In September 2023, Michiaki Matsushima, head of editorial content at Wired Japan, asked me to talk about the year 2050. He was convinced that what is happening now in the 2020s is going to shape what is to come in the next 30 years. However, it is a very dif!icult task to anticipate the future. First of all, we are not sure if we will actually live until then in order to verify our predictions, because even though 2050 falls in the not-too-distant future, life is full of uncertainty. Within the first 24 years of the 21st century, we have already come under the threat of wars, nuclear meltdowns, ecological crises, and, more recently, AI apocalypses. This is not a prophecy we are all witnessing — it is the reality.
If it is true that the inventions of the mid-20th century shaped the following 70 years, then how can we really predict what is to come in the next decades? It is not that we lack imagination; indeed, we can imagine many things to come. For example, Mars could be transformed into a habitable planet for humans or Elon Musk could invite us to live among the stars. We could download our memories to a machine in order to realise immortality, as Ray Kurzweil suggested, or achieve full automation in all areas, from autopiloting to medical surgery. It is also possible that we could also fabricate the first synthetic embryo, legalise marriage between humans and robots, and so on.
Yet it is difficult to reflect on such a future without too great a dose of optimism or pessimism, if what we are really trying to achieve is a planet that is favourable for the coexistence of different cultures, as well as humans and nonhumans, where a universal happiness (‘allgemeine Glückseligkeit’, as Immanuel Kant put it) can flourish. Regarding the aforementioned technological inventions, could they become possible in the next 30 years—if not earlier? (Didn’t Kurzweil already announce that immortality will be possible by 2045?1) Today, it is indeed more and more difficult to discern reality from science fiction. However, most science fictions don’t really grant us the power to dream. They either offer us a dystopia, where the human species is going to end, or a ‘chicken soup of humanity’, in which love is the last resort. Pessimistically, we know that all of this progress will demand us to pay a huge price. We have already seen the ramifications of such a demand in past decades, in terms of the imminent climate collapse, the so-called ‘sixth extinction’, mass unemployment due to automation, and, most horrifying, a Third World War. We moderns have been facing a dilemma: a decision has to be made to affirm or change the direction of our civilisation. We can imagine a response to it, but does it involve deceleration or acceleration?
We must discern whether or not the deceleration of technological progress is a solution to our dilemma. Recently, there has been a lot of discussion regarding degrowth or even a so-called ‘degrowth communism’. I am not sure if degrowth is a solution: if our understanding of and relation to technology will remain the same, degrowth will be only a transitionary stage toward something even worse. Even if we take degrowth seriously, then all countries will have to synchronise their degrowth; otherwise, those that refuse to degrow will remain the strongest in terms of military and economic power. It is hard to imagine how this could happen without the climate collapse occurring first. But by then, it will already have been too late.
The other option would be to accelerate toward full automation, under which wage labour would disappear, and again, we would arrive at Communism. The automation of one area would lead to the creation of another that produces worse alienation. What happened, for instance, in China, where so many factories in Shenzhen became automatised? The former factory workers today are neither unemployed nor enjoying paid retirements. They submit themselves to platforms of ride-hailing and food delivery. In other words, they are commanded by algorithms that want to maximise their income and optimise their services. Therefore, there has been no unemployment and no liberation. The seemingly more flexible jobs, such as car hailing or food delivery services, require that one is subordinated to the control of algorithms, whose rules are determined by facts that conform to the interest of profit-making. This can be seen, for example, in an award-winning report titled ‘Takeout Delivery Drivers: Caught in the System’, which went viral in 2020.2 The article details the experience of a rider who discovered that the time allowed to deliver food within a three-kilometre area could be reduced from 32 to 30 minutes. (On one of the food-delivery platforms, the time allowed for delivery within a three-kilometre area was one hour in 2016, then 45 minutes in 2017, and 38 minutes in 2018.) Apparently, there is no longer any room for negotiation, and there is no way to add it back. Acceleration or deceleration may not really give us a desirable future; instead for such a future to be thinkable, it will demand a radical change of our relationship to technology. Of what does this radical change consist?
1 ‘Ray Kurzweil – Immortality by 2045, 2045 Initiative, uploaded to YouTube on 4 March 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f28LPwR8BdY.
2 Youxuan Lai, ‘Takeout Delivery Drivers: Caught in the System’, People Magazine, China, 8 August 2020, https://truestoryaward.org/story/222.
In the past one hundred years of modernisation, technology has not only become the medium of synchronisation of both time and space, but it has also pervaded our everyday lives. As we have seen, this omnipresence of modern technology is the source of the social, economic, and political problems that can lead to a devastating war. We may recall that on 1 September 2017, Vladimir Putin told Russian children that ‘whoever leads in AI will dominate the world’. This message becomes very clear when we think of the current war on microchips, which are essential for the development of artificial intelligence. If we limit our imaginations to the efficiency, speed, and pervasiveness of technology, then we will only be speeding toward this impasse. The technological competition imposes a uniformity, not only on technology itself, but also on the imagination of technologies.
This uniformity is precisely what prevents our imagination from reaching out too far. In December 1914, during the outbreak of the First World War, Henri Bergson gave an inaugural speech as the newly elected president of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques at the Institut de France. Titled ‘Meaning of the War’, it identified the development of mechanical science and technology as the source of the war. It also noted that the 19th century had given ‘a wholly unforeseen extension to the mechanical arts and had equipped man in less than fifty years with more tools than he had made during the past thousands of years he had lived on the earth’.3 Each new machine, Bergson proposed, thus became like a new human organ; the soul could no longer accommodate the dilating body. Bergson expressed his anger in a long list of questions, including: ‘What kind of a world would it become if this mechanism should seize the entire human race [humanité entière], and if the peoples, instead of elevating themselves to a richer and more harmonious diversity, as persons may do, were to fall into the uniformity of things?’4
3 Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War: Life & Matter in Conflict (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915), p.34.
4 Bergson, The Meaning of the War, p.36.
If we agree with Bergson that the uniformity and the expansion of ‘organs’ were the sources of war, then it is clear that the technological progress we are now experiencing will inevitably lead to another large-scale war. Therefore, the challenge that we face does not involve how to invent a machine-learning algorithm to achieve 100 percent accuracy in facial recognition or to invent the most powerful weapon, but rather: How can we break this impasse? However, are we not demanding too much of engineers (because this is normally a question for politicians and diplomats)? I emphasise that it is a ‘technological challenge’ because now, more than ever, technology has become the substrate of our social, economic, political, and aesthetic lives. Also, in the future, the division of disciplines at universities, which we have adopted for centuries, will have to be reformed. However, since universities have a close connection to the industrial world, they will be reluctant to make any changes unless they will improve their ranking or bring in more funding. We must recognise that technological imagination is no longer only about improving an existing product or inventing a new one, but rather developing new nomos for the digital Earth.
The omnipresence of technologies connected by computer networks has provided us with a new concept of the Earth — a digital Earth that succeeds the concept of the ‘electrified Earth’ identified in 1920 by Vladimir Lenin. In 1995, Wired dedicated an article to the work of the Jesuit palaeontologist, theologist, and visionary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in which the author named him as the philosopher who had anticipated the consciousness of the internet: ‘Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterised by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fuelled by human consciousness. It sounds a little off-the-wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running point to point through a nerve-like constellation of wires.’5 What Teilhard de Chardin described in his seminal essay, written in the 1930s, The Human Phenomenon, as the ‘noosphere’, which comes after geosphere and biosphere, best captures today’s technological convergence. What he called the ‘omega point’ or ‘noospheric reflection’ could be compared to technological singularity or the intelligence explosion.6 The noosphere is more than the technosphere, because the noosphere is the evolution of consciousness, while the technosphere is a geological concept proposed by geologist Peter K. Haff that describes the transformation of the Earth since the invention of transistors.7
The formation of the noosphere indicates the evolution of the consciousness in general through the propagation and development of technologies. In the digital Earth, the noosphere becomes a battlefield as well as a place where old ideologies, such as race and domination, re-emerge. However, we must also recognise that the technological progress offers us a chance to reconstitute democracy — a reconstitution that allows us to negate the noospheric convergence itself.
The relationship between democracy and technology has not been sufficiently addressed. Technology has only ever really been thought of as a tool for democracy—whether in the Greek kleroterion, the modern postal and ballot systems, or even today’s digital platforms— that could be used for voting or decision-making (for example, the direct digital democracy of the Five Star Movement in Italy), along with social media, to influence voters. In the 20th century, democracy was vulnerable to analogue technologies of marketing, such as television and radio, which used broadcasting to create and transmit patterns of information in the form of propaganda. Compared to information in its textual form, data in visual and audio forms opens up an intuitive means of communication: more direct and efficient, it can synchronise the audience’s consciousness. Thus far in the 21st century, the proliferation of digital technology has challenged the broadcasting model of mass media. Information is transmitted not only through successions of images and sound, but also via the direct processing of user data. Modern citizens are increasingly becoming both users and consumers, in the sense that they adapt to new interfaces and algorithms over which they have no control or influence. This has been the common experience of social media users over the past two and a half decades.
5 Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg, ‘A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain: An obscure Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, set down the philosophical framework for planetary, Net-based consciousness 50 years ago’, Wired, 1 June 1995, https://www.wired.com/1995/06/teilhard/.
6 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le phénomène humain (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955).
7 Peter K. Haff, ‘Technology as a geological phenomenon: implications for human well-be-ing,’ in Geological Society Special Publication (vol. 395), eds. C.N. Waters, J.A. Zalasiewicz, M. Williams, M.A. Ellis and A.M. Snelling (London: Geological Society, 2014), pp. 301-9.
The democracy about which we are now talking is the democratisation of technology, which has been undermined by industrial capitalism and consumerism. This is why I propose to develop the concept of technodiversity: to imagine a possibility to renew our relationship with technologies and to fragment the noosphere. It is not a proposal to give up modern technologies— though it is imperative that we should abandon the atomic bomb and all kinds of weapons of mass destruction—but rather an attempt to diversify and transform these technologies beyond the shadow of industrial capitalism and consumerism.
We could rethink the future according to a new vocabulary that includes technodiversity, noodiversity, and biodiversity. Technodiversity and noodiversity correlate, and in turn, they interfere with and maintain the biodiversity of their living environment. The invention of tools in order to adapt to and adopt the environment inevitably leads to the interference of biodiversity. Species without the mediation of technology will take a long time to adapt to changes in the environment. The problem, as E.O. Wilson and many others have pointed out, is that the destruction of the environment has accelerated to the extent that the damage has become irreversible. In other words, biodiversity and noodiversity have come to depend more and more on technodiversity — and without technodiversity, we will not be able to maintain and develop noodiversity and biodiversity.
This will demand a new structuring of knowledge communities and public institutions. Therefore, the question that we are raising here concerning the future of technology is less about developing this or that machine — which could bring fundamental impact to human life, as we have seen with the invention of the computer — and more about fragmentation or diversification. So, we will have to provide some examples of technodiversity and ways to approach it.
Joseph Needham, a British biochemist, historian of science, and sinologist, raised the haunting ‘Needham’s question’, which asks why modern science and technology appeared only in Europe, but not in China and India.8 Like many historians after him, one could, of course, argue that before the 16th century, many scientific discoveries and technological developments in China were more advanced than those in Europe. However, this betrayed what Needham was hinting at: for him, it is not legitimate to compare western science and technology directly with their Chinese counterparts, since they carry rather different ontological and epistemological assumptions. As an example, ontological entities, such as qi (vital breath) and yin-yang in Chinese medicine, cannot be materially demonstrated in anatomy. Based on his own research in biology, Needham adopted the term ‘organicism’ to describe Chinese medicine and Chinese thought in general.
Whether one should use the terms ‘organicism’ or ‘holism’ to characterise Chinese thought remains controversial. However, one could at least conclude that Chinese and Western cultures have had different ways of understanding and constructing technology, and this is what I term ‘technodiversity’. I think this might also be the case when we think about Japan, Korea, and India, as well as other non-Western territories. This seems self-evident, as the concept of technodiversity has been much discussed in Latin American countries over the past few years. Moreover, this diversity should not only be found in the past or treated as a subject of historical study; we can, and we need to, think about it today.
We are surrounded by digital technologies, yet we rarely inquire about diversity beyond market niches. Consequently, we remain blind to the ontological and epistemological assumptions already made in these products. Take the example of social networks: they already presuppose that society is a collection of social atoms and that human relations can be known and studied via data connectivity. Once questioned, these presuppositions appear to be problematic, because they were developed in the 1930s by social psychologists such as Jacob Moreno and Kurt Lewin, and no anthropologist will agree that human society commenced with social atoms. However, this model has been imitated and amplified by almost all social network platforms in many different countries, whether via Facebook, VKontakte, or WeChat. This also shows the limits of innovation that we are talking about today, especially when the idea focuses only on market niches, efficiency, and speed.
I feel that now, more than ever, we must come back to the question of technodiversity in view of the dilemma of our civilisation. This dilemma has been falsely described as a choice between acceleration and deceleration, growth and degrowth, optimism and pessimism. The quest for and promotion of technodiversity should be one of the core tasks for us today. This is the technological pluralism I would like to propose. I believe it will demand that all of us think collectively about how it could be possible. The year 2050 is not that far away, which also means that we are running out of time.
8 Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969).