Ripples and Breakers

On Disruptive technology. Someone else made a load of predictions, and I made all sorts of comments and said I would too… later. So now I have.

I’m totally winging it here. I’m making it up as I go… so to make that a bit easier – a brief recap of the most disruptive of disruptive technologies in the 20th century?

Cripes – that’s a big one. Maybe too big. There was TV, Aeroplanes, mechanised warfare, TV again, telephones, computers, the internet, the anti-baby-pill, the atomic bomb. Not all of these were disruptive in the classical sense, but had a huge impact. Ok. 20th century too big. Try the last 20 years.

Cellphones. And the Internet. Obviously. I mean we did have these things earlier than 20 years ago, but the effects didn’t really kick in until the 90s/00s.

And to be honest, I’m struggling a bit to think of anything outside of that – but they are (to be fair) kindof big. I think they’re probably bigger than the anti-baby pill… and that was a really big one, that no one saw coming. It basically allowed women to go out an work – to a much greater degree. And this (coupled with capitalism’s inexorable drive to make people worth less) means that once a husband could support a whole family, now it takes two… and often even that is pushing it. This has put all sorts of strains on that entirely artificial construct “the family”… on people’s expectations, and now about 1/5th of the planet is suffering from clinical depression.

Obviously there are other reasons for the depression… but… whatever it is that we’re doing now, it ain’t making us happy. See that picture above. That’s prozac. In a bit I’ll get up, make a coffee and swallow that pill.

The point? “there’s no such thing as fate, just demographics” as a Russian somewhere said. If you’re looking at disruptive technologies, then I think that focusing on things that make Western consumers go “hey, Neato!” is… dust in the wind, dude.

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So. Disruptive technologies. Big ones. Tectonic ones.

1) The anti-death pill.

I’ve got a feeling that this one might be a bit like nuke fusion – always 20 years away… because the complexities of separating out what each gene actually does, is very problematic, because no gene is “for” just one thing.

Off the back of this – the search for it, satellite technologies like limb-replacement etc… the drive towards life extension is probably going to create all sorts of discoveries (like alchemy did back in the day) and will create fairly profound questions around what it actually means to be human. I mean where would the absence of death leave the monotheist religions? (which as far as I can see, are basically death-cults – particularly Christianity). And the anti-death pill is the most compellingly viral of technologies because virtually everyone on this planet has someone who they would die for. There is absolutely no question of containing this technology once it’s invented. People will kill for it.

2) The end of scarce energy.

Biotech again. Home-made fuel-stills running off genetically engineered algae. Once the bits are in place (ie: someone’s made the algae) then it should (theoretically) be no harder to set up than making your own beer.

Biotech is a bit of a mad one because once the R&D hump is passed, the costs of replication fall precipitously. You do need wizards to get over the hump though.

In addition to this, the price of solar, and the pressures to install are falling (and rising respectively) all the time. I can remember when every calculator needed a bunch of batteries. Then Every calculator was solar. This was due to nega-watts in action… not through improvements to solar-tech, but improvements in efficiency of the calculators.

So – I think energy acquisition (you know, that thing we’ve fought all these wars over in the last 100 years) is going to be completely deflated. And it will probably be replaced by mineral acquisition… because we’re running out of stuff… there are whole swathes of minerals where the remaining stocks/sources can be counted in 1 or 2 decades. Gallium for example – we’ve got about 6 years of that one left. It’s the stuff that flat TV screens are made out of.

This is another driver for bio-tech solutions I think. The Chinese currently own about 90% of the rare-earth magnet sources. You need these for generators etc… you know, wind-farms and so on. Solar? Wouldn’t be at all surprised if there weren’t a few key-ingredients here that are running a little low either. Biotech doesn’t have a problem with this sort of thing. Well, not as much.

3) CNC

Computer-controlled micro-manufacturing in other words… the ability to download a design from the web, to a printer/cutter thing of some sort, that then makes it.

The proliferation of this tech, combined with open-source… solutions for things created by people who are actually embedded in the problem, rather than trying to make “solutions” to sell to consumers – this is also potentially a big one. I think it’s a long way out though – decades. We actually already have machines that could (reprap-like) make themselves – modern cnc/lathing machines could do it… but these are very big and expensive. There needs to be a couple of innovations (probably to do with micro-sensing feedback loops so the engineering can be sloppier) happening before this stuff proliferates to the extent where it really starts sidelining mass-production.

I always use clothes (sewing machines etc) as the example why DIY manufacturing won’t necessarily take off. That said, the robotics of sewing machines is so well established and advanced, that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was where it started.

4) Non debt-based currencies.

Don’t know how this will happen, but there is a need for it to happen. A bad need – and if it does, it will change everything.

I mean really, there needs to be a serious re-invention of what “wealth” actually means, because our current understanding is not working. It’s not making us happy – even the people who have all the money aren’t happy… and it means we’re pouring trillions of dollars – lives, energy etc etc into “protecting ourselves from each other”.

From a design point of view it’s fucked.

Now we know a bit about design now – we experimented on various things in the 20th century, none of which worked terribly well – but something’s that was fairly clear – monolithic design is a recipe for genocide. Whatever we do needs to be made up of small, networked cells.

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That’ll do for now.