What is Technoevolution?

February 6, 2019 – The first time I encountered the term “technoevolution” was in my reading of Stanislaw Lem’s, “Summa Technologiae,” a book first published in 1964 by the Polish futurist and science fiction writer. The version I read was an English translation issued in 2013. I had heard about Lem in passing when reading other futurist writers. They had described Lem’s writing as dense but informative. So I bit the bullet and ordered the book from my local library.

Lem poses a dilemma for our species from the moment you start reading his tome. He talks about the moral challenges of technoevolution, “the regulation of Nature and the regulation of Humanity.” He points to our premature development of atomic energy, our foray into space in the 1960s, our medical progress that reduced mortality leading to a sudden increase in global population. For Lem, “the technologies that facilitate living are becoming a tool for life’s impoverishment.” And he is not just talking about the security of food and water because of our population explosion, but also because technoevolution has produced “cultural junk.” Was he anticipating Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, or iPhones and Android devices, the essence of our current fascination with daily use of technology? It is Lem’s conclusion that humanity is showing its immaturity in dealing with our current level and pace of technoevolution, and that we are more and more, prisoners of what we have created.

Even worse, our technoevolution has put the natural world at risk favouring technology over living things. Technoevolution is faster paced than natural evolution making it nearly impossible for life on the planet to keep up. Part of our technoevolution is the information explosion. We are inundated by data and we double the amount of it several times each decade. Our cultures can’t keep up. We create online social networks that techno evolve to become negative rather than positive forces in our lives, that rather than unite us, divide us. We have become too much for our planet and we have messiahs among us who want us to colonize Mars to ensure that we as a species can survive the techno-evolutionary pace we are on.

Is this the fate of all intelligent species in the Universe? That we evolve a technological civilization that becomes a runaway train and inevitably wrecks itself taking life on the Earth along with it? Is that why our efforts to find other intelligent life in the Universe yielding nothing because civilizations that evolve technology end up destroying themselves?

The current state of our technoevolution has created anthropogenic climate change, the most significant crisis our species and the planet has ever faced. And yet in the President of the United States, State of the Union address last evening, nary a word on the subject.

So should we conclude that this human experiment in technology has been a bad thing? That’s a hard conclusion to make since our species has evolved because we adopted technology from very early on. Starting with the earliest stone tools handled by our ancestors, or moving on to the Neolithic Revolution that spawned our modern civilizations, we are today largely in lockstep with technoevolution, and less and less a product of natural evolution.

Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, believes our destiny is to become one with the machines of our creation in what he calls “The Singularity.” In his view, it is technoevolution that will save us and life on Earth. I wonder if similar prognosticators from civilizations elsewhere in the Universe, also spoke of technoevolution as their saviours? It’s a pity we can’t talk to them. Or maybe the fact that we can’t find them in our search, a telling sign of technoevolution’s failure?