Frankenfoods, Toothpaste, & Justin Bieber: Capitalism & Technology II

In a previous post I argued that too often Marxists fail to recognize the ways in which capitalism remains dynamic and continues to advance technologically and socially. This one-sidedness distorts analyses and perspectives and threatens to give Marxism the feel of a millennial doomsday sect. Instead Marxism ought to be perceived as a powerful critical tool for explaining the contradictions of capitalism and providing strategic answers to create a better world without them. To do so means that Marxism must be flexible and dynamic. It must not fear the strengths of capitalism but rather must build itself on the ways that capitalism has made a better, more efficient and humane system both possible and necessary. That failure is a result of an ideological defensiveness and ossification arising from the isolation of Marxists from workers struggle (at least in the English-speaking world) for longer than a generation. I want to now posit some thoughts on the way that technological development takes place under capitalism, how it is distorted by the profit-motive and by the prerogatives of the capitalist state – and yet still manages to create forms of progress that are often quite dramatic.

To summarize what I previously argued, billions of people now have access to the internet (though two-thirds still do not). China and a number of other “developing nations” are growing at a rate unprecedented in modern times, at least in terms of scale. China has plans, for instance, to urbanize an additional 500 million people over the next decade or so. Private companies, most notably SpaceX, are bringing down the cost of space travel (potentially by a hundred-fold if they manage to establish reusable rocket components) or, in the case of Planetary Resources, developing business plans to mine asteroids. Regenerative medicine is working on the development of 3D printing of organs, regrowing lost teeth and even reversing male pattern baldness. Gene therapy, long shunned after some earlier false starts, is moving a number of therapies for MD, AIDS, hemophilia, blindness and even the common cold, through clinical trials. Moore’s Law has advanced computing to the point that supercomputers from the 1970s that were housed in entire buildings are now contained in a smartphone that can be bought for under $500. The world has never seemed to change as quickly in human history as it is today.

And yet there are serious problems and great dangers that face humanity from hunger, diabesity (diabetes and obesity) and poverty to war and climate change. Ice caps are melting, the economy is stagnating (though with recent signs of life in the USA) and we face challenges never before faced. How is this possible? It is fundamentally rooted in the contradictions of the way that capitalism organizes the economy, research and more. I want to argue that the problems are rooted in at least six ways that capitalism distorts research and technological development. These are as follows:

1) Capitalism only develops technologies that can generate profit, and usually only those that can generate short-term profit. This has a few results:

a. Capitalism produces technologies that we don’t need. We don’t need a new smartphone every year or a new flat screen TV or remote controlled lawn mower. More than anything capitalism uses advertising and marketing to get us to buy dumb shit. This is rooted in part in alienation from our own productive capabilities as human beings. Because our labour is forced we seek reward in consumption, literally in buying things or in our animal desires – eating, sex, etc. – rather than in what makes us human, our ability to labour (ie. Transform nature) because that ability is taken from us by forced labour (work for someone else or starve).

b. Capitalism doesn’t develop technologies that we do need. If it doesn’t produce an obvious profit, technologies are neglected. 

c. Capitalism produces stuff that is simply garbage and doesn't work but which continues to be produced because it generates profits. Think of GMOs, these are very big business. Yet, many recent studies suggest that they don't do what they say - increase crop yields. (There are also many potential dangers in relation to human consumption, et al). But GMOs have the benefit, from the point of view of capitalists, of allowing agribusinesses to dominate the agricultural production because they can patent the seeds and thereby outlaw their "illegal use" such as seed banking (which would permit farmers to avoid having to buy more seed and fertilizer every year. It also allows the corporation to generate sales of ancillary products like fertilizer and pesticide, since their seeds are designed to be used in conjunction with their specific products. Again, with no clear, uncontested evidence of the seeds being useful for producing more of anything except profit.

2) Related to that last point, capitalism is only interested in technologies that it can enclose using legal measures like copyright, patents, etc. We are all aware of the music and film industries and their struggles to stop “piracy” (much of which is actually just freely sharing, involving no money or profit) but this extends to many fields, including the recent decision by the US Supreme Court to negate the right of companies to patent naturally existing genes (as opposed to synthetic genes, such as with GMOs). While it's good that companies can't go so far as patenting, in this instance, the genes that lead to higher breast cancer risk, in the years to come patented synthetic genes will become an obstacle to research and meeting human need - just as patented pharmaceuticals have contributed to tens of thousands of deaths from AIDS in Africa, where people and governments couldn't afford the exorbitant prices.

3) Capitalism produces technological developments that achieve false, rather than true, efficiencies by externalizing as many costs as possible – on the environment, onto workers, etc. The most obvious one here is fossil fuels. There has been talk for decades, for instance, as to when solar power will achieve the same cost as coal, natural gas, oil, etc. But if we account for the future cost of cleaning the environment; the cost of extreme weather events and the melting of the polar ice caps; the cost of healthcare for children with asthma, the cost to the deterioration of buildings in cities, etc. – this point was probably already reached a while ago. The inefficiencies are hidden and offloaded to the general population. At a more "mundane" level, the recent deaths of over a thousand garment workers in Bangladesh is a stark demonstration of exactly what it means to "externalize costs" onto workers.

4) The technologies that capitalism invents that could make life better – for instance robotics and other forms of automation, etc. – instead cause dislocation through unemployment and provides a downward pressure on wages through deskilling, offshoring, etc. This is pretty straightforward – the rise of the internet has made international trade more possible, permitting the off-shoring of jobs, from low-skilled manufacturing to service jobs. Websites like designcrowd.com and Elance.com allow the hiring of freelancers in the developing world for half or less the cost of paying for those services in the first world. Foxconn, which produces the iPhone and many other high-tech items announced a plan in 2011 to utilize three million robots within a few years. This will come at the expense of jobs in China.

5) Capitalism attempts to use technology to solve problems that are created by social conditions, not lack of technology.

a. An obesity pill is a really obvious human health issue. Obesity is caused by the rise of processed foods that lack nutrition but which are craved by time and cash-strapped working families.

b. Greater crop yields – Monsanto and other companies seek to patent genetically modified crops (related to the above point about enclosing tech and bogus technology) but the problem is not production it is that people can’t afford food. There is no food shortage, there is a shortage of “effective demand” – people who can afford to buy the food.

6) Of those technologies that capitalism is interested in that don’t have immediately apparent profit opportunities, the only ones that usually get developed have benefits for the state, usually in the form of its military arm.

a. Drones – these have become widespread, first for foreign military purposes (literally to bomb people in the Middle East and places like Afghanistan). They are now being utilized by police and security services as a way to perform surveillance on domestic populations.

b. Even in healthcare, the areas that get funded are in large part that have a military component, like treating soldier’s who suffer major trauma.

These are, of course, only a small sample of technologies and technological dynamics that are distorted by capitalist dynamics. I may well have missed some and invite other to add to this list. But it nonetheless suggests that capitalism is both inefficient and destructive in the ways that it develops technology.


SEE ALSO PARTS ONE & THREE IN THIS SERIES:

1) Marxism, Capitalism & Technology

2) Genes, Robots & The Internet: How Capitalism Revolutionizes The Planet

Marxism, Capitalism & Technology

Thoughts on Marxism & Technology Part I There is a joke about Marxist economists that goes something along the lines of “Marxists have predicted five of the last four recessions”. I was reminded of this joke recently as I debated with a comrade about capitalism and progress, specifically around technological advances in modern capitalism. I suppose that for Marxists, as radical critics of the present system that we will tend towards always pointing out the weaknesses and contradictions of the system; the way in which it develops technology – the means of production – in a distorted way that leads to economic, environmental and humanitarian crises. These critiques are important tools for puncturing the arrogance and pretensions of the present system and pointing to a better, less destructive way, to organize society.

And, yet, there is a danger that we look like Luddites or moaners, scoffing at everything and seeing no good in anything, perhaps not to each other – we expect “ruthless criticism of everything that exists” - but certainly to most working class people. I remember this well in the 1990s as the internet was expanding rapidly and changing the way that we communicate, access information, etc. Of course, it wasn’t only us who were grappling with this. I was in university at the time and there were debates about how to treat internet-based research for papers – was it an academically valid resource; how ought it to be footnoted in papers, etc? But our own reaction to the internet, and now web 2.0, looks quaint to say the least. We have had two reactions, which typify in general the reaction of contemporary Marxists to technology. These are 1) deny its significance (“only middle class people use the internet”, “it hasn’t changed anything about how we organize or communicate”) and 2) emphasize its destructive aspects (British Marxist Alex Callinicos recently referred to the “dark side” of the internet, leading to much chuckling).

The real problem, of course, lies not with the failure of capitalism to innovate and transform the lives of people, not only in the developing world (to which I’ll return) but also those in the developed world. Of course this transformation includes a serious destructive element – the rise of smartphones has led to proxy wars and trade maneuvers towards securing and manipulating rare earth metals that are key elements in smartphone manufacture, for instance. In terms of the economy, the irresistible pressure of Moore’s Law, which describes the tendency for the number of transistors on chips to double every 18 months or so, has not only given us the aforementioned smartphones, it has also led to the deskilling of a whole number of fields, technologically-driven unemployment, etc. Not to mention the destructiveness of mining practices, etc.

But there is also a progressive side to this development. It is a good thing that we can access information instantaneously. I am someone who works from home for a company in another province. In the course of a given day I receive material in pdf format via e-mail. I input my expenses into an online bookkeeping website that calculates and itemizes all of my expenses and income for me (for free). I pay my bills online and send money electronically, which saves me hours of standing in line at the bank. I purchase or sell second hand products from another country and have them shipped to my home. I pay another freelancer to design a poster or do research for which I’m ill-equipped. This list doesn’t even touch on social media. As I write this I’m involved in a crowd-funding campaign for a movie that I co-directed that has raised several thousand dollars. A lot of that money has come from people I haven’t personally seen for a decade or more but with whom I maintain a semblance of contact through Facebook. I’m not that old but when I was in public school there weren’t even personal computers and our introduction to computing was filling in punch cards using binary language to perform simple math problems. We sent off the cards to be processed and they returned a week later. To say that advances in computers have transformed our culture – even if it hasn’t eliminated capitalism, is stating the obvious.

On a society-wide scale the transformation of China is nothing short of breath-taking. A generation ago the vast majority of Chinese lived in the countryside without phones and TVs and were illiterate. China is now an urban nation with 100 times more cities above 1 million people than the US, with income in the top 50% of the planet, and with literacy around 95%. As a result of innovation the Chinese company that manufactures Apple’s iPhones and the Kindle, with a workforce of about 500,000 in China alone, is moving towards adding up to 3 million robots to its manufacturing process. The Broad Group, originally a manufacturer of air conditioning units, will break ground next month on what will be the world’s tallest building using factory fabrication techniques. The 838 metre building will be erected in about six months – compared to six years for the current record holder, the Burj Khalifa. Of course there are problems – China is a dictatorship; the major cities of China are rife with corruption, pollution and smog, gridlock, etc. These are not insignificant but to deny that capitalism has transformed China is to deny reality.

The same exploration of technological advancements could be applied to multiple fields. In many ways, in my opinion, we are in the midst of a new industrial revolution that brings together a conjuncture of materials science, computing power, biology, robotics, space technology, in a way that is transforming our society. This combines with the effects of post-colonialism in significant areas of the world – belated and problematic as that is. The penetration of China into Africa, where the previous relationships were almost purely about capital outflows, is transforming that continent as well. Just as the industrial revolution didn’t eliminate exploitation, neither do present advances, but it is nonetheless transforming our world.

Is there a crisis gripping capitalism internationally? No doubt about it. Greece has been in meltdown for half a decade. Spain is not much better with close to 50% unemployment for youth. Japan has had a decade of deflation. The list goes on. But without revolutions to resolve these crises it is certain that capitalism will itself solve them – through destructive and inhumane means, to be sure. But if capitalism could survive the Great Depression (with a world war that cost tens of million of lives) it can survive the present stagnation. There are whole swathes of the world from Africa to Latin America to Asia that are still in the early stages of development and can provide an outlet for the system. War and imperialism provide another mechanism.

What about the environmental crisis? The problem of carbon emissions and climate change is absolutely devastating. Severe weather patterns will become more and more the norm, particularly in regions where this was already the pattern – hurricanes, monsoons, tornadoes and more. This is radicalizing millions of people and making them open to the argument that this system is fundamentally destructive. But we ought to take a lesson from the ozone crisis of the 80s and 90s, which was then considered to be the looming apocalypse. It didn’t materialize and capitalism was able to reduce the use of CFCs to the point that the ozone layer is no longer depleting and the ozone hole has shrunk. Of course carbon-based fuels are much more central to the economy than CFCs but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that capitalism is structurally incapable of overcoming its dependence upon fossil fuels. The growth of renewables and nuclear forms of energy are proceeding at rates sometimes five times the rate of growth of the global economy. They are still a small component of the overall mix of energy sources but capitalism, with the aid of the state, can shift quickly where necessary. Of course these are problematic, particularly nuclear power (though research into deep burn fission may well resolve the problem of nuclear waste). However, in China where energy use is growing most rapidly (in the US carbon emissions have actually declined since the onset of recession in 2008) there is a concerted effort, for national security reasons and because of smog in the cities, to both increase energy efficiency and to move away from dirty coal and to increase renewables in a significant way. Will it be enough? Hard to say but it might be and, while arguing against capitalism’s dependence on fossil fuels we ought to be prepared for the distinct possibility of moving towards significant carbon reduction and even carbon neutrality. The only thing that capitalism absolutely needs is profits, everything else is more or less contingent.

We can take a lesson from Marx when it comes to how we view capitalism. In the Communist Manifesto, written more than 150 years ago, Marx begins by praising the power of capitalism to transform the planet. That power is no less diminished today than it was in Marx’s time. If anything it has increased exponentially. The belief that the dynamic period of capitalist development has passed is a myth. China’s rise – and the imminent rise of Africa and Latin America - ought to be proof enough of this. Of course it is true, more than ever, to say that capitalism is obsolete but that is not the same thing. Capitalism is obsolete because capitalism itself has made other ways of organizing the system both possible and necessary to end the ongoing destruction of our planet and the brutal exploitation of humans. But it is not the same to say that capitalism no longer is dynamic and no longer produces advances that will aid a future society in which profit and imperialism are no longer the driving force for advancement.

The real challenge for Marxism is not the continued existence of capitalist dynamism and development. The real problem is that Marxism as a living, mass movement has been isolated for generations. The impact of Stalinism followed by the decline of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s has led to an ideology of retrenchment. We have lost confidence and that has made us defensive, which has had an impact on Marxism at both the level of organization, leading to bureaucratic and brittle methods, and at the level of theory. Lenin, at the head of a victorious revolution could declare that communism equaled Soviet power (basically a new model of democracy organized through workplaces) plus electricity. Imagine declaring anything similar today viz the internet or biotechnology or robotics. We now fear anything that seems to undermine the millennial dreams of Marxism, such as the continuing power of capitalism to transform millions of lives. The idea that capitalism could still progress suggests falsely that our goals are obsolete, rather than giving us confidence that the advances of capitalism make the possibility of socialism more palpable. We need to return to Marx in engaging critically with the technological advances that are coming fast and furious. We shouldn’t pretend that genomics is irrelevant or the equivalent of phrenology, the 19th century quack science of measuring skull bumps to determine criminality, for instance. Pointing to genetic reductionism – the idea that there is a gay gene or a gene for criminality or even one gene responsible for most diseases – is to shadow box with arguments from ten or fifteen years ago. The arguments and those methods have largely moved on as a result of experience. This is not to say that there aren’t still problems with genomics and the field of genetics more broadly. From GMOs to genetically modified algae that produce diesel, to medical treatments, genomics often seeks to treat problems whose origin lies elsewhere, in socially created problems that arise from capitalism itself. Nonetheless, we should see the revolutionary potential that these advances hold if they are harnessed towards human ends, rather than those of profit. We should celebrate their liberatory potential while resisting their capitalist implementation that serves profit or imperialism at the expense of humans.

This is not simply of academic importance. It effects the work of Marxists in two ways. On the one hand it is important in terms of relating to working class people’s experience and not coming across as a cult that denies that the world is round. When growing numbers of people with cancer have more effective treatments because the genome of their tumours can be analyzed to prescribe the most effective medication we look foolish to say that genomics is irrelevant – as opposed to pointing to the role of environmental and dietary pressures that lead to higher rates of cancer, or the fact that most people lack access to these treatment options. And, on the other hand, denying reality distorts our analysis and perspectives, which shapes how we act and organize to change the world. If we are “predicting five of the last four recessions” it speaks, in a humorous way, to a weakness in our approach: a desire for capitalist catastrophe to prove our theory correct, rather than a desire for popular mobilization to prove our theory correct. The irony is that we don’t need catastrophism to demonstrate the power of Marxism. We don’t need to fear scientific advance and the dynamism of capitalism as a threat to our ideology. The dynamism of capitalism is creating an ever-larger working class whose interest remains the overthrow of their exploiters. The rulers of China are scared more than anything by the rebellion of their population – who resist far more militantly and regularly than the North American working class. And the scientific advances demonstrate that capitalist authoritarianism and private property are hindrances to realizing the full potential of those advances, and that the democratization of science is the only means to avoid the destructive application of those advances.

SEE ALSO PARTS TWO & THREE IN THIS SERIES:

1) Frankenfoods, Toothpaste, & Justin Bieber: Capitalism & Technology II

2) Genes, Robots & The Internet: How Capitalism Revolutionizes The Planet

Capitalism Is Killing The Advance Of Healthcare

The scientific advances of the last century - and even of that last ten years - have been dizzying. The ability to turn ordinary skin cells into stem cells that can become any type of cell in the body; organ, limb and face transplants; gene therapy - all these things have pushed us to a place that our great grandparents couldn't have dreamed possible. It has been this sense of accelerating change that has generated the enthusiasm amongst futurists like Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near for the idea that we will soon cure aging. And yet, while there are advances, there are also terrific obstacles that come from a healthcare system based upon profit. In the last blog post on cancer I discussed a treatment option - adoptive cell transfer - that is being ignored because it lacks a clear path to profitability for pharmaceutical companies. But the distortions that arise from a for-profit model of research in healthcare go deeper than simple neglect.

We have been led to believe that research is objective, driven by the "scientific method", which inherently resists bias and distortion. Most of us know or suspect that this isn't the case, at least not always, where research is carried out by private companies that have an interest in a certain outcome. But  the truth is more sinister than even that. Even where the research takes place in the public sector using public money, the drug must be submitted by a drug manufacturer to the regulatory bodies - FDA, Health Canada, etc.

Since all pharmaceutical manufacture takes place in the private sector, the only sponsorship for new treatments is going to come from the private, for-profit sector and they won't sponsor anything that doesn't have a clear path to profitability. This distortion of true research and development is exacerbated by the dynamic of neo-liberal ideology and cutbacks, which has seen more and more public sector research come to depend upon private-public partnerships; basically, money from pharmaceutical corporations. And this leads not only to distortions in the priorities of research, it often leads to outright corruption as researchers who release papers supporting this or that drug are also on the payroll as consultants and speakers for the pharmaceutical company that makes the drug. And researchers who dare to challenge the positive findings that big pharma expects of their sponsored studies are in for a rough ride. In the late 1990s Dr. Nancy Olivieri, a researcher at Sick Kids Hospital and a University of Toronto professor, dared to reveal potential side-effects from an experimental heart drug. She was fired, defamed and then sued by drug manufacturer Apotex. While she later won a lawsuit, the company reneged and refused to pay the settlement even after she won a second suit in 2008. However, Olivieri's courage and principle is all too rare, as the above linked article notes:

No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top nine US drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year. By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.

It is at our own peril if we forget that big pharma isn't in the business of saving lives or innovating healthcare - it's in the business of making profits. Yet, this dynamic never appears in the writings of tech boosters and singularitarians like Ray Kurzweil who are enamored of the power of the market to deliver the best tech at the quickest pace. One often reads complaints, for instance, that the FDA doesn't recognize aging as a disease and, therefore, there is no incentive for pharmaceutical corporations to put money into researching a cure. But this misses two key points. First off, the refusal to designate aging as a disease is actually meant to protect people from snake oil salesmen who would promise drugs that cure aging and which do nothing. There are, after all, already over the counter nutraceuticals, supplements and other expensive "treatments" that promise to stop aging - and which do nothing.  Secondly, this prohibition on aging cures doesn't prevent the development of treatments for the diseases of aging - arteriosclerosis, cancer, Alzheimer's, etc.

And, finally and perhaps most importantly, where big pharma wants a disease designation it has the money and connections to effectively lobby for it. Obesity is an excellent example of exactly this dynamic. The rise in obesity from the mid-1970s or so until today is clearly a social phenomenon, rather than a "biological" or "medical" one. Changes in the North American diet, the end of post-war affluence and the slow decline in living standards, have all contributed to this. The rise in diabetes is a related phenomenon, resulting from a high carb, low nutrient diet - basically the rise in importance of cheap, processed foods in the North American diet. These health problems are not diseases, by and large, but the symptoms of broader social and economic changes, which require a social and economic, and not a medical, response; things like higher incomes and better services to reduce the financial burden on families as well as reduced working hours and access to quality childcare to free up more time. Even better urban planning to make walking and cycling viable forms of commuting would help. Yet suburbs continue to be built (and, these days, go bankrupt) and wages and public spending continue to decline as research into anti-obesity drugs and new medical treatments for diabetes, as well as various types of implantable medical devices & surgical interventions - insulin pumps, bariatric surgery, in vivo fat melting machines - is a massive industry.

According to research and markets, the global anti-obesity market was valued at $1.1 billion in 2009. It is forecast to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of seven percent for the next seven years to reach $2 billion by 2017.

The result is that the medical and pharmaceutical industry is chasing dollars to fix problems that are social, not medical. Meanwhile, the money spent on anti-obesity drugs, statins for cholesterol, drugs for the treatment of diabetes, could be used more effectively elsewhere. The sad truth is that the American government alone spends around a trillion dollars on the military - money that could be spent on providing quality, high nutrition meals to the American population and still have money left over to feed the rest of the world. It is a cascade effect of distorted priorities that lead to further distortions down the line. We keep attempting to treat the symptom when the cure is right in front of us. In the meantime, those conditions that truly are medical and truly can only be treated with various forms of medical intervention face neglect.

NEXT: Aging is a Social Disease

The Politics Of Immortality

If we grant that aging is, like other pathological conditions, a matter of molecules out of place - though perhaps considerably more complex than "simple" and singular diseases like cancer or diabetes, then we have to grant that it is also potentially subject to intervention and alteration, even reversal. We already accept this to a limited degree - age of mortality in most western societies has nearly doubled in the last century, largely as a result of better nutrition, better hygiene and better understanding and control of infectious diseases. Is it really so outrageous to extend that logic to imagine a more profound intervention against the accumulated damage of existence, which is aging? And is it crazy to imagine that this century might see the development of a suite of treatments and interventions that would achieve this?

There are some who are already entertaining the idea with active research on various avenues of life extension technology. Intervention into metabolic pathways in experimental animals, particularly fruit flies, nematode worms and mice, has been one route. These experiments have often sought to simulate the effects of calorie restriction (CR) – increased metabolic efficiency – as a means to extend life. Resveratrol, which generated a lot of buzz a couple of years ago, is believed to stimulate a class of regulatory proteins, Sirtuins, related to CR mimetics. Alternatively, in the work of Dr. Michael Rose, he and his team more than doubled the lifespan of fruit flies by postponing the age of reproduction in generation after generation. His theory is that evolution is only interested in sustaining animals to just past the age of reproduction, thereby allowing the rate of aging to be "tunable" by altering when reproduction takes place.

Perhaps the most widely known bio-gerontologist is Aubrey de Gray, Chief Science Officer at the SENS Foundation (SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). De Gray has had wide media exposure, is in constant demand as a speaker, and has appeared in several recent books and films on longevity and the singularity. As the name of his foundation implies, his attitude to aging is not to try and alter metabolism - which he views as too impossibly complex for the foreseeable future - but rather to take an engineering approach. That is, to allow the damage of aging to happen but then to intervene to fix it before it becomes pathological. An example of this method is to introduce a microbial enzyme that breaks down the particular type of cholesterol (7-ketocholesterol or 7KC) that forms plaques on artery walls. (Fascinatingly, the method is to search through the microbes that eat the bodies buried in graveyards to find which ones eat 7KC and then discover by what enzyme it does so.) Or stem cell therapy to replace depleted or aged tissue - for instance the loss of cartilage in joints that leads to arthritis or the manufacture of replacement organs. According to de Gray there are seven major classes of aging related damage and he has proposed seven types of intervention to correct them. When will this happen? According to him it might be sooner than we think.

I think there’s a 50% chance of getting the first-generation SENS therapies working within 25-30 years. But that’s only an estimate, and it’s a highly speculative one: I think there’s at least a 10% chance that we will hit so many unforeseen problems that we won’t get there for 100 years. This is not something special about SENS, though: any technology that’s two or more years away could easily be 100 years away.

Nor is de Gray alone in thinking that true anti-aging treatments are close at hand. Dr. Rose, in the article linked above, argued in 2005 that we might be only ten or twenty years away from extending lifespan by decades. The foundation for this optimism rests upon the rapid and remarkable advancements in the field of medical and biological science in the last generation and, in particular, the last two decades. We are seeing the arrival of robotics in surgery, including testing of the first autonomous robotic surgeons; giant leaps in imaging technology such as MRIs; genomics and the beginnings of gene therapy; stem cell science and regenerative medicine; and, recently, forms of immunotherapy (basically programming the immune system to attack unwanted factors in the body - most notably cancer but also accumulations of extra-cellular junk like beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's patients or arteriosclerotic plaques). And these advances only speak to the repair and/or enhancement of the body through the use of biology or medical intervention. Considerably more could be written were we to include advances in bionics - from limbs that respond to direct brain signals broadcast via implantable chips to implanted medical devices that assist - or take over - particular internal functions of the body, from insulin pumps and pacemakers to recent research on a prosthetic hippocampus to restore lost memory function.

In some of these fields the pace of advance is so dizzying that it boggles the mind to think where we were only ten years ago - and where we will be ten years from now. Consider genomics, it's been just over a decade since the first complete human genome was sequenced after fourteen year's worth of work and at a cost of around $3 billion. It now takes hours and costs $4,000 per genome. The rate of progress has been at a faster rate than Moore's Law - the famous prediction that the number of transistors that can be fit on an integrated chip doubles every two years. That doesn't mean that we've come close to figuring out the complexity of how the genome functions and the breathless predictions of the media when the first sequence was completed have failed to come to pass. But it does suggest that we are learning more, more quickly than at any time in previous human history.

And, yet, while there is some suggestion that a bright future of profoundly extended lifespans awaits those of us who live long enough - there are a lot of reasons to be rather more reserved in our optimism. For one thing it's not at all clear that the current medical model will find profit in generating the kind of tech that will ultimately lead to longer lives. Nor is it necessarily the case that even if a cure were created that it would be accessible to everyone or even a majority. And what if lifespans are radically extended - how will that effect the population, planetary resources and, ultimately, how we live our lives? Do we want to live a thousand years working crappy, meaningless jobs? In this series I want to look at some of these issues.

Next: Is Curing Cancer Bad For Business?

Robot Apocalypse, Robot Utopia

There's no doubt in my mind that we're heading into what's called "the knee" of an exponential curve in terms of robotics  - that moment when the accumulation of molecular advances in the technology and everyday penetration of a piece of technology takes off. As I discussed in a previous post the evidence for this exists in a number of places, with the most recent affirmations (to my mind) being the announcement of a general purpose personal robot - the Luna - to be launched at the end of this year and the near-term intention to launch an industrial, multipurpose robot at a price point around $5,000, making it affordable for small companies. But there are many other signs that this is the case - advances in autonomous swarm robotics to allow teams of small robots to explore disaster sites; robots trained to develop their own language to describe their experience to other robots; advancing robot vision systems using biological modeling of a visual cortex in a monkey. And that is just a small sample of the many convergent technologies that are acting as enablers for the coming robot revolution.

What will the robot revolution mean for human society? How will we be changed by the arrival of ubiquitous robotics? What will it mean in terms of everyday life, in the home, in the workplace, in healthcare? Generally, of course, we are given two models of possible futures in a robotic world - the apocalypse a la Terminator and the Matrix and the "utopia" with helper robots a la Astroboy or Data on Star Trek TNG. In one instance robots, as proxies for all technological advancement, finish us off as a species, in the other technology is seen to solve all of our problems - world hunger, poverty, climate change, etc. However, I want to suggest that the question is rather more complicated than that.
First, a little mea culpa: I love technology. My wife and I each have a smartphone and Macbook Pros and an Apple TV. My wife - a photographer - shoots with DSLRs, one of which also shoots HD video. I regularly read the tech press - from the techno-cyber-philia of the transhumanist websites to the more "sober" pages of MIT Technology Review, New Scientist and IEEE Spectrum. We desperately need to renovate our crumbling kitchen and part of me hopes we don't get the money until its possible to get an internet connected smart home that I can access from my phone anywhere in the world and that has augmented reality projectors in the kitchen. You get the point - I love tech.

But loving the stuff doesn't mean accepting the promises and threats that are thrown about uncritically. It is simply not true, for instance, that the problems of poverty and world hunger remain unsolved because we have to achieve the level of technological advancement required to feed and house people. There is more than enough food produced (I won't get into the quality of the food produced - high carb cereal grains providing the bulk of global crops, for instance) but that food for which there isn't a market - i.e. people with money to purchase it - is allowed to rot or is dumped at sea. Many countries in which there are the worst problems with food shortages are actually net exporters of cash crops - whether bananas, coffee beans or cacao.

Even if there weren't a surplus of food crops it is also not the case that there is a lack of resources to convert non-arable land, provide seed stocks, fertilizer, farm machinery, etc. At present the USA alone spends close to $1 trillion on various aspects of the military and intelligence apparatus. The next ten military purchasers combined spend another $1 trillion. That is more than enough to feed every hungry human, house every shelterless family, provide clean water and teach every illiterate to read. Lastly, the technological priorities that do exist - which make the private automobile the pre-eminent mode of transportation, encourage short distance flights for business, expand carbon-heavy low density development (i.e. suburbs), make use of fossil fuels for our power plants - contribute to climate change, which exacerbates food shortage in many place. The so-called solutions of converting grain stocks and arable land to the production of biofuel only contributes to the problem.

The problems of scarcity are thus social problems and not technical ones. And having a robot in the home or in the field or the factory will not solve those problems. The irony could be that agricultural workers could be displaced by robots and then not have the income to buy the food that the robots are able to produce in greater quantities. And here again, the problem isn't that robots are taking jobs - it is that the priorities of our society are such that rather than being used to make our lives better - as tools (whether hammers or robots or computers) are meant to do, they instead threaten to make our lives worse at least in the short term. But don't blame the robots - blame the Man.

Next part in this series: Will Robots Lead To Revolution?

The Robot Invasion Has Begun

Lock up your family, protect your job! You don't have to be Ray Kurzweil to see that there has been an acceleration of certain kinds of technological progress in the last generation - the rise of the PC, followed by cellphones, the internet, laptops, smart phones (only since 2007!) and now tablet computers. There have also been advances in machine vision and materials technologies - witness the big leap of the Xbox Kinect, which, along with touchscreens in smartphones and tablets, is radically reshaping our concept of human/machine user interfaces. All of this seems to have laid the groundwork for a near-term revolution in robotics. And such a revolution is in many ways overdue. Robotics pretty much stalled after the introduction of industrial robots into the large manufacturers, such as the auto industry, in the 60s and 70s. However, in the last number of years it has slowly been making advances that have created the conditions for a new leap forward.

Already, there are a number of popular open-source research platforms, like the PR2 from Willow Garage (something of a spin-off from Google) that is in the video above demonstrating a new software module that enables the PR2 to pick up and scan the bar codes of groceries (bye-bye check-out clerks?). The makers of the very popular Nao robot from France are about to go open-source to speed up the process of developing software "apps" to supply behaviour modules for the cute, versatile little robot. Google has also announced that it will extend its Android open-source software's capabilities into the field of robotics with Android@home, which will provide a common operating system for the growing interest in home management or smarthome systems - things like dimming lights, controlling the thermostat, home security, cleaning robots, etc. And there are popular events like the Robocup, that brings together programmers and robot aficionados to engage in a robot football tournament with the goal of creating better-than-human robot football/soccer players by 2050. To be honest, I think it will be sooner than that.

All of this stuff is interesting and even exciting, however it has mostly been about laying the groundwork and robotics is waiting for the killer device to make the breakthrough into ubiquitous robots in the same way that Apple made the breakthrough for smartphones and tablets. There are two immediate potential contenders in this field - Willow Garage is perhaps a contender but at present their interest is still in the field of research and development platforms with a $400,000 robot that's out of reach to consumers and most businesses. One is Heartland Robotics, headed up by Rodney Brooks a pre-eminent robotics professor, formerly of MIT, and founder of iRobot, which brought the Roomba vacuum cleaner to market. Of the 8.6 million robots in the world, something like 7 million of them are Roombas, so he has a track record of knowing how to convert existing tech into a consumer device. Brooks now intends to take that success into the field of light manufacturing by advancing on the platform developed with the Obrero (worker) robot - basically an intelligent, dextrous arm and hand - from a few years ago. While Heartland is in what's called stealth mode - primary research to complete development of the product out of sight of competitors - the general goal of Heartland is public knowledge.

Brooks wants to create a robot for light manufacturing that will be priced in the $5,000 range, allowing the USA to compete with low wage economies to which a lot of manufacturing has been outsourced - places like China and Asia. I haven't done the math on the relative advantage of a $5,000 manufacturing robot vs a product produced by sweated labour plus the costs of shipping and handling but my guess is that it would make a lot of domestic manufacturing more competitive. Brooks believes that this will generate a new industrial revolution and will eliminate drudge work in the service sector, particularly in health care. The first impact, however, is likely to be unemployment in those industries that can make use of a cheap robot. There will be other impacts, such as the long term decline in the rate of profit once affected industries take up the new technology across the board and the effect of relative advantages is mitigated (I'll take up some of this in a future post). Whatever the ultimate character of the impact, it would no doubt be huge. Check out 32 minute Brooks talk, below, from the Maker Faire in 2009:

The second potential "killer device" is the forthcoming general purpose home robot, Luna. While we have the Roomba in the home, there has yet to be any general purpose robots to perform a variety of tasks. I'm not sure that the Luna is it - it seems to have too little functionality. But the intended future price tag of $1,000 (for this year and next it will be $3,000) might be low enough to encourage enough early adopters with disposable income and a desire to be the first ones on the block to own a home robot to make it a viable business model. The Luna platform is intended to be expandable both in terms of hardware and software, with the idea that developers - in the model of the iphone and Android app stores - can create specific modules to expand the capabilities of the Luna - say voice recognition software or a more advanced arm, etc.

But even if the Luna itself isn't ready for prime time and doesn't take off as the company hopes, it is a sign that the genie is out of the bottle - the age of personal robotics has begun. To be honest I haven't grokked what the cultural implications of a robotics explosion will entail - it certainly won't mean the end of inequality, world hunger or imperialism - most of the "service" robots other than the Roomba are for military use to defuse IEDs, as spotters, UAVs and, already in testing, the next generation of fully robotic fighter planes known as the Phantom Ray. But it would be foolish to think "nothing will change" and the coming robot revolution deserves some serious social analysis. Thoughts?