Best Technology
Tech it or leave it: what is the best technology? The bed, writing, antibiotics? In this podcast we ask: how do we define technology, and can we objectively measure the best of it? We take a look at potential metrics - from the number of people who benefit to quantifying the overall happiness created - and wonder whether the best is yet to come.
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
- Estimates of historical world population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population
- Timeline of inventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventions
- The philosophy of intellectual property https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph, and this week we're discussing what's the best technology ever and why is it the bed? Nick, go for it.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, actually, the other day I had occasion to use a bed because I was in bed and I was really tired and I just was musing on how brilliant it was being in bed. And I thought, well, you know, and I spend, you know, getting on, well, probably a quarter of my life in bed and it's really comfy. And if you think about what people must have had before the bed, it must have been things like the floor and they would have slept on the floor and had maybe a rock for a pillow. Before that, they were standing up. Yeah, they had to sleep standing up. They hadn't invented the floor. So, and I was thinking, hang on, quarter of my entire life spent using this fantastic invention, the bed, and it's really comfy, obvious improvement on the previous invention, which was the floor. And so I thought, well, that must be the best technology ever invented, like in terms of adding happiness to humanity. I mean, everyone's got one, so they're obviously pretty ubiquitous. Anyway, so I thought, well, actually, let's try and do this scientifically. What is the best technology ever? What do we mean by that? And can we actually, can we measure it and work out objectively that the bed is, in fact, the best technology of all time?
Speaker A:I think it feels like this is, we're going to be sort of doing a bit of defining, a bit of definitioning. Yeah, I reckon that's true. A bit of metrics. Yeah. And a bit of... Data collection. Yeah, a bit of data collection and then just a little bit of magic sort of sprinkled over the bed. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I like it. How do we want to kick this off? I mean, do we want to start by defining what we mean by technology? Because for me, the bed doesn't immediately strike me as a bit of tech, but, you know, perhaps it is. Is that a good place? Peter, what's a technology? Yeah, what's a technology, Peter?
Speaker C:Off the top of my head, I'd say it's anything that's artificially created that is some sort of, that provides some sort of function in extension of you as a human. So anything you can strap on, place on, clothe on, get on, get on, or in, or hold, that perform some tasks that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do without it.
Speaker A:Do you know what, Nick? I don't know what you think, but I think for an off the top of my head definition, that's pretty cool.
Speaker B:I like it. He's done it again. It does make me wonder if a bed can be defined as technology. I mean, it doesn't, to what extent does a bed do something that we would have done anyway? Do you see what I mean?
Speaker A:Well, let's dig into that, right? Because we can all lie down. I've definitely seen you do that. I certainly have. And, you know, we're aided by that other invention, gravity, which makes that a nicer sort of way to be. So let's dig into this. Is a bed a bit of tech? And if so, how?
Speaker C:Yeah, I think it fits within my definition. I think so.
Speaker A:Because it keeps you warm and dry, whereas the floor doesn't. So does a bed have to be raised? You know, because let's say back in the day, there you are in your cave, you and your Mrs. Ugg. And yeah, of course, one day you think, you know what, that floor of my cave is getting a bit cold, a bit rocky. And you lie something, you put some, you know, mammoth fur down there or something. Is that tech? Because is that bed?
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, what about someone who put one piece of straw on the floor and then lay on that? Is that a very primitive bed?
Speaker A:Yeah, no, I feel we're going down that, you know, what is a pile of things?
Speaker B:Well, I think it is. We always come up against this problem when we often discuss technology. And it's very, very hard to draw a line around something and say that's a that. You know, that's beds. And, you know, for example, the line between the floor and the bed is a spectrum.
Speaker C:My definition would allow things like birds' nests to be a technology, which I'm totally okay with. I'm totally okay with the idea of animals. But also sentient candidate animals having technologies of their own.
Speaker A:Yeah. But I guess also the nature of classification, right, which is sort of what we're talking about a bit here. Yeah. If you're going to say, right, let's try and understand this stuff around us in the world. And one of the ways we can try and understand it is by classifying things. And the nature of classification is you draw lines in effect, right? And so you will always come across this, okay, where, how does this line fit? It's wrapped up in the question, right? So I don't think you should get too hung up on that.
Speaker B:Yeah, no, I agree. I think the best, we'll do what we normally do, which is go, so that's an interesting question, but we won't actually try and answer it. But I think it is particularly relevant here because we sort of want to say, well, if, should we, let's say we were trying to find out what the best technology was, we kind of have to decide what bed we're talking about. Like, is it the very, because you can imagine, I would assume that there was possibly tens of thousands of years development between a mammoth skin and, you know, a French Baroque four-poster bed. And so, you know, if we're talking about that, the four-poster bed, that's going to have provided much less utility, much less happiness than, you know, your animal skin. So it is, you know, it does make a difference, I think, to what the results might be. But I think we're straying now a bit into, well, so what do we mean by best?
Speaker A:Well, I suppose so, yeah. But I think we can probably agree that, I think we're all satisfied that bed is tech.
Speaker B:Yes, but I mean, I think the answer would probably end up being something like, well, you know, you classify, if you really wanted to know the difference, you'd say the four-poster bed was a different technology to an animal skin. And you'd say the animal skin has provided less comfort to more people. And, you know, it might turn out, you could probably do a whole podcast on which bed has added the most utility. But it becomes problematic when you're trying to just classify all of them as a bed and to put a number on it, which of course we're going to do.
Speaker A:Yes, quite. Right. Have we put the bed question to bed? And are we now able to say, hey, what is it about this that makes it great? And then maybe start comparing other things. Are we at that point? I don't think I'm anywhere near that point. Oh, good Lord. Okay.
Speaker C:I think it might be helpful if we rattle off some technologies and agree if they are indeed technologies or not, and agree if they are good or not. Net good or not. I'm going to ignore a bucket of things I've got, which is transformational technologies everyone talks about. Boring things like the internet, communications, smartphones, AI.
Speaker B:Oh, I thought you were going to say fire in the wheel.
Speaker C:No, no, no. Those definitely can be. So fire and wheel are those technologies? I think they are. Yeah. Writing, that's quite a big E. Yeah, I've got that down in my notes as a really difficult one. And then slightly more, slightly later, I'd say like housing, having a roof and walls. And that link to that materials and material engineering. So things like concrete, textiles, glass, plastics. And coming a bit later still, we've got things like electricity. It's quite a big one. Not bad. It's not bad, is it? Not a bad invention. Household appliances, things like washing machines as a labour saving. There's a lot of technology out there, isn't there? Is electricity just a type of fire? But anyway, carry on. Okay. Dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, that kind of thing. And finally, antibiotics. I'll chuck that in there.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah. I think they're all very solid candidates.
Speaker A:Yeah. I mean, also let's define it by what it's not maybe, right? It seems everything that is nature that exists in a natural state. Well, except birds' nests. Well, but that's not a natural state. Right. I mean, it's... What about animal skin? No, that is technology. Because we've done something to it. So when it's on the animal and the animals, when it's still attached to the animal, it's not technology.
Speaker C:What about an animal wearing another animal skin? That's technology.
Speaker B:What about if you stuff the animal so it's still wearing its skin and you use it as a chair? Technology. Okay. I'm glad we've cleared that up. So I think these all seem very plausible. And I think they're for different reasons, which I want to get onto. So just to talk about how we might measure best, actually measure and define are slightly different things. I think in terms of define, what we really want to know is some sort of measure of happiness, which, you know, luckily economics has an answer to because we don't actually try and talk about happiness. We talk about utility, which is about how much you'd be willing to pay. How much would you be willing to pay for this thing? So how much would you be prepared to sacrifice to have this thing? Now, obviously, it's very hard to interview a caveman to find out how much they would give up. They might be willing to part with some of their prized ivory for the chance to lie on a nice comfy bed. But how do we value that in today's terms? But the good thing about technology, unlike other things, is actually it doesn't generally doesn't disappear. So you can actually now put, we've actually got beds and we've also got things like wooden bowls that cavemen had. And we can go, well, how many wooden bowls is one bed worth? And actually make that comparison, not by the way that I've done that particularly because it's really hard. But in general, that comparison is in principle makeable. So we can actually quantify how good a bowl is compared to how good a bed is. But a really key thing is how many people have used it. So this is going to be this is going to turn out to be really important, because obviously, we're not just interested in in sort of how many years the technology has been around for, but how many people on Earth have gained benefits from it. And obviously, there's more people now. So if you invent something a long time ago, there's take maybe a couple of thousand years of that technology being around to infect the same number of people as a technology now in like five or 10 years. So there's that. So we've got to worry about the number of people it's affected. And that also means a really, really cool technology that other people that people generally don't use or any niche group of people use probably isn't going to come out as useful as something that's perhaps not quite as exciting, but used by everyone like a bed. I think there's a quick way through to this. Yeah, yeah. So I think I'm basically what we're talking about is happiness people years. Okay. And that's what we need to we need to we need to somehow have a way of quantifying. But but there is I mean, this. Yeah, there's a big problem of indirect effects. So do we, for example, credit the wheel with, for example, you know, being able to get spices to transport spices across along the Silk Road. Now, the wheel made that cheaper. So how much of the value of a spice is accredited to the wheel? If if markets were all perfect, you'll be priced in, right? In theory. So the value of a tractor would would be partly related to the amount of wheat you could produce for the tractor. And the value of that wheat would be partly related to the value of the bread that it would end up producing. Right. So, you know, the baker would pay more for your wheat if bread was more valuable. And in theory, if everything was marketed, then we we actually wouldn't need to worry about this problem of second order effects. But everything isn't marketed. And for example, writing is a very hard one to quantify in terms of, you know, you can say, well, how much do people pay for a book? But that's not the same as how much they pay for the for the actual the technology of writing, which you just can't sort of sell. It's not priced in. Something like electricity. You can charge people for it. You know that how much they were a bowl you can charge someone for. You can say how much is a bowl worth. But what you what it's very hard to do is say how much writing is worth. So, yeah. So I just even with that, I think pretty, pretty tight economics definition. I think even then it's it's very difficult to ascribe values to specific technologies.
Speaker A:But we're going to give it a go. Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah. Peter, I'm drifting here. Wade in. What are your thoughts on this?
Speaker C:Do we want to talk about why some of these things are good?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:Would that help? Let's do it.
Speaker B:Because all the economics bit does is say that people like it. So they literally they'll pay for it. But we've got no idea why. Like people would pay for heroin. But maybe that's not quite as good as a bed.
Speaker C:Yeah, exactly. So the beds. What about heroin in the bed? The bed keeps you warm and dry. It's fairly obvious. But writing. Why is that good? So writing allowed us to move from being an entirely verbal culture to one that was written, which unlocks all sorts of things. Thinking about a sort of civilization kind of tech tree. One of, you know, one of which being being able to externalize your memory onto paper or parchment or clay tablets or whatever it was. So you don't have to remember everything. And it means that information is much more shareable. But it also unlocks a key thing, which is specialization. It means that you can become expert in a narrower field rather having to hold everything about how to operate in the world in your head. And so that's that's writing.
Speaker A:So writing's got the cognitive engineering stamp of approval.
Speaker C:Yeah, I think it's caught on. Yeah.
Speaker B:It sort of upgrades everything else, doesn't it? Yeah. Like farming has benefited from writing because farmers can read about how to make better crops.
Speaker C:Yeah. And it's ubiquitous. It's sort of something that everyone potentially can do. And once you can do it, you get value in everything, in everything. Well, writing, reading, you get value in everything you do. Why are antibiotics good? Well, some stats. So in the 19th century, there was a staggering, in the UK, there was a staggering 50% infant mortality due to infections. Sorry, 50% of infant mortality were due to infections. The mortality rate was between 140 and 200 per thousand. So you had about a one in five chance of not making it to five, depending on where you lived. So rural towns were lower, industrial towns were higher. And in the early 21st century, global infant mortality rates went down to 9.6 per thousand. And that's largely due to the availability of antibiotics. So that's pretty good, right? That's obviously got knock-on effects in terms of you've got more workforce, you've got bigger economy, you've got more people doing more things.
Speaker B:But even just in terms of like, what are you paying for? You're paying for the ability to exist longer. People really like existing. People like existing, yeah. It's about as fun. Because I think some of the things you've mentioned make me think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And actually, it makes a lot of sense, the tech tree that we've gone on. We didn't invent films before we invented fire, for example. And it feels like we drill upwards or we build upwards, perhaps, on the kind of pyramid of needs. So that all of the basic ones, all the food and the warmth and the light and all of those things get dealt with first. And then we gradually, we now invent Netflix, which allows us to self-actualize by watching documentaries about cheerleaders. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker C:Keep going for a bit, Peter. Other stuff. Well, talk about building up from the ground, like concrete and other materials. Everything you touch and look at in the modern world, unless you're in the woods, is some sort of artificial material that's been created from some base substrate stuff dug out of the ground or cut out of a tree or sucked out of an oil well.
Speaker B:And even if you're in the woods, I bet you're wearing shoes, so you're not actually touching the floor, you're touching a material. You're completely naked, standing on the moon.
Speaker C:And in the 10 seconds that you can enjoy that experience, you're not in contact with anything. But yeah, everything is made of some sort of material that's artificial. Okay.
Speaker B:I feel like materials feels a bit too general to me. Yeah, okay. It's a bit like defining things made out of stuff.
Speaker C:I define the technology as material engineering. And I would even class it as carpentry in that. So taking wood and being able to prepare it to make furniture out of it. That's a form of material engineering.
Speaker B:Because I feel like that's then going to try and steal bed's chips. Because the bed people, the material people, will just say, well, bed is just another kind of material. We don't dig out bed material. Beds are made out of lots of different materials. Yeah, I suppose so. But carpentry, for example. I mean, is carpentry, the technology in bed, is merely one output? And you can also have chair and table.
Speaker C:Well, I say carpentry is a sub part of material engineering. Right.
Speaker A:Yeah. It's hard, isn't it? Yeah, it is. But do you know what? I think as a team, we're equipped for this. Right. And I think this is why we're the dream team. Because how we attack this in our different ways. So often, Nick, you come at things through an economic lens. Not purely, but that can be a way you look at it in terms of utility like this. Peter with his engineering hat and looking at the whys of technology. Right. And then you've got another approach. The listeners. Strap in listeners. Look, imagine it like this. Let's say there's a lucky caveman from about 60,000 years ago. And he doesn't know if he's won the lottery. He's won the kind of time travellers lottery. Because us three magically transport him to now. Yeah. Okay. And what we do is we just give him a fantastic holiday or something like that. In the modern age. In the modern age for a month. Okay. And we send him to make a list. Yeah. And we show him all sorts. It's like he's, you know, imagine it's the kind of person who sort of has got a terminal illness and they go, right, I've got a month just to go for it. Yeah. That's a bit like it is with our friend. Right. So we try whenever we can. We expose him to the experiences that we can. Right. And I wonder at the end of those four weeks, we then sit him down and say, so what was your best bit? Okay. Because it will involve technology. Because just to say, by the way, how we've got to this point is we've agreed that technology is quite cumulative. And it's actually quite difficult to separate because it's cumulative. So let's go another way of just going, hey, Ugg, what was your best bit? What do we think his best bit might have been?
Speaker C:I reckon probably getting sort of thoroughly de-loused and just cleaned up.
Speaker B:Yeah. I would think water, availability of water and warmth. Food. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And also not being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger all the time. Yeah. Would be up there. Although he probably gets run over by a bus, though. That's true. I mean, unless, yeah. We'll look after him. Yeah. We'd sort him out on that score. I mean, that's which is interesting because I feel like that's a really good thought experiment to sort of cut through all this and say, but hang on, what could we imagine that this guy's going to want?
Speaker A:I think he would be really sparked by things like plane travel. I think he'd be into that. He'd be a bit frightened, but I think he'd get into that. I think he'd be really into, I think he'd be into beds. Or would he? He might miss his, a bit like Crocodile Dundee, he might miss his sort of, you know, mammoth fur on the floor. I don't know. But I think he'd be into beds. I think he'd be into music. That's true.
Speaker C:He might just binge watch the entire Game of Thrones.
Speaker A:Yeah, something like that.
Speaker C:And waste his whole time.
Speaker A:Yeah, it could be by the first week, he's like, wow. And by the last week, he's just vegging out to cheerleaders on Netflix.
Speaker B:But I suspect that would happen remarkably fast. Yeah. And which I think makes this problematic for us, I think, intuitively, because we don't realise how many of these things. I mean, it is a useful idea to sort of imagine. I think, well, actually, reverse it and say, imagine you're suddenly beamed back to Cape Verde. What am I missing the most? What would you miss the most? And I think it's going to be the material comforts, which would impinge on your utility the most. I think they're the things that you'd be like, I've got to walk three miles to have a glass of water. That's all right, I'll bring loads back with me. Oh, no, we haven't invented, you know, animal skins yet for carrying water. So, you know, you have to do that every morning just to have a drink. I think those kinds of things would be, and shoes, you know, I think it's going to be all of that stuff that probably end up being most annoying to not have, which I guess is the same as what things have added the most value.
Speaker A:Yeah. And you'd have to sort of taking that approach. If you start stripping it away one by one. Right. So day one in your cave, there we are sitting around. Well, we haven't got, yeah, if we just went gradually further back in time, so we're going to miss our mobile phones. We're going to miss artificial intelligence, that's gone. Mobile phones, boom, they've gone. Internet, they've gone. Computers, they've gone. And back and back and back.
Speaker B:I think I'm feeling pretty comfortable until we probably, until we get to 19th century. I think we're going to start to. Yeah, we would definitely, the antibiotics thing would be a problem. Modern medicine would be much more problematic than we expect. But I think, I feel like we could probably, at least if we're in Britain, probably life isn't going to be that. It's like when you go to an Airbnb in the countryside, you know, and it's a little bit rustic. I think this isn't like London. I think we're coping at this point. Yeah. I actually, I think we'd cope.
Speaker C:Yeah, I think we'd probably cope until quite a long time ago. Yeah, until quite a long time ago. Assuming you didn't fall sick or needed a new pair of shoes. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker A:And also it's where does comfort cross with sort of necessity, let's say, which you were kind of talking about in the hierarchy of needs and all that business. Because there are certain things where technology is great for making sure you stay alive. And then it's also great and crosses over into what's comfortable and what's fun. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B: million by: Speaker A:So look, let's move towards wrapping this up and finally nailing this question of what's the best technology on its head, right? So I've got a question, but just before we do, anything to just round this off a bit, this discussion, Peter?
Speaker C:This is probably a second part podcast, but we could look ahead to things that we think are going to be game changers, but not yet. Yeah, let's do that. Very quickly. So I've got a couple. So I'd say gene editing, CRISPR and the like, pretty big, because that could unlock sort of immortality, or if not immortality, then 10x kind of life expectancy, which if you have 10 lifetimes versus one, imagine how much more you can achieve. You just do 10 different things one after the other, and you have a much more full life. Linked to that, personalized medicine. Modern medicine is pretty good, but there's a lot further it could go. So if your entire medical apparatus around you was completely personalized down to your genes and your behavior and your habits and everything else, that could be pretty big. It could have pretty big outcomes just in terms of life expectancy and things. Those are the only exciting ones. There's boring ones like Internet of Things, blockchain, renewable energy. Oh, they're so boring, aren't they? They're so boring.
Speaker B:The idea that the blockchain is going to be as good as fire, I'm not buying it. Yeah.
Speaker A:Just to say, we've been talking about blockchains for about seven, eight years on this podcast. I still don't really know what it is. No, don't worry about it. I'm not worried.
Speaker B:I think Peter, it's a good idea to try and think of the new, but I think they'll never catch up because the old techs will never go away. I don't think you can beat, say, clothes. I don't think anyone can invent something that is as good as clothes. Let's imagine they invent gene editing, and you say to people, look, you can have that or clothes. Which thing do you want? Well, gene editing could give you a nice woolly coat. Okay. But I mean, you know, in general, imagine a thing which would be so good that you'd give up clothes to have it. I don't think, I think it's very hard to imagine such a thing. And so, first of all, we're not going to invent something as good as clothes. And secondly, clothes have already had six billion or eight billion, you know, well, actually vastly more than that, people enjoy them. So I think the trouble is we're never going to invent the best technology because it must already have been invented.
Speaker C:I think there's a chance because of, you know, as you say, only it needs to be proportionally a little bit. It needs to be proportionally less good to affect more people because the human race, you know, assuming we've got a nice long history ahead of us.
Speaker B:Remember that clothes are getting, are also getting. They're also. Yeah. All of those people are going to be enjoying clothes as well. No, I think you'd have to get outlandish and look at the prospect of if we invent simulated people, for example. If we invent a technology where we can then simulate a universe like we might be in. But if we invented the technology to simulate a universe, then we could immediately spin up a trillion people, all of whom are naked but still happy. You know, and so, you know, you can imagine. Or brain emulation. Do you know what? Yeah.
Speaker A:It strikes me you've just hit upon something there, Nick. Clearly at some point where all space and time meets, God and his elves were sitting around having this same chat. Yeah. And they said, hey, do you know what we could do is we could just make this simulated universe where everyone's naked but happy. You've just described the Garden of Eden. And, you know, you're aligned with God. He's aligned with us. Yeah.
Speaker C:Nick's doing it much more cynically, or maybe not. But he's just instantly creating trillions of people just to get loads of happiness points out of the system.
Speaker B:Actually, although, you know, it's interesting to think about how the upgrades, you know, obviously the creator of the universe brought in the upgrades in the order that you'd expect. It was like, well, we'd better start with fire. Like that's going to add the most value. And then we'll start tinkering with stuff. It's a bit like, you know, the first major upgrade of a software release fixes all the bugs. He knew what he was about. And then, you know, everything else is tinkering with the textures.
Speaker A:Yeah, he did a good job. Yeah. Although maybe the previous universes were a bit of a disaster. Maybe it was learning from. OK, look, we have to stop. However, before we do, quick question. What's your favorite bit of tech?
Speaker C:Writing for me is big. I mean, if we lived in a part of the world where we didn't need fire, we could eat the berries and we could bask in the sun to stay warm. I'd keep writing over fire if I could.
Speaker A:Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I'll go next. My favorite bit of tech is music, whether that be musical instruments, a musical instrument, the drums, you know, back in the day. I can't play the drums, but piano. Piano is my favorite bit of tech. Brings me a lot of joy and others as well when I play. So, yeah, that's mine. Somewhere else. Yeah. Nick, your favorite bit of tech?
Speaker B:I think I'd have to go. Well, Peter forgot to invent paper. So, lol. Boom. Yeah, he's invented writing. He's got nothing to do it on. I think I would go for cooking. I just, I mean, imagine having to eat like raw food. Food is just one of the, eating nice food is just one of the best things. It's unimaginable that we, you know, living without, for example, toast or, you know, pan fried chicken or something. Yeah. Like those are the things I think I would miss if you took those away. That would have a huge impact on me. So, yeah, cooking, I think.
Speaker A:I think you've hit upon something there, Nick, because I think our friend, who we brought into the present with us, I don't think he'd give a toss about the planes and the dancing around music. I think it's like, wow, the food's amazing. Domino's pizza. Yeah, exactly. Here's a slice of pizza. It'd blow his mind. Yeah. Fantastic. Okay. We've done it again. We've solved it. Okay. We'll stop there. Thank you as always for joining the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph. Until next time, goodbye.
