citizen, convince them these are the correct way to understand the situation, and that the basic fabric of a good society would accommodate deafness even if deafness was (partially) optional. I’m not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, it’s a fundamentally undemocratic notion, one that abdicates any responsibility to persuade society and your fellow citizens of your position, and instead exert pressure in some way to bring about your consequential goals in a way that divests deaf people who do want technological intervention of that option.
On the other hand, I’m not an unalloyed fan of democracy, I understand completely the difficulty of convincing people of complicated ideas, and I’m deeply cynical of the public’s ability to develop this sort of detailed understanding of philosophically advanced ideas.
S&A correctly identify the main ethical subtlety in the case of children having cochlear implants chosen for them (they presume by hearing people). That might actually be the most common case, now that I think of it. They present two ‘alternatives’:
1) the complete and equal rights and access of those without hearing,
2)The widespread adoption of cochlear implants (and/or other technological ways to give hearing)
As ‘solutions’ to the goal of creating “a society in which deaf people have all the opportunities and benefits that are available to hearing people”, and observe that the former is likely much more difficult than the latter. In fact, what I did earlier was propose a third, a combination of 1 and 2:
3) The (likely widespread) adoption of cochlear implants by anyone who chooses them, and the simultaneous struggle for the complete and equal rights and access of those who choose to remain without hearing.
The addition of (2), it is assumed will make accomplishing (1) much harder, making (3) even more difficult than either (1) or (2).
Returning for now to S&A, they identify this distinction with their L1/L2, ‘as with malaria’.One option a purely technological solution, pushing the complexity of the situation aside or ignoring it, the other engaging directly with the enormous political challenge.To Deaf people and allies, this sharp boundary is innappropriate, in leaving out important considerations. Opposition to cochlear implants is therefore engaging it as a L2 system. However, this brings up a conflict between the two goals; goal (a) can be much more easily accomplished through technology such as cochlear implants, making those without hearing equal in situation to those with by giving them hearing, whereas goal (b) seems to be actively frustrated by this solution. It could be that accomplishing (b), ensuring that Deaf culture is sustained and fully accepted and included in a vibrant and diverse society would also fully accomplish (a), but doing that is much harder than the technological fix, say S&A. Even if we grant that such a solution would be better than the technological, a more just and equitable and better society, it may be too difficult compared to (2). Here S&A are clear that they are not making an ethical argument for or against, just making an observation about the likely paths, and a weak prediction about the choices that people on the whole are likely to make.
Here we have the difficulty and struggle of a political struggle pitted against the ease of a technological intervention, and S&A are observing that the latter has a fundamental political advantage stemming from its functionality. It may disturb us, but “it rubs our noses in the possibility that what seems like the right thing to do— work for a more tolerant and inclusive society— may in the end be a less beneficial path to follow than the use of the technological intervention…because the fix is so much more effective, more reliable, and more predictable than the political path toward progress.”
They caution, however, that this also shows the importance of understanding the LI goal that the fix actually addresses and distinguishing it from more complex Level II goals that the fix may not address, or might even reduce pressure to achieve (or with which it might even conflict).
Pursuing this discomfort, we turn to childbirth.The ‘industrialization; of childbirth has made it far more reliable and predictable than it was, even globally. At the same time, one may also feel it has been alienating and dehumanizing.
“In rich countries, infant mortality at childbirth has declined from several hundred per thousand in the eighteenth century to ten or fewer per thousand today, and maternal mortality has declined from as high as 10 percent as recently as the late nineteenth century to less than one in 10,000 today.”
S&A even gesture towards the possiblility that this will increase until pregnancies are completely technologically mediated, perhaps even outside the womb, to deliver utter reliability in the outcomes of childbirth.They also point out “the entrenched inequities in birth outcomes in the United States.”, comparing African-Americans to white Americans, and the US to other rich countries. However, the disparity seems not to be directly due to technology - the increase in safety is about the same for both poor and minority babies as it is for the babies of ‘more well-to-do’ parents - the L1 tech developments have resulted in similar absolute increases - and “More than 40 years of policies aimed at increasing the quality of prenatal and maternal health care and nutrition among poor women in the United States through Medicaid and other programs have had little or no clear positive effect on birth outcomes. These worthy efforts turn out not to have narrowed the mortality disparities. The specific reasons for the lack of progress are, of course, debated among the experts.”
Again, while improvements are swiftly gleaned from L1 changes in technology, political paths to solving an underlying problem and less satisfactory. But the technological path can seems less ethically satisfying. It gives us an excuse to leave intact the underlying social failures contributing to the inequity.
S&A thinks this underlines the ‘incoherence and wrong-headedness’ around transhumanism. Technological enhancement of humans, they say, will not “help us confront the most fundamental political challenges faced by our society, challenges underlain by a combination of value conflict and uncertainty about the future consequences of our actions.”
I’m torn by this. On the one hand, they did say ‘dialog around transhumanism’, and there are some transhumanists who seem to act as if technology alone will solve everything.And in our community, there is a disproportionate amount of people proposing technological solutions to political problems.Ultimately, though, I think this is grossly uncharitable. Even the strongest form of transhumanism S&A have defined does not require that transhumanist technology can solve every political problem (and it is not implausible that some political problems will have technological solutions - we’ve seen some potential examples already). Perhaps more importantly, transhumanist solutions need not be solely technological. Transhumanism is the application of rationality to technology for human betterment; not an implausible description of a political solution. Additional, even ‘mere’ Level I human enhancement can greatly enhance the capabilities of individual humans, giving them a greater capacity to solve these problems; this is one reason transhumanists are so excited about cognitive enhancement. Even if it is ‘captured’ in the way described elsewhere, the increased productivity that is directed towards human betterment (for example, by academia, public service, capitalism, etc). To a degree, S&A acknowledge some small part of this response in their “technologies can sometimes help us find a shortcut to dealing with some of the particular consequences of these challenges”, but only in the most superficial way. S&A also say “Accordingly, we simply don’t buy into the framing of transhumanism as offering a choice between two alternative technological futures, one essentially utopian and the other essentially dystopian”, a framing of transhumanism I’m completely unfamiliar with.
S&A, it seems to me, have made several reasonable points using their S1/S2 distinction (though I have some problems with the distinction itself, as I’ve mentioned), but they systematically underestimate the extent of S1 effects; “We suggest instead that there is a scale of experience where one doesn’t have to give up one’s sophistication about the complexity of the world (and its technology systems) to accept the possibility of modest yet encouraging technological progress on the shop floor.”
The recursive nature of human enhancement is at the core of much transhumanism, so-called ‘L1-enhancements’ increasing our rate of progress on the ‘shop floor’, which in turn makes us more capable, both at solving L1-level problems, fueling the continued progress and making us more capable at solving L2-level problems. This is the broader, weaker thesis that, when taken to its extreme, becomes the intelligence explosion ‘school’ of Singularitarianism.
