September 14th, 2025
Technological progress has a dark side. Sure, nobody sets out to invent harmful technology, but even the most beneficial technology has its downsides. We’ve seen this here on earth over and over.
An ideal example is provided by the automobile. This invention had a tremendous effect on society. For the first time, people could travel almost anywhere, at any time. The automobile completely changed American society. Here’s a graph showing the number of automobiles registered in the United States over the years:
There’s no question that the car bestowed huge benefits upon society. Greater mobility made a wider range of jobs accessible, improved the speed with which goods were transported, and opened up lots of recreational and tourist opportunities.
But the car had plenty of downsides, and it took society a long time to adapt to the problems created by the automobile. Car crashes were common; the first person to die in an automobile accident was Mary Ward, an Irish woman who was killed in 1869 when a steam-powered car in which she was a passenger tipped and she was thrown out. Once more cars appeared on the roads, fatal accidents increased:
You must keep in mind the fact that the number of people on the roads increased dramatically during this period. Here’s a graph showing the number of fatalities per billion miles traveled:
As you can see, cars became much safer over the years. But note that the process of reducing fatalities took roughly 60 years to reach a stable level of fatalities. The problem was attacked on multiple fronts. Cars were engineered for greater safety as we learned more about the causes of accidents and fatalities. Better suspensions, tires, and steering reduced cases of drivers losing control of their vehicles. Better roads and the addition of safety signs and road lighting helped. The addition of seat belts, air bags, and better structural engineering made it possible for people to walk away from accidents that destroyed the car without significantly injuring its occupants. Legislation tightening the rules for driving, requiring licenses, and harshly punishing drunk driving added to the safety margin. But this was a slow and difficult process; even though an average of 40,000 Americans were dying each year in car accidents, resistance to change impeded progress. Of course, some of the steps that improved safety required technological advances that were unavailable in the early years. But the most difficult step was the development of strong cultural standards against unsafe practices. Here is where we see the difficulty that civilizations have in adapting to harmful change. Roughly half of all automobile accident fatalities are due to people failing to fasten their seatbelts. A third are due to drunk driving, and a quarter are due to speeding. Thus, today most automobile accident fatalities are attributable to stupid behavior. After more than a hundreds years of automobile use, our society has STILL not fully embraced the cultural attitudes necessary to use this technology safely.
Delayed Consequences
It took Americans at least two generations to adopt cultural changes to reduce the number of deaths from car accidents through their behavior. But in this case, the necessity of change was immediately obvious for everybody to see. The average American experiences three to four automobile accidents during their lifetime; everybody knows how dangerous this technology can be.
Many technologies, however, pose threats to our well-being that are not immediately obvious. The blatant example of this is climate change. More than a hundred years ago, scientists knew that the emissions of carbon dioxide from internal combustion engines would cause the planet to warm. They didn’t know how much it would warm, or how quickly it would warm, but they knew it would inevitably warm from our emissions. By 1990, we had enough data to reliably conclude that our carbon emissions were causing measurable increases in temperature, and preliminary computer simulations showed that the end result would surely be very injurious to society. By the year 2000, enough data had accumulated, and enough theoretical work had been carried out, that scientists were convinced that our emissions of carbon would cause serious changes in climate that would wreak immense damage within a hundred years. They warned society of the dangers of our carbon emissions.
But Americans did not want to give up the benefits of the internal combustion engine — so they did almost nothing to address the problem. At the time I write this, the official policy of the US government is that climate change is a hoax, and it has cut off all funding for research into climate change. We have already seen the effects of climate change in extreme weather events, heat waves, forest fires, melting ice caps, and sea level rise, yet we still refuse to do anything about it. Our behavior over the last 25 years leads me to conclude that we will not take climate change seriously enough to take effective measures for at least another 25 years.
It gets worse. The earth’s oceans soak up a lot of the excess heat generated by our carbon emissions. The net effect of this is to delay the full impact of our actions on the climate for roughly 30 years. In other words, the climate change we are experiencing today fully reflects only the emissions we released up until about 30 years ago. To put it another way, if we completely terminated all carbon emissions today, the planet would continue warming for about 30 more years based soley on what we have previously emitted.
It is obvious that humanity has completely botched its handling of climate change. It will hit us with a gigantic wallop that will inflict damages greater than we can cope with. Current damages from climate change are estimated to run at about a trillion dollars per year. That figure is growing every year. Global GDP is about $90 trillion and is growing by about 3% per year. This means that the world is growing about three trillion dollars richer every year. But by the year 2050, damages from climate change will surely exceed three trillion dollars per year. Therefore, the world will begin growing poorer by the year 2050, and it will continue growing poorer and poorer every year.
Political scientists have established that modern populations expect about 3% growth in their personal incomes every year. At that level of growth, they are satisfied. But if growth is only 2%, they are mildly dissatisfied and, if possible, will probably vote out their current politicians. 0% to 1% growth will definitely cause serious political unrest, and negative growth will usually cause a population to revolt, unless the regime has strong security forces and uses them forcefully. We are already seeing populist politicians gaining power all over the world, offering no actual solutions to their countries' problems, but lots of revenge against supposed scapegoats.
Terrestrial experience demonstrates how easily a civilization can fail to cope with accelerating technological progress, and eventually tears itself apart. I very much doubt that our civilization will survive the 21st century.
Terrestrial experience does not provide adequate evidence that all civilizations will fail to cope with the challenges of technological progress. My argument does not rest on the empirical evidence from earth; it is based on fundamental principles of system organization. EVERY system undergoing stress from environmental change suffers from a delay in response because the system must undergo internal modifications in order to respond adequately. No system can undergo instantaneous internal modification. Therefore, the real question is whether a civilization can respond quickly enough to cope with change. But accelerating technological progress ensures that the amount of time available to a civilization to respond to an external stress continues reducing forever. No matter how quickly a civilization can respond to change, it is inevitable that the response will eventually come too late.