Are Technologies Inevitable?
On Path Dependency
Dear reader,
This week’s post is not the usual thing. I designed New Things Under the Sun to feature two kinds of articles: claims and arguments. Almost everything I write is a claim article (or an update to them). Today’s post is the other kind of article, an argument.
The usual goal of a claim article is to synthesize several academic papers in service of assessing a specific narrow claim about innovation. Argument articles live one level up the chain of abstraction: the goal is to synthesize many claim articles (referenced mostly in footnotes) in service of presenting a bigger picture argument. That means in this post you won’t see me talk much about specific papers; instead, I’ll talk about various literatures and how I think they interact with each other.
Also, this article is really long; probably about twice as long as anything else I’ve written. Rather than send you the whole thing in email, I’m sending along the introduction below, an outline, and a link to the rest of the article, which lives on the NewThingsUnderTheSun.com. Alternatively, you can listen to a podcast of the whole thing here.
Cheers everyone and thanks for your interest,
Matt
Are Technologies Inevitable?
Introduction
In a 1989 book, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould posed a thought experiment:
I call this experiment “replaying life’s tape.” You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past… then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original.”
p48, Wonderful Life
Gould’s main argument is:
…any replay of the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken… Alter any early event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel.
p51, Wonderful Life
Gould is interested in the role of contingency in the history of life. But we can ask the same question about technology. Suppose in some parallel universe history proceeded down a quite different path from our own, shortly after Homo sapiens evolved. If we fast forward to 2022 of that universe, how different would the technological stratum of that parallel universe be from our own? Would they have invented the wheel? Steam engines? Railroads? Cars? Computers? Internet? Social media? Or would their technologies rely on principles entirely alien to us? In other words, once humans find themselves in a place where technological improvement is the rule (hardly a given!), is the form of the technology they create inevitable? Or is it the stuff of contingency and accident?
In academic lingo, this is a question about path dependency. How much path dependency is there in technology? If path dependency is strong, where you start has a big effect on where you end up: contingency is also strong. But if path dependency is weak, all roads lead to the same place, so to speak. Contingency is weak.
Some people find this kind of thing inherently fun to speculate about. It’s also an interesting way to think through the drivers of innovation more generally. But at the same time, I don’t think this is a purely speculative exercise. My original motivation for writing it was actually related to a policy question. How well should we expect policies that try to affect the direction of innovation to work? How much can we really direct and steer technological progress?
As we’ll see, the question of contingency in our technological history is also related to the question of how much remains to be discovered. Do we have much scope to increase the space of scientific and technological ideas we explore? Or do we just about have everything covered, and further investigation would mostly be duplicating work that is already underway?
I’ll argue in the following that path dependency is probably quite strong, but not without limits. We can probably have a big impact on the timing, sequence, and details of technologies, but I suspect major technological paradigms will tend to show up eventually, in one way or another. Rerun history and I doubt you’ll find the technological stratum operating on principles entirely foreign to us. But that still leaves enormous scope for technology policy to matter; policies to steer technology probably can exert a big influence on the direction of our society’s technological substrate.
The rest of the post is divided into two main parts. First, I present a set of arguments that cumulatively make the case for very strong path dependency. By the end of this section, readers may be close to adopting a view close to Gould’s: any change in our history might lead to radically different trajectories. I think this actually goes too far. In the second part of the essay, I rein things in a bit by presenting a few arguments for limits to strong path dependency.
The rest of the piece goes on to make the following argument:
Part One: The Case for Strong Path Dependency
Small scale versions of replaying the technology tape point to path dependency being at least big enough to notice
The landscape of possible technologies is probably very big because
Combinatorial landscapes are very big
Technology seems to have an important combinatorial element
Our exploration of this space seems a bit haphazard and incomplete
From the constrained set of research and invention options actually discovered, an even smaller set get an early lead, often for highly contingent reasons, and then enjoy persistent rich-get-richer effects
Part Two: The Limits of Path Dependence
It may not matter that the landscape of technological possibility is large, if the useful bits of it are small. This may be plausible because
This might be the case for biology
It is probably possible to discover the small set of universal regularities in nature via many paths
Human inventors can survey the space of technological possibility to a much greater degree than in biological evolution
A shrinking share of better technologies combined with our ability to survey the growing combinatorial landscape can yield exponential growth in some models
As always, if you want to chat about this post or innovation in generally, let’s grab a virtual coffee. Send me an email at mattclancy at hey dot com and we’ll put something in the calendar.
New Things Under the Sun is produced in partnership with the Institute for Progress, a Washington, DC-based think tank. You can learn more about their work by visiting their website.