Technology Is the Driving Force of History

Technology is the driving force of history. 

It lies upstream of culture, and thus upstream of politics.

A technological determinist view of history is surprisingly rare. From this view, much of history is not as much about the eternal rights of man as about the newest features of machines.

Mapmaking technologies enabled creation of accurate maps. We take this for granted today, but without good maps, there were no explicit borders, only a gradual diminishing of the power of one sovereign as its territory bled into another.

In theory, the state was meant to be an innovation in violence reduction. You stay in your territory; I stay in mine. Clear sovereigns would keep domestic order, and the principle of national sovereignty would deter aggression from abroad. It didn’t entirely work out like that, of course. Both intrastate and interstate conflict still occurred. But it may have been preferable to the preceding era of fuzzy-bordered empires and sovereign conflicts.

Feudalism was enforced by knights on horseback in shining armor with heavy swords; guns changed that. Guns reduced the importance of physical inequality. Any man (or importantly, woman) with a gun could kill any other man, even if the shooter was old and frail and the shootee was Sir Lancelot himself.

Guns destabilized the feudal hierarchy; a strong right arm was suddenly worth less than a strong left brain, because the technology and supply chain to produce muskets was suddenly critical. The gun helped catalyze the transition from feudal hierarchy to nationalist republic and enabled the “republican” ideals of the American and French Revolutions to thrive.

Today, we’re on phones and computers. Whether it's politics or wars, it starts with the device.

Our mental picture of war is what we see on the History Channel. But it's actually going to look like what we've seen online over the last twenty years, which is terrorism, social media, memes, hacks, cancellation, deplatforming, unbanking, and assassination. That's what conflict looks like in the networked age.

There's both a good and bad aspect to this. It's probably less destructive to property and lives than missiles and nuclear warheads; but it's also worse because the battlefront is both everywhere and nowhere.

To be against technology is to be on the wrong side of history. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You won’t take away voices newly gained by billions.

Technological innovation drives moral innovation. Human nature may be roughly constant, but technology is not. New technology leads to the re-evaluation of existing moral principles, and sometimes to new ones.

“Freedom of speech” meant one thing in 1776, something else during the era of highly centralized mass media, and something different again in an era when every type of data is transmitted in speech-like digital symbols over the internet.

Moral innovation also drives technological innovation. Once believing in a heliocentric (sun-centered) model of the solar system was no longer considered morally evil, people developed more accurate star charts. In the fullness of time, that led to oceanic navigation, satellites, and space travel.

Technology determines which fringe ideas have become newly feasible and what elements of current consensus have become suddenly obsolete.

There is so much emerging tech to be excited about: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and crypto in general; startup cities; reversing aging; brain-machine interfaces; transhumanism; robotics; digital nomadism; AI-assisted content creation, including AI video and decentralized video; virtual reality as a replacement for offices; augmented reality for productivity; telemedicine; personal genomics; CRISPR; health tracking; pure biomedicine as well as consumer biomedicine, which overlaps with quantified self. 3D printing in metals is a little more speculative, but I think that's getting better quietly. Pseudonymity aided by crypto and AI voices and faces is also emerging. I think we'll build an entire pseudonymous economy.

I have to remind myself these things are still new to 99 percent of the population. The way to calibrate on this is to ask the average person, “What are the top five 3D printers?” or “What are the top five drones?” Most people can't go into the full list. Maybe they can name one or two, but they can't tell you all the innovation that's happening, so it’s still early in that space.

The incredible thing many people don't get? Technology is just getting started. We're only at the base of the exponential.