An article on The New Yorker Blog got me to thinking about the impact of technological evolution on society. If you read the post carefully, you will notice how interesting does the comparison with the Oji-Cree seem. So I started discussing it with someone I know.

The problem my friend had was basically the fact that there is a common misconception that, in general, evolutionary processes takes us in “desirable” directions for a number of reasons. He says, “First, evolution is not a teleological process, i.e. it does not have a pre-defined end point. No one can define which directions are more “desirable” than others. Or at least multiple competing definitions always co-exist. Second, one could argue that “environmental fit” is the only “desirable” outcome in evolutionary terms. However, the fact that a given population has survived for a long time does not automatically mean that it is somehow “better” or “more advanced” than other populations. According to The Red Queen hypothesis, the extinction probability of a given population is constant at every moment of time and does not depend on the lifetime of a population. Only because we’ve been around for such a long time does not mean that we are somehow “better” than other species. Third, evolutionary processes are highly sensitive to “initial conditions.” That is a very small or extremely unlikely or random event can end up not only deciding the outcome of an evolutionary selection process, but also make this outcome irreversible.”

He continues, “Similarly like markets often stick to inferior technological solutions despite the existence of superior ones, evolution in biology is not guarantee that we’ll get “the most desirable” outcome possible. Against this background, everyone who assumes that there could something naturally positive about any kind of evolution is at loss. What this means is that we should be extremely careful about the decisions we make today, because they will be the conditions of our decisions tomorrow.”

As Marx said, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

In my opinion, unlike biological one, technological evolution has one big difference — its directions may not be so easily defined as “desirable,” but the consequences are obviously over our control. I would describe technology — and technological evolution afterwards — as something that refers to the changes over time of something we humans have created.

We should remember that the long existence of a certain population does not necessarily mean that it would become “better,” but more advanced — why not? Does this advancement mean we are getting “better”? Not necessarily. So how do we determine if a specific population is getting somewhat “better”? Productivity? Human capital? Health? Something else?

“If we’re not careful, our technological evolution will take us toward not a singularity but a sofalarity. That’s a future defined not by an evolution toward superintelligence but by the absence of discomforts.”
— Tim Wu

Sofalarity is present, and I do think the choice is entirely up to the brain of the living. However, sofalarity is certainly our fault, not evolution’s.