Technology

In a competitive marketplace with advancing technology, as the effort required to produce and, hence, acquire things diminishes, the price of gaining utility falls. For example, if the average worker had to work two hours, 40 minutes, to buy a chicken in 1900, but only 14 minutes as the 21st century approached (actual statistics), Bastiat would say the chicken "is obtained for less expenditure of human effort; less service is performed as it passes from hand to hand ..." In other words, most of the utility that had to be paid for with painful effort in 1900 was free by 2000.

The last channel is the one through which physical capital, like social capital, changes under the influence of interventionist policies: "Technological innovations allow governments to utilize lower-cost methods of social control with a greater reach not only over foreign populations, but also over domestic citizens. Examples of such methods include but are not limited to surveillance and monitoring technologies, hardware and equipment for maintaining control of citizens, and weapons for killing enemies." Interventionist policies will require particular kinds of equipment and technologies ...

It is a frustrating business to phone one of the computer companies' technical support systems and be told that what you have is a software problem, not a hardware problem. Then you phone the software company's technical support people, who tell you that you have a hardware problem and that you should call the computer company ... Back in 1956, the government forced Eastman Kodak to stop selling Kodachrome film with the developing included. Because developing Kodachrome is more complicated than developing most other color films, Kodak sold it with the processing included, so that they could see that it got done right.

Monopoly cannot develop as long as technology is dynamic, which it most abundantly is today ... As long as one brain remains unavailable, there is the chance of innovation and competition ... Nor does technological breakthrough always depend on vast resources ... Short of total state control, and presuming creative brains ... and presuming the existence of capital with which to build even modest research facilities, few would flatly say that technological innovation could be prevented simply because of some single source enjoying a temporary "monopoly" of a given product or service.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, an inventor of the integrated circuit ..., observed that computer chips seemed to evolve in two-year cycles; every two years, chip makers were able to fit twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit ... What does Moore's Law have to do with my immortality? [C]onsider this: In 1850, the average American life span was 38 years. Here in 1999, 150 years later, it's 76 years. Would it be fair to assume that in the next 150 years the human life span will at least double to 150 years, enabling some of us to live until biotechnology is able to confer immortality on us?

What distinguishes contemporary life in the countries of Western civilization from conditions as they prevailed in earlier ages ... is ... not the familiarity with the exploits of pure science and their utilization by the applied sciences, by technology. ... What these poor countries need in order to adopt the Western methods of mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses is not information about a 'know how.' There is no secrecy about technological methods.

Morley assumed that tremendous technological advances made political integration necessary. However, in this assumption he probably erred. If anything, the ongoing technological revolution has made necessary the disintegration of state, national, and international political organizations. Just as a pilot of a jet plane is forced to rely on the automatic controls which fly the plane almost independently of him, so the advancement of technological knowledge requires the automatic controls of the natural laws of economic and social action, with political control, like that of a pilot's, reduced to a minimum.

Reisman credits to two technological artifacts of Western civilization with helping him pull off such a difficult long-term project ,,, '[A] very important element in the pleasure I have derived from the writing of this book rested on my use of a personal computer. ... I fully believed, of course, that the pen is mightier than the sword .. But however mighty is the pen, the personal computer is far mightier...To me, as a writer, the personal computer is the greatest of all the remarkable goods supplied by capitalism, surpassing even the personal automobile in its contribution to the ease and enjoyment of life.'

In his 1979 book, Community Technology, Hess wrote candidly of some of the successes and of the many failures that attended his efforts to turn his Adams-Morgan neighborhood in D.C. into a self-sufficient community through rooftop hydroponic gardens and trout aquaculture in basements ... He regarded his new [welding] vocation as consistent with the view that human technologies have been more important to the spread of liberty than political philosophers or ideologues. From 1980 to 1985, he edited a newsletter titled Surviving Tomorrow, in which he emphasized small-scale alternative technologies over big centralized ones.

Perhaps the first great tool of change was the horsecollar or ox yoke. It was the tool which first enabled human beings to use a non-human source for energy. Even the discovery of fire seems pallid beside this. ... Isaac Newton described differential calculus. In some distant future, private space travellers will owe their journeys, in no small part, to Newton and his analysis. ... In America, the Wright brothers’ plane successfully flew. ... That was also the year that Crick, Wilkins, and Watson received their Nobel prize for describing the molecular structure of DNA.

[Shaffer] writes,

... Patents and copyrights inhibit the creative process ... If one scientist has been issued a patent for his invention of a widget, another scientist would likely be discouraged from continuing his own work on a similar product ... when driven by the rewards of patents, scientists and inventors are known to maintain secrecy in their laboratories and research ...

The technological revolution has been dramatically lowering the price of capital goods, making competitive, small-scale, nonhierarchical enterprises by independent individuals and peer groups more feasible than ever.

Sometimes, improvements in networked communications and cybernetic technologies reinforce the shift in military balance of power from the United States and its allies to dissident regional powers ... Sometimes states, in attempting to undermine rival states' control of their domestic populations, create liberatory technologies that undermine not only their rivals' power but their own. For example the Tor router, originally developed by the U.S. military to aid dissidents in countries like Iran, now undermines the NSA's ability to keep the American domestic population under surveillance ...

[T]he mobility provided by the Internet [has] produced competition ... unprecedented in U.S. history. They offer two examples:

Over the next three years, a major New York securities firm plans to replace its team of 800 American software engineers, each of whom earns about $150,000 per year, with an equally competent team in India earning an average of only $20,000 per year. Second, within five years the number of radiologists in this country is expected to decline significantly because MRI data can be sent over the Internet to Asian radiologists capable of diagnosing the problem at a small fraction of the cost.

It is certainly true that because of cheap telecommunications, low-cost foreign labor is now able to provide services to Americans that couldn't have been provided even a short time ago ... Several years ago low-cost foreign labor started making computer memory chips, and predictions of the demise of the U.S. high-tech sector were rife. It didn't work out that way. Instead, the price of memory chips plummeted, making computers pervasive throughout manufacturing and the service industries. Productivity skyrocketed. American chipmakers switched to innovative higher-end work.

What difference do you perceive between knitting-needles and a stocking-frame, but that the latter is a tool more complex and more efficient ..., applying ... the properties of metal, and the power of the lever, to fabricate the vestments with which we cover our feet and legs? The question is ... this:—Is it advantageous for man to take into his hands a tool more powerful, capable of doing a much greater quantity of work, or of doing it much better, in preference to another tool of a gross and imperfect construction, with which he must work more slowly, with greater toil, and less perfection?

The economy that emerged from the railroad land grants ... was not even the best way to integrate new technology such as electrical-power generation and electrically powered machinery into production ... Kropotkin celebrated the possibilities of electrical power for destroying the primary rationale for the large factory: the need to economize on power from prime movers by running as many machines as possible off belts from the drive shaft on a single steam engine. The electric motor meant that a prime mover could be built into each machine; hence the machines could be sited as close as possible to the point of consumption ...

The technological improvement in the production of A makes it possible to realize certain projects which could not be executed before because the workers required were employed for the production of A for which consumers' demand was more urgent. ... Mere technological knowledge is of no use if the capital needed is lacking. ... A tendency toward higher wage rates is not the cause, but the effect, of technological improvement.

Today Microsoft is a software giant. But its commanding market share is by no means assured. That's because its power is non-coercive and, therefore, it must worry about competitors ... Google, Mozilla, and Linux pose challenges to Microsoft's domination. Microsoft must also always worry about new competitors offering new kinds of technology that could suddenly take away market share. Yet antitrust regulators have had Microsoft in their sights for many years. In the 1980s, the regulators had IBM in their cross-hairs, only for their antitrust case to collapse after some 15 years of futility.

... science is attaining an undreamed-of ability to create new materials. The first auto-engine parts made of silicon and carbon (water-pump seal rings) are being installed in Volkswagens. Engines could soon be made of silicon carbide, cutting weight and emissions in addition to replacing metals. Palladium instead of platinum can now be used in auto-exhaust emission systems. Ceramics engineering is exploding with new knowledge, putting an end to past generations' worries about running out of metals. Organic plastics can now be blended with glass to yield a material as strong as concrete, but flexible and much lighter.

Scientific and technological discoveries are pouring from our research-and-development laboratories at an unprecedented rate ... The value of the computer ... lies not in its material constituents, but in its design, in the thinking and knowledge it embodies ... Microchips are made out of sand; their value is a function of the intelligence encoded within them. A copper wire can carry 48 telephone conversations; a single fiber-optic cable can carry more than eight thousand conversations—yet fiber-optic cables are cheaper, more efficient, and much less energy-consuming to produce than copper.

The parity formula ... completely ignored the revolution in farm production and the fall in crop-production costs ... from the introduction of tractors ... [C]rop prices have fallen primarily because modern technology, better seeds, better fertilizers, and better-educated farmers have produced far higher yields and lower costs ... [F]arming underwent a mechanical revolution in the 1920s. Farmers bought almost a million tractors in the 1920s, resulting in a revolution in productivity ... Yet, farm subsidy advocates choose to completely ignore the technological revolutions of modern agriculture.

People want to sell us things such as portable music players, mobile phones, and personal digital assistants (PDAs; small electronic calendars, notebooks, and the like). Many of us want one or more of those things, and entrepreneurs know that. But their knowledge is very general. What they are far less certain of are the scads of details involved. How much are we willing to pay? What combination of features do we want? Should a phone play music? Should a PDA be able to make calls? Do you want a camera with that? Should everything be rolled into one electronic Swiss army knife? They don't know.

We should ask ourselves why so many human advances have come from relatively free societies. We should ask why totalitarian nations not only have to steal our technology, they can't even feed their own people. Consider ... medical care ... [V]isit a hospital and marvel at the medicines and medical technology. Can you explain why these advances are available now, after several centuries of relative freedom in a few capitalist countries, while for thousands of years and in most nations the diseases we now conquer as a matter of course were a death sentence? Why here? Why now? And why not sooner?

Looking back over the past 35 years, it's amazing how much the world has changed, and generally for the better. Just consider all the things we take for granted today, that did not exist in 1968, like:

• Federal Express,
• ATMs everywhere you look,
• cell phones from competing phone companies,
• real price competition in airline service,
• video recorders,
• personal computers,
• the Internet ...

the list goes on and on. These things were made possible by a combination of technology and significant reduction of government control.

I should like to touch on what I regard as the most pernicious aspect of modern environmental rhetoric, the contention that the technology associated with modern civilization brings in its wake an unending stream of catastrophes, ranging from the despoliation of the natural habitat and the depletion of the world's resources to the dehumanization of man himself ... [D]espite these scenarios of imminent doom associated with industrial society, none is more pervasive than the view that technology has spawned a vast and increasing number of chemical compounds that are hazardous to human health.

Contrary to common opinion, living in a rich, industrialized, technologically advanced country that makes considerable use of industrial chemicals and nuclear power is a lot healthier than living in a poor, nonindustrialized nation that uses little modern technology and few industrial chemicals ... Surveys of risk perception show that knowledge of the known hazards of a technology does not determine whether or to what degree an individual thinks a given technology is safe or dangerous. This holds true not only for laymen, but also for experts in risk assessment.

All this is happening even as surveillance agencies are deluged with ever-increasing, unmanageable amounts of raw data. The ratio of hay to needles is growing exponentially. The larger the volume of raw data to be analyzed algorithmically, the larger the number of false positives the system generates. The sheer volume of false positives, and the ratio of false positives to genuine leads, is enough to paralyze government ... The Snowden scandal resulted in a spike in adoption of measures like PGP encryption and TOR browsing. Even as the NSA is hoovering up more and more hay, more and more needles quietly remove themselves from the haystack.

Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century—medical advances, the transportation revolution, ... dramatic improvements in housing, the computer revolution ... [M]uch of the improvement in our health has been due to pharmaceutical drugs that keep us from having to go to hospitals ... Yet the people who produce pharmaceutical drugs have been under heated political attack for years ... As for computers, no one made them more usable by more people around the world than Microsoft. And no one has been hit with more or bigger lawsuits as a result.

The prime movers that powered industrial machinery—typically steam engines or water wheels—were very large and expensive, so it made sense to concentrate ... machines ... in one building and power them all with belts running to a central drive shaft. The electric motor eliminated this ... Since you could build a prime mover into each machine, it became economical to site it near ... consumption and then scale ... to fit demand. The ideal production model for taking full advantage of this new technology's potential would be craft production in small shops using general-purpose electrical machinery to produce for the local market ...

[Garrett's] next novel is his epoch story of steel. It is The Cinder Buggy (1923) ... In the course of the story, the reader discovers how it is that technology has such a dramatic effect on society ... We also have here a realistic portrayal of the truth about innovation. It is not enough to come up with a good idea. That idea must be embodied in real production that takes place in a cost-reducing way, and then marketed in the service of society. The unity of technology, accounting, and marketing must all come together to make possible such things as technological revolutions.

What does the future hold? ... [T]here are encouraging signs. The main reason is technology. The web has challenged the state-university and state-media cartels as never before. You don't need a PhD to write for Wikipedia. What does the rise of the ... new means of sharing information ... imply ...? ... [A]s universities become more vocationally oriented, they will find it hard to compete with ... technology-intensive institutions such as DeVry ... and ... Phoenix, the fastest-growing US universities. Home schooling, the costs of which are greatly lowered by technology, is also on the rise.

Medical expenses are rising faster than the costs of any other service ... Many observers offer lucid explanations of the medical-spending explosion ... Other observers hold the endless stream of medical innovations responsible for rapidly rising health-care costs, such as new drugs and delicate tools for microsurgery. They lay most of the expense explosion at the feet of technology. But these writers never explain why new drugs and new tools should raise medical costs threefold and consume an ever larger share of national income. Technical innovations usually lower the costs of production.

Amoebas and birds and most other animals are "situation-action machines." They are endowed by natural selection with a more-or-less fixed repertoire of behaviors that tell an organism, "In situation A, do action B." Amoebas have fewer choices, while birds have more ... Birds ... live as their ancestors did, and their range of choices is determined by the stately processes of biological evolution. People, on the other hand, are no longer tethered to evolutionary change. Language and culture, especially modern science and technology, enable us to dramatically increase the range of our choices.

Borlaug: Biotechnology will help us do things that we couldn't do before, and do it in a more precise and safe way. [It] will allow us to cross genetic barriers that we were never able to cross with conventional genetics and plant breeding. In the past, conventional plant breeders were forced to bring along many other genes with the genes, say, for insect or disease resistance that we wanted to incorporate in a new crop variety. These extra genes often had negative effects ... Conventional plant breeding is crude in comparison to the methods that are being used with genetic engineering.

# Has the EFF succeeded? ...
... [I]f you look back, you can see some major victories:

...
• Many forms of expression have been rapidly enhanced by computer technology, without being throttled in the cradle by vested interests ... The Internet and the Web synergized with digital media creation and editing, providing a cheap and powerful distribution path. High bandwidth distribution of large files, including music, movies, and software, is now automated, and EFF helped to keep these networks free to operate despite powerful opposition.

KIRZNER: Imagine Victorian England, where everything is calm and still, with horse carriages and trains carrying people here and there. Along comes the entrepreneur who invents the automobile ... People lose jobs and physical resources are shifted to new lines of production ... [W]hen the entrepreneur discovers the automobile, he ... is identifying what was in fact waiting to be introduced. Technological knowledge was being misapplied. Resources were being wasted on trains, carriages, and bicycles, when, in fact, what was waiting to be put together was this new gadget called the automobile.

Wendy McElroy: [The Internet] is a huge force for freedom in much the same way as the printing press. It delivers ... information ..., enabling people to ... break down many of the age-old barriers ... [It] has made it more difficult for governments and other elite to keep secrets or tell lies. Science and technology contains the great hope for mankind. Of course, the Internet is also a powerful tool in the hands of the elite who have used it to bad ends and who want control ... to use it to worse ones ... Ultimately, however, I believe [it] empowers the individual more than it can harm us.