The Myth of Scientific Progress

Modern man does not think of truth as a set of facts or principles fixed for all time but rather as an ongoing process of revelation. This process is science. It consists of scientists who test claims by gathering data through experimental procedures. This knowledge is ultimately refined and implemented as technology. Modernity is in part based on this idea of technological progress. It asserts that science and technology are both good and will continue developing. However, there are limits to what science can discover. There will forever be truth outside of science’s reach. Further, each advancement of science and technology is better characterized as a trade-off rather than an unqualified good. Many of the obvious benefits to technology come with a more subtle or delayed drawback.

Science and technology are generally viewed as good. This is because the obvious advancement of technology supports the narrative of progress. The question of what is good is fundamentally a religious or at least a philosophical one that cannot be answered scientifically. There are some obvious objections to science being strictly good. The easiest are the technologies of incredible destructive power. Developments such as hydrogen bombs, biological and chemical weapons, or AI controlled drones are morally suspect at best. The real problem with technology and scientific discovery is far more nuanced. 

Consider the development of industrial scale fertilizer. Created in the early 20th century, this fertilizer now supports billions of people. The fertilizer is created through the Haber-Bosch process. Without this technology those people would very likely starve. At first glance, this piece of technology appears to be positive. The Haber–Bosch process produces the ammonia used to create the fertilizer. But ammonia-based explosives were made for World War I with this process. As with most technologies, this invention has a mixture of good and bad applications. Creating a technology with the best of intentions does not guarantee it will be used for good. Yet the real problem with this fertilizer technology was its success. The availability of an abundance of cheap food has been a primary factor in the rise of obesity. The solution to the problem of starvation created the problem of overabundance-driven disease. Now of course the problem of overabundance and obesity might be a better problem to have. But technology did not reduce the number of problems humanity has, it exchanged one for another. It also introduces bad unintended uses. This is the problem with scientific and technological “progress.” Technology does not advance a society, it offers a trade-off.

Also, this “progress” is not permanent. The Haber-Bosch process consumes a lot of oil. If fossil fuels longer available, this technology is likely rendered useless. In the meantime, about half of the nitrogen contained in the fertilizer is not absorbed by the intended plants and soil. Eventually it washes into the ocean. The effects are large “dead-zones” where little wildlife is found. Is this ecological damage worth the human lives saved? That question is difficult to answer if that environmental damage ends up killing people. Hypothetically, in the future humanity will not have enough fuel to use the Haber-Bosch process, but it will have a damaged or diminished environment. In that case, this invention would be better characterized as regression rather than progress.

The problem of technological trade-off is compounded by unknowns. When a technology is invented or adopted, the potential downsides are not immediately clear. Consider the invention of synthetic plastics in the early 20th century.  No one imagined that microscopic bits of it would be found everywhere from the top of mount Everest, down to the deepest parts of the ocean. More than a hundred years after its invention, almost every person on the planet has microplastics building up in their internal organs. Modern people laugh at the Romans for poisoning themselves by using lead pipes, but we may have poisoned humanity at a global scale. Scientists are discovering a link between male infertility and the presence of plastics in the environment. If that is true, this could impact the future of humanity.

Of course there are many benefits to plastic, it was quickly applied to many different areas. Medical equipment such as IV bags would be impractical to make without plastic and are essential in hospitals to save lives. But this again is the trade-off found in technology. Eliminate plastic and a massive number of preventable deaths occur, keep it and potentially gamble with the future of humanity. All these considerations were completely unknown to the inventors. The point is that any judgment for or against plastic or any other technology is premature. By the time the downsides are known and quantified, the damage is done. It is naive to judge a brand new technology as good because its potential downsides are not known at the time of invention. It is impossible to determine when all the pitfalls of a technology are known. Instead, it would be best to consider technologies as either harmful or not yet harmful.

Further, the problem of the unknowable trade-offs of technology are worse when considering human society. Physical effects and properties of a technology are reasonably easy to measure. However social effects are intangible, complex, and difficult to quantify. Society is a complex, rat's nest of tangled social connections and inter-dependencies. Determining the cause and effects of social conditions is hard. Determining if a change brought on by technology is a net good is an intractable problem. Again, the problem is compounded by the fact that long term consequences cannot always be foreseen.

Whatever potential benefit technology offers, modern technology is fragile. Since digital storage of information is cheap, fast, and convenient, it contains the vast majority of recently recreated data. If society can no longer create electrical power, most of modern technology goes with it. Modern technology may be efficient and effective. But without power it is useless and much of pre-modern technology has already been forgotten. The number of people who could fall trees to build a house without power tools is few. Likewise there are very few people who could make textiles with a loom or by hand. Losing power would mean a larger reset than reverting to a pre-industrial age.

There are more problems besides losing power. If society cannot produce enough people capable of understanding and applying modern science and technology, then it might as well be lost as well. One recent example of this was a fuel pipeline in the Southeast United States that was disabled. The computer system that controlled it was compromised by hackers. Theoretically, the pipeline was controllable through manually operated valves. But all the people who knew how to operate it manually were dead or retired. A similar potential crisis is brewing with financial systems. They are running software written in COBOL, a programming language that no programmer has been taught recently. The average age of a COBOL programmer is close to the average retirement age. This means that there will be no one to fix or maintain these critical systems.

What appears to be scientific and technological progress is not necessarily good. Neither is it guaranteed to continue forever. While advancements have been rapid, they can disappear just as fast. These scientific and technological achievements are not good, they are a trade-off, an exchange of one problem for another. What is believed to be progress is a narrative of wishful thinking.