If A New Technology Seems “Unnatural” or “Dystopian,” Consider What It’s Replacing

“Natural/unnatural” and “good/bad” are orthogonal axes

A Paper by Sam Matey Coste

From personal conversations to news articles to regulatory standards to cultural depictions of technology, this writer has found that the world would be much better served if more people took the time to subject their thinking to a simple test: if a new technology seems dystopian, consider what it’s replacing. Intertwined with this, I’d like to posit another rule of thumb: if a primary argument against something new is that it’s “unnatural,” that’s a good sign that it’s probably not actually bad.

Very often, media coverage and intuitive personal responses to new technologies boil down to “it’s unnatural/new/strange, therefore it’s bad.” From solar farms to self-driving cars to next-generation vaccines, we regularly hear “unnatural” (or similar forms like “industrial”) used as an attack against new ideas and tools, as if that accusation alone formed a meaningful argument. This causes a lot of problems and unnecessarily slows down a wide range of positive change.

First, let’s try to define our terms for the purpose of this article.

For “good” and “bad,” while endlessly debatable on the margins, I’m going with the effective global consensus definition as neatly expressed by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now.

“Most people agree that life is better than death.

Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony.”— Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker

As for “natural,” that’s arguably a bit more complicated. There’s a school of thought that holds that since humans are animals that evolved on Earth, everything we create is “natural” because it’s an extended phenotype of a species, like a beaver dam or a termite mound. This is arguably true in a philosophical sense, but it’s a bit word-gamey; that’s just not what most people mean when they talk about something being “natural.”

So, let’s leave aside the “skyscraper = termite mound” argument and explore the commonly understood “human technology is unnatural” terminology. I’m pretty sure most people talking about “unnatural” technology don’t want to go back to dowsing for ants with sticks like a chimpanzee group. You do sometimes see people making spirited “degrowth”-style arguments about the superiority of Paleolithic-level hunter-gathering or medieval-level subsistence farming as a lifestyle1, but these tend to founder pretty hard when confronted with the absence of absolutely critical standard of living improvements like “indoor plumbing” or “smallpox vaccines” or “C-sections to prevent death by childbirth.”

So, let’s be maximally charitable to the “technology is unnatural” argument and say that some kind of technological civilization is okay, but newer or more recent technologies are particularly “unnatural.” Well, one of the first things that I notice is that the goalposts seem to keep shifting on exactly what time horizon saw the crossover from “natural human technology” to “unnatural human technology.” In communication technology, for example, the Internet was once widely considered unnatural2, and TV before that, and cheaply printed novels before that. This writer suspects that most people’s actual working intuitive standard of naturalness is basically that “human technology that changes things from the way they were when I was a child is unnatural.” This XKCD comic and these Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett quotes explore relevant examples.

One could add a panel in 320 BC detailing how Socrates detested writing for destroying the memory…

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new, exciting, and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

– Douglas Adams.

‘Not natural, in my view…Not in favor of unnatural things. Do you mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?

– Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant.

In particular, this is a common “failure mode” this writer sees in responses to discussion of new technologies that can solve big problems, but in an “unnatural” way, from the comparatively well-accepted but still under-attack genetically modified crops, solar power, and mRNA vaccines to hotly-debated issues like cell-cultivated meat and self-driving cars to the “still pretty far out” stuff like geoengineering or even artificial wombs. All of these technologies can sound scary and dystopian to some people, but I believe that the evidence is overwhelming that all of these have at least the potential to be a substantial improvement than the status quo, and we should therefore support and accelerate the process of researching, developing, testing, refining, optimizing, and eventually deploying them.

Here’s what this kind of “anti-unnatural bias” can look like in practice. When this writer brings up any of the many awesome new meat replacement technologies—even something as innocuous as the plant-based Beyond Burger, let alone the new frontier of cell-cultivated meat(—)a lot of people have an immediate negative reaction, expressing fear, disgust, or apprehension at such an “unnatural” future. This is often from the very same people who care a lot about animals, who are vegetarian or vegan for ethical reasons, and/or have strong opinions about enforcing animal welfare in farms.

That is, to put it gently, an extremely incoherent position to hold. Cultivated meat isn’t a dystopian future, factory-farmed meat is a dystopian present!

The world is full of such examples of “ignoring the dystopian present.”

In the present, right now, over 8.9 billion chickens, 66 million cows and 71 million pigs are factory-farmed in  the United States alone.

1.35 million humans per year, or almost 3,700 per day, are killed in collisions and crashes on Earth’s roadways, currently dominated by human-driven cars.

As of 2019, about 900,000 human babies per year died due to being born preterm.

It seems to this writer that given these conditions as the status quo, we should default to being in favor of accelerating the development and deployment of cell-cultivated meat, self-driving cars, and artificial wombs! And the same holds for lots and lots of other cases, including practically all of the medical research and clean energy fields given vast death tolls from disease and air pollution.

Self-driving cars (which are proving to be safer) aren’t a dystopian future, mass deaths from car crashes are a (relatively) dystopian present.

Spreading solar farms sheltering biodiversity aren’t a dystopian future, deaths from air pollution and escalating global warming is a dystopian present.

Injecting weird-sounding mRNA vaccines isn’t a dystopian future, dying of preventable diseases is a dystopian present.

We have many, many opportunities to build a much better world, and speeding up that process makes a huge difference for vast numbers of lives! And yet many people in developed countries these days, if not most, seem to have an attitude ranging from ambivalence to negativity towards transformative new technologies. Even world-improving technologies like renewable energy and vaccines that have clearly proven their manifest value over and over again still face disturbingly widespread bands of die-hard opponents. The most “anti-technology” elements of the political “left” and “right” have formed an unholy alliance that now runs the United States government and is actively attacking science, research, and innovation across the board.

Over and over again, new technologies, conditions, and systems are held to a disproportionately high standard, while existing technologies, conditions, and systems, even when they kill thousands or torture millions every year, are accepted as “that’s just the way it is.” We find it much easier to fear hypothetical dystopian futures than to acknowledge real-life dystopian presents. There are probably a lot of understandable psychological reasons for this; we’d probably go insane if we tried to truly comprehend all the suffering in the world. You can’t live a life like that.

​From Our World in Data.

But humanity has demonstrated an extraordinary potential to make the world a much, much better place, particularly since the dawn of our emerging Earth-born technological civilization. The “dystopian present” is often a substantial improvement on an even worse past and can become better still in the future. Quite often, major positive changes are caused by “unnatural” new systems and technologies, however you define that. That intersection of “good” and “unnatural” is one of the things I try to write about in my newsletter, from wildlife thriving in human-dominated urban landscapes to advanced clean energy bringing abundant power while benefiting biodiversity to incredible new medical developments improving the lives of millions.

Of course, new things sometimes cause brand-new problems, from leaded gasoline poisoning to thalidomide babies to rapid-onset human-caused climate change (burning fossil fuels was new once, too). It may seem like a “cheat” to praise “unnatural” new technologies like renewable energy and cell-cultivated meat for helping solve the problems of the fossil fuel industry and factory farming. Fossil fuels and factory farming were themselves once widely considered “unnatural” new technologies fighting to help solve the problems of dire energy poverty and food poverty being the base state of most of humanity. But those were really big problems, and the new technologies did, in fact, mostly solve them, at least compared to preindustrial norms. They then created new problems, which I think new technologies are on track to solve in their turn.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that “good/bad” and “natural/unnatural” are differentthings, and new, scary seeming “unnatural” things often turn out to be very good for humanity. That’s very different from saying that anything new or unnatural is by definition good. It’s just a call to judge things more on the “good/bad” axis and less on the “natural/unnatural” axis, because “natural/unnatural” is a pretty terrible proxy for “good/bad!”

 

A quick visual aid I whipped up to help illustrate what I’m talking about. Note that I’m only intending to use this as a four-quadrant qualitative categorization, not a quantitative differentiation within quadrants.

“Natural/unnatural” and “good/bad” are entirely different axes of meaning, orthogonal to each other, and don’t seem to correlate that well. This writer is extremely confident in that statement, and although it’s inherently subjective, it appears to be backed up by reasonably applicable data.

If your (or someone else’s) argument against a new technology is “But it’s unnatural!” the logical response is “So what? So are flush toilets, light bulbs, and dentistry. Give me a reasonit’s bad.” A better question to ask would be, “Who, if anyone, does this new thing kill, or hurt, or impoverish? And, critically, does it do that more or less than what we have now? Is this an improvement over what we have now, or not?”

By strongly advocating the disentanglement of the “good/bad” and “natural/unnatural” axes, I’m not at all trying to dismiss out of hand the classic “Burkean conservative” or “Chesterton’s fence” genre of arguments. To wildly over-summarize, those arguments boil down to “don’t break down old things (institutions, policies, social norms, etc) just because you don’t understand their use and/or they seem bad, consider what value they might be bringing that you’re unaware of.” In fact, I’m trying to provide a complement to those argument, arguably an attempt to deploy “cautiousness” or the “small-c conservative” mindset from the perspective of the future: I’m trying to say “don’t break down new things just because you don’t understand their use and/or they seem bad, consider what value they might be bringing that you’re unaware of!”

We can solve lots of objectively bad environmental, social, and public health problems by using “unnatural” technologies and processes (solar panels! vaccines!) and it’s important to remember that. We can also solve lots of objectively bad problems using “natural” technologies and processes (planting trees for shade! marshes preventing erosion!), and it’s important to remember that as well.

So please, whenever applicable in your life, as a voter, consumer, patient, caregiver, worker, and citizen, try to judge new technologies, ideas, and processes by really thinking through whether their effects will be on net good or bad, whatever those values mean to you. Whether it’s “natural” or “unnatural,” may be interesting, but it’s not relevant.