THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES

"Today technocrats retain enormous power, but they lack intellectual or cultural vigor. "Got a problem, get a program" is still a deeply ingrained habit, but enthusiasm for technocratic schemes died in a gas line sometime during the Carter administration. From urban renewal in the 1950s to the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, technocracy has not made good on its promises. In many cases, it has made things worse. Rather than the smooth-running engine promised by turn-of-the-century progressives, technocratic governance has been a Rube Goldberg device at best and, more often, a misfitting hodgepodge that grinds gears, shoots out sparks, and periodically breaks down entirely."

– Page 20

"Instead of rushing to address every new development with a grand plan or an ad hoc solution, dynamists have the patience to let trial and error—and well-established, well-understood rules—work. 'It's easier to learn from history than it is to learn from the future,' writes [Mike] Godwin, counseling legal forbearance in the face of new communications technologies. Rather than try to address worst-case scenarios with technocratic schemes that will create legacies of their own, he urges an evolutionary, common-law approach. 'Almost always,' he says, 'the time-tested laws and legal principles we already have in place are more than adequate to address the new medium.'

– Page 48

"The dynamist concept of trial-and-error evolution is very different from the concept of progress popular earlier in this century—the goal-directed, progressive ideal for which [David] Gelernter is nostalgic. We make progress not toward a particular, certain and uniform destination but toward many different, personally determined, and incremental goals. In a global sense, "progress" is the product of those parallel individual searches: the extension of knowledge and the gradual improvement of people's lives—an increase in comfort, in life options, in the opportunity for 'diversified, worthwhile experience.' Progress is neither random Darwinian evolution nor teleological inevitability."

– Page 57

"We are limited, in a very real sense, only by our imagination and the time we have in which to exercise it. That time includes not simply our own life spans but the creative legacies of past generations: the experiments, inventions, and knowledge on which we can build."

– Page 64

"Predictions go wrong because there are many possible sources of error: environmental shocks, bad or incomplete models, bad or incomplete data, sensitivity to initial conditions, the ever-branching results of action and reaction. Writing of technology, the physicist Freeman Dyson notes that its inherent unpredictability makes centralized decision making hazardous:"

"'Whenever things seem to be moving smoothly along a predictable path, some unexpected twist changes the rules of the game and makes the old predictions irrelevant . . . A nineteenth-century development program aimed at the mechanical reproduction of music might have produced a superbly engineered music box or Pianola, but it would never have imagined a transistor radio or subsidized the work of Maxwell on the physics of the electromagnetic field which made the transistor radio possible . . . Yet human legislators act as if the future were predictable. They legislate solutions to technological problems, and they make choices between technological alternatives before the evidence upon which a rational choice might be made is available.'" 1

– Pages 87-88

"Knowledge is at the heart of a dynamic civilization—but so is surprise. A dynamic civilization maximizes the production and use of knowledge by accepting widespread ignorance. At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out. To celebrate the pursuit of knowledge, we must confess our ignorance; both that celebration and that confession are central to dynamic culture. Dynamism gives individuals both the freedom to learn and the incentives to share what they discover. It not only permits but encourages decentralized experiments and competitive trial and error—the infinite series by which new knowledge is created. And, just as important, a dynamic civilization allows its members to gain from the things they themselves do not know but other people do. Its systems and institutions evolve to let people develop, extend, and act on their particular knowledge without asking permission of a higher, but less informed, authority. A dynamic civilization appreciates, approves and nurtures specialized, dispersed, and often unarticulated knowledge."

"Not surprisingly, how we think about knowledge—like how we think about progress—is one of the questions over which dynamists and stasists clash. These competing visions simply do not imagine knowledge in the same way. To dynamists, knowledge is like an ancient, spreading elm tree in full leaf: a broad trunk of shared experience and general facts, splitting into finer and finer limbs, branches, twigs, and leaves. The surface area is enormous, the twigs and leaves often distant from each other. Knowledge is dispersed, shared through a complex system of connections. We benefit from much that we do not ourselves know; the tree of knowledge is too vast. For stasists, by contrast, the tree is a royal palm: one long, spindly trunk topped by a few fronds—a simple, limited structure."

– Pages 88-89

"The late metallurgist and historian of science Cyril Stanley Smith argued that "

"'historically the first discovery of useful materials, machines, or processes has almost always been in the decorative arts, and was not done for a perceived practical purpose. Necessity is not the mother of invention—only of improvement. A man desperately in search of a weapon or food is in no mood for discovery; he can only exploit what is already known to exist. Discovery requires aesthetically-motivated curiosity, not logic, for new things can acquire validity only by interaction in an environment that has yet to be. Their origin is unpredictable.' " 2

– Pages 182-3