What Technology Wants (6 page)

By 15,000 years ago, as the world was warming and its global ice caps retreating, bands of Sapiens expanded their population and tool kits, hand in hand. Sapiens used 40 kinds of tools, including anvils, pottery, and composites—complicated spears or cutters made from multiple pieces, such as many tiny flint shards and a handle. While still primarily a hunter-gatherer, Sapiens also dabbled in sedentism, returning to care for favorite food areas, and developed specialized tools for different types of ecosystems. We know from burial sites in the northern latitudes at this same time that clothing also evolved from the general (a rough tunic) to specialized items such as a cap, a shirt, a jacket, trousers, and moccasins. Henceforth human tools would become ever more specialized.

The variety of Sapiens tribes exploded as they adapted into diverse watersheds and biomes. Their new tools reflected the specifics of their homes; river inhabitants had many nets, steppe hunters many kinds of points, forest dwellers many types of traps. Their languages and looks were diverging.

Yet they shared many qualities. Most hunter-gatherers clustered into family clans that averaged about 25 related people. Clans would gather in larger tribes of several hundred at seasonal feasts or camping grounds. One function of the tribes was to keep genes moving through intermarriage. Population was spread thinly. The average density of a tribe was less than .01 person per square kilometer in cooler climes. The 200 to 300 folk in your greater tribe would be the total number of people you'd meet in your lifetime. You might be aware of others, because items for trade or barter could travel 300 kilometers. Some of the traded items would be body ornaments and beads, such as ocean shells for inlanders or forest feathers for the coast dwellers. Occasionally, pigments for face painting were swapped, but these could also be applied to walls or to carved wood figurines. The dozen tools you carried would have been bone drills, awls, needles, bone knives, a bone hook for fish on a spear, some stone scrapers, maybe some stone sharpies. A number of your blades would be held by bone or wood handles, hafted with cane or hide cord. When you crouched around the fire, someone might play a drum or bone flute. Your handful of possessions might be buried with you when you died.

But don't take this progress for harmony. Within 20,000 years of the great march out of Africa, Sapiens helped exterminate 90 percent of the then-existing species of megafauna. Sapiens used innovations such as the bow and arrow, spear, and cliff stampedes to kill off the last of the mastodons, mammoths, moas, woolly rhinos, and giant camels—basically every large package of protein that walked on four legs. More than 80 percent of all large mammal genera on the planet were completely extinct by 10,000 years ago. Somehow, four species escaped this fate in North America: the bison, moose, elk, and caribou.

Violence between tribes was endemic as well. The rules of harmony and cooperation that work so well among members of the same tribe, and are often envied by modern observers, did not apply to those outside of the tribe. Tribes would go to war over water holes in Australia or hunting grounds and wild-rice fields in the plains of the United States or river and ocean frontage along the coast in the Pacific Northwest. Without systems of arbitration, or even leaders, small feuds over stolen goods or women or signs of wealth (such as pigs in New Guinea) could grow into multigenerational warfare. The death rate due to warfare was five times higher among hunter-gatherer tribes than in later agriculture-based societies (.1 percent of the population killed per year in “civilized” wars versus .5 percent in war between tribes). Actual rates of warfare varied among tribes and regions, because as in the modern world, one belligerent tribe could disrupt the peace for many. In general, the more nomadic a tribe was, the more peaceful it would be, since it could simply flee from conflict. But when fighting did break out, it was fierce and deadly. When the numbers of warriors on both sides were about equal, primitive tribes usually beat the armies of civilization. The Celtic tribes defeated the Romans, the Tuareg smashed the French, the Zulus trumped the British, and it took the U.S. Army 50 years to defeat the Apache tribes. As Lawrence Keeley says in his survey of early warfare in
War Before Civilization,
“The facts recovered by ethnographers and archaeologists indicated unequivocally that primitive and prehistoric warfare was just as terrible and effective as the historic and civilized version. In fact, primitive warfare was much more deadly than that conducted between civilized states because of the greater frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was conducted. . . . It is civilized warfare that is stylized, ritualized, and relatively less dangerous.”

Comparison of War Fatality Rates.
Annual war deaths as a percentage of the population in both prestate (gray bars) and modern societies (darker bars).

Before the revolution of language 50,000 years ago, the world lacked significant technology. For the next 40,000 years, every human born lived as a hunter-gatherer. During this time an estimated 1 billion people explored how far you could go with a handful of tools. This world without much technology provided “enough.” There was leisure and satisfying work for humans. Happiness, too. Without technology beyond stone implements, the rhythms and patterns of nature were immediate. Nature ruled your hunger and set your course. Nature was so vast, so bountiful, and so close, few humans could separate from it. The attunement with the natural world felt divine. Yet without much technology, the recurring tragedy of child death was ever present. Accidents, warfare, and disease meant your life, on average, was far less than half as long as it could have been—maybe only a quarter of the natural life span your genes afforded. Hunger was always near.

But most noticeably, without significant technology, your leisure was confined to traditional repetitions. There was no place for anything new. Within narrow limits you had no bosses. But the direction and interests of your life were laid out in well-worn paths. The cycles of your environment determined your life.

It turns out that the bounty of nature, though vast, does not hold all possibilities. The mind does, but it had not yet been fully unleashed. A world without technology had enough to sustain survival but not enough to transcend it. Only when the mind, liberated by language and enabled by the technium, transcended the constraints of nature 50,000 years ago did greater realms of possibility open up. There was a price to pay for this transcendence, but what we gained by this embrace was civilization and progress.

We are not the same folks who marched out of Africa. Our genes have coevolved with our inventions. In the past 10,000 years alone, in fact, our genes have evolved 100 times faster than the average rate for the previous 6 million years. This should not be a surprise. As we domesticated the dog (in all its breeds) from wolves and bred cows and corn and more from their unrecognizable ancestors, we, too, have been domesticated. We have domesticated ourselves. Our teeth continue to shrink (because of cooking, our external stomach), our muscles thin out, our hair disappears. Technology has domesticated us. As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves. We are coevolving with our technology, and so we have become deeply dependent on it. If all technology—every last knife and spear—were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology.

We have rapidly and significantly altered ourselves and at the same time altered the world. From the moment we emerged from Africa to colonize every inhabitable watershed on this planet, our inventions began to alter our nest. Sapiens' hunting tools and techniques had far-reaching effects: Their technology enabled them to kill off key herbivores (mammoths, giant elk, etc.) whose extinctions altered the ecology of entire grassland biomes forever. Once dominant grazers were eliminated, their absence cascaded through the ecosystem, enabling the rise of new predators, new plant species, and all their competitors and allies, surfacing a modified ecosystem. Thus a few clans of hominins shifted the destiny of thousands of other species. When Sapiens gained control of fire, this powerful technology further modified the natural terrain on a massive scale. Such a tiny trick—burning grasslands, controlling it with backfires, and summoning flames to cook grains—disrupted vast regions of the continents.

Later the repeated inventions and spread of agriculture around the planet affected not only the surface of the Earth, but its 100-kilometer-wide (60-mile-wide) atmosphere as well. Farming disturbed the soil and increased CO
₂
. Some climatologists believe that this early anthropogenic warming, starting 8,000 years ago, kept a new ice age at bay. Widespread adoption of farming disrupted a natural climate cycle that ordinarily would have refrozen the northernmost portions of the planet by now.

Of course, once humans invented machines that ate concentrated old plants (coal) instead of fresh plants, the mechanical exhalations of CO
₂
further altered the balance of the atmosphere. The technium bloomed as machines harnessed this source of abundant energy. Petroleum-eating machines such as tractor engines transformed the productivity and spread of agriculture (accelerating an old trend), and then more machines drilled for more oil faster (a new trend), accelerating the rate of acceleration. Today the CO
₂
exhalation of all machines greatly exceeds the exhalation of all animals and even approaches the volume generated by geological forces.

The technium gains its immense power not only from its scale but from its self-amplifying nature. One breakthrough invention, such as the alphabet, the steam pump, or electricity, can lead to further breakthrough inventions, such as books, coal mines, and telephones. These advances in turn led to other breakthrough inventions, such as libraries, power generators, and the internet. Each step adds further powers while retaining most of the virtues of the previous inventions. Someone has an idea (a spinning wheel!), which can hop to other minds, mutate into a derivative idea (place the spinning wheel beneath a sled to make it easy to haul!), which disrupts the prevailing balance, causing a shift.

But not all changes induced by technology have been positive. Industrial-scale slavery, such as that imposed upon Africa, was enabled by the sailing ships that transported captives across oceans and encouraged by the mechanical cotton gins that could cheaply process the fibers the slaves planted and harvested. Without technology, slavery at this massive scale would have been unknown. Thousands of synthetic toxins have caused mass disruptions of natural cycles in both humans and other species, a huge unwanted downside from small inventions. War is a particularly serious amplifier of the great negative powers brought by technology. Technological innovation has led directly to horrific weapons of destruction capable of inflicting entirely new atrocities upon society.

On the other hand, the remedies for and offsets of the negative consequences also stemmed from technology. Local ethnic slavery was practiced by most earlier civilizations, and probably in prehistoric times as well, and still continues in various remote areas; its overall diminishment globally is due to the technological tools of communication, law, and education. Technologies of detection and substitution can eliminate the routine use of synthetic toxins. The technologies of monitoring, law, treaties, policing, courts, citizen media, and economic globalism can temper, dampen, and in the long run diminish the vicious cycles of war.

Progress, even moral progress, is ultimately a human invention. It is a useful product of our wills and minds, and thus it is a technology. We can decide slavery is not a good idea. We can decide that fairly applied laws, rather than nepotistic favoritism, is a good idea. We can outlaw certain punishments with treaties. We can encourage accountability with the invention of writing. We can consciously expand our circle of empathy. These are all inventions, products of our minds, as much as lightbulbs and telegraphs are.

This cyclotron of social betterment is propelled by technology. Society evolves in incremental doses; each rise in social organization throughout history was driven by an insertion of a new technology. The invention of writing unleashed the leveling fairness of recorded laws. The invention of standard minted coins made trade more universal, encouraged entrepreneurship, and hastened the idea of liberty. Historian Lynn White notes, “Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history.” In White's view, the adoption of the lowly foot stirrup for horse saddles enabled riders to use weapons on horseback, which gave an advantage to the cavalry over infantry and to the lords who could afford horses, and so nurtured the rise of aristocratic feudalism in Europe. The stirrup is not the only technology that has been blamed for feudalism. As Karl Marx famously claimed, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”