During election season in the United States, technology has become a proverbial lightening rod across the political spectrum. The debate over voting machines versus paper ballots is emblematic of this tension. Political persuasion has even prompted techno-enthusiasts like Elon Musk to change their views on mechanized solutions. Ironically, the brilliant founder of companies that make self-driving cars and reusable rockets has joined the Trump campaign to question the technological robustness of voting machines! Yet, there are more profound matters at play when it comes to the role of technology and the fate of the planet. Technology can certainly be part of the solution to sustainability challenges, but it can also cause many material and energy usage concerns.
The “techno-optimists” have come under considerable criticism from social scientists working on sustainability in two primary ways. First, there is a concern for access to technology in a world which has such stark levels of economic inequality. Second, there are concerns about the social impacts of the technology itself and whether this impact can be determined effectively in advance of implementation. However, the techno-optimists have also come under criticism from innovators in engineering design. One of the pioneers of this field, John Ehrenfeld, who had burnished his credentials as a systems engineer at MIT, became a major critic of the techno-optimists in his book Sustainability by Design and declared that a culture of sustainability should have “techno-skepticism” as a trait alongside being biocentric and communitarian.
Ehrenfeld’s influential book used causal loop diagrams developed by his colleague at the Sloan School of Management, Peter Senge, to consider the perils of relying on technology to achieve sustainability goals. Ehrenfeld offered a new definition of sustainability: “the possibility that human and other life will flourish on the planet forever.” Perhaps if we consider extraplanetary travel the “flourishing” could also be stretched over wider timescales. He further claimed that “almost everything being done in the name of sustainable development addresses and attempts to reduce unsustainability. But reducing unsustainability , although critical, does not and will not create sustainability.” Ehrenfeld goes on to use the Zen metaphor of the glass half full and half empty as an example of a complementary spectrum that is often misleading when considering sustainability. Unlike the glass metaphor, reducing “unsustainability” will not create space for “sustainability.” Emergent complex systems have this property that we cannot solve problems at the same level of thinking at which we created them.
The allure of technology as a solution to our sustainability challenges remains highly dependent on social behavior. By one estimate made by physicist Geoffrey West, an average human needs around 90 watts of power for biological sustenance but around 11,000 watts for “social well-being” in even an efficiently managed developed economy. Social well-being encompasses all the variety of amenities we have grown to consider important for connecting with each other such as electronic devices as well as key services that make us feel civilized, such as a haircut or an education!
Technology is a key mediating mechanism to managing human needs for well-being in both biological and social terms, but it can itself have an ecological impact as well on planetary support systems. Human inventions are marvelous manifestations of the intelligence of our species. We should embrace technology with a good measure of courage and humility. It is indeed a “wild card” which we can play to our advantage or to our loss. A next step in the evolution of our species is to consider how specific technologies not only mitigate human impacts, but where the human footprint of technology is actually a positive systems contribution. Developing a means of evaluating technologies through refinement of key tools like life cycle assessment for such net positive potential must be a key next step in our quest for sustainability.
