A promise, fulfilled in full, and in ways never dreamed of before their invention. Scientists who, at most, might have met once a year at a conference in 1950 or a few times in a lifetime in 1850 are now cowriting papers from different continents. “Closed” governments have opened – the immediateness of the images of suffering was what caused the response to Vietnam to be different from Korea only 20 years before, and the Spanish-American war 60 years earlier, and forced the government to respond. People, with this tech, aren’t just getting one view of world events, or if they do, it is by their choice, not by necessity. Minds which would have known but one way now know many.

We wouldn’t have heard about, or cared about, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean a century ago. Now we donate billions to the Red Cross to help. (Leave alone the difference between what happened to New Orleans in 2005 vs. Galveston in 1900, mostly driven by the ability to communicate the danger, quickly and effectively, to a population.) We are far more open as societies than we used to be, to a great extent because of all of these technologies and their promises.

The issues Wu cited – China and Google, Napster, EBay fraud – back up the idea of technological transformation. Why? Google, for example. Ok, they modified their site to fit the Chinese rulers. That is one website. Millions more to go. China blocks the net? Someone uses radio, or fax, to go around them. Or they mirror the blocked information on an as-yet unblocked site, which is then blocked, and then is mirrored again, etc. Each time someone is able to access that which isn’t ‘allowed’, a promise fulfilled.

Today’s Havanan, living in absolute despotism, has more access to the outside world than the most free citizens in London 150 years ago. That Christian in Afghanistan, who was on trial for his life for apostacy? He wouldn’t have had a trial in a previous era, he just would have been strung up and forgotten. Instead, he is able to leave, and at least some Afghanis who would never have given his death a second thought are thinking about what they are doing. Even if it is a very few, it is a start toward those minds being opened. Let us not forget that the WEST was doing these same things not so long ago. Now we don’t – a promise fulfilled.

The automobile opened up the world, literally, to people who would have never gotten more than 10 miles from home a generation before. It ‘opened’ society in a way we can’t even understand in our society where many of us commute on a daily basis distances which would have taken more than a day to cover in 1800, and take weekend trips at distances which would have taken a week to cross. Tech did that, fulfilling promises its inventors didn’t even imagine. Not sociology, or political activism, or government..

Tech hasn’t brought, and never will bring, a perfect world. It can be used to snoop into private lives (though how much worse was it when we all lived in small towns with a few hundred people, and any small transgression was sure to be known by everyone, simply because there was no place to hide). It can be used to kill (though swords and arrows did that quite nicely, too – the battles in Ancient Greece killed more than now, proportional to population change). It can be used to oppress. (Though is the worst oppressor today as bad as the Pharaohs were, what can a conqueror today do that Rome didn’t do to Carthage?) It pollutes. (How many millions died due to unclean water, before modern treatment methods?) It doesn’t solve every human problem, right now. (What does?) All it does is solve more than it creates.

No single ‘button’ is ever going to solve all of the world’s problems, Utopia is an impossibility with humans, but a multitude of little buttons will make solutions, one by one. What will those solutions be? I don’t know, they haven’t been invented yet. What promises will they fulfill? Who knows?

The argument that “we can do anything with technology” has a good deal to recommend it: primarily that it’s generally been true, historically speaking. Don’t be too hard on Newt and others for taking it a bit too far.

But the above is my thesis more or less and also that of Brian Zepp Jamieson of Zepp’s News Service.

If you go there, you should read my very first post (january archive) and also my quoted Zepp post (early this month).

The second type boils down to this. Technologists are very good at polishing known technologies and approaches, but not at solving fundamentally new problems. Scientists, on the other hand, have a good idea of where the really difficult unsolved stuff is. Some (rare, unfortunately) people wear both hats comfortably, of course. Based on the best current understanding (or lack of understanding) of the issues involved, some people have argued that it is a collossal waste of money that could be much better used elsewhere.

Does this mean it isn’t possible? Of course not. It just means, that in the judgement of many people who understand the issues quite well, it isn’t likely.

The Internet equivalent of the zipless fuck is the “garage-door opener” theory of high tech. It’s the idea that all you need to do is invent the right tech, push a button, and the whole world opens up. Closed governments open, the narrow-minded become open-minded, and so on. This was the promise of the telegraph, radio, and television; and in the 1990s, this was the promise of the Internet. And it’s still the premise of books like Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat.

Not to mention Reynolds’ book, if I understand correctly.

Clarke’s First Law:
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

Seems to sum up the attitude under discussion.

But what Henry says about the conceptual constraints applies in a big way.

Missile defense is after all a giant government program. One that is subject to no market discipline and can be kept going for purely political reasons whether it works or not, to appease congressmen whose districts are enriched or who just want to be seen as “strong on defense”. Its checkered history thus ought to be quite unsurprising to any libertarian. (The International Space Station is another good example of the same phenomenon).