Are there any unavoidable technologies?
Last night I was struggling to fall asleep. So I started to reflect on a documentary I had seen. It was dedicated to Nikola Tesla, the visionary inventor who was obsessed with electrical energy at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The story that made me reflect is the famous “currents war” (a movie version with Benedict Cumberbatch has just been released). Thomas Alva Edison
argued that direct current was the ideal solution to “electrify” the
world, and invested on it large sums. Tesla, who worked a few months for
Edison, was instead convinced that alternating current was to be used.
I do not go into technical explanations. Let’s just say that Tesla, allying with Edison’s rival, the industrialist George Westinghouse,
won it. Today we use alternating current (AC), but then transform it
into continuous (DC) when we need to power our digital devices (or any
other battery-powered object).
The
question I asked myself was: if there were no Westinghouse and Tesla,
would we have direct current distribution networks today?
Most likely not, because the advantages of AC distribution would still have emerged, and even rather soon.
More generally, the question is: are there unavoidable technologies?
Are there any alternative technological paths?
In
the only case study available, that of human civilization, some
discoveries and inventions, and the order with which they were made,
seems to be obligatory: fire-> metals-> agriculture-> city->
wheel-> earthenware for example.
But
also hunter-gatherer societies could have invented the wheel: it would
have been very convenient for them, there was no reason not to have the
idea and they had the ability to build it. Perhaps some tribes did so,
using it for generations before memory was lost.
Scholars
think that to get to the monumental buildings, cities and civilizations
we must go through the agriculture: the production surplus is able to
support a large number of people and to give birth to social classes, as
nobles and priests dispensed from manual work but able to “commission”
great works.
The extraordinary discovery of the Göbekli Tepe
temple — dating from around 9,500 BC — has however questioned the need
for the transition to an urban society with social differentiations to
create such buildings.
Another
example. Sophisticated mechanisms such as those of clocks began to
spread in the early Middle Ages, with the first specimens placed in
church bell towers.
Why
did not the Greeks or the Romans, so skilled in the practical arts,
come to develop similar mechanisms? In fact, after the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism,
a sophisticated astronomical calculator, we have seen how the
capabilities (for example to have minimum tolerances) and the techniques
to build high precision instruments existed. Probably social, economic
and commercial structures more than technological limits did not allow
to have Roman pendulum clocks. In the same way, having a lot of low-cost
labor, the slaves, did not stimulate the invention of steam engines, if
not some rare and simple system used for “special effects” in the
temples.
With
regard to the innovations of the last 120 years, it is important to
underline, alas, the crucial importance of the two world wars,
especially the second, for the acceleration of technological
development; we only think of rocketry and computer science, born in
that period, and electronics developed shortly after (and there was the
Cold War …).
If there had not been World War II, what technologies would be surrounded by our daily life?
Probably
we will be at the level of the 60s / 70s, with mainframes, first
satellites in orbit, color televisions but with cathode ray tubes, first
commercial jet planes, just in time production chains etc.
Perhaps
an analog Internet would have developed, thanks to unpredictable
developments in the amateur radio network hybridized to systems such as
fax and video / audio cassettes.
Difficult to establish the timelines, life cycles of individual technologies, their interconnections and interdependencies.
In
a complex system such as that of human society, small variations in the
initial conditions can generate great changes in the trajectories and
directions of the space of innovations.
As a last example we think of the web. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee created it while working at CERN in 1990.
The
web (or a similar one) could have been developed at least 10 years
before, in one of the American universities already inter-connected with
a telematic network.
This
would have meant that the portals of the first web would have appeared
at the end of the 80s, the web 2.0 around 1994, the social networks
would have been established around 1997 and today … we can not know it.
Also because there would have been a longer interval to have the mobile
web, since in any case the evolution of mobile telephony would have
followed its course as in our timeline. Or not?
