Don’t Fear the Future

Anti-growth, techno-pessimist, long-termist.

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The future has a lot of enemies these days, and most of them seem to agree that progress is behind us while nothing but disaster lies ahead. Today, AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis is back on the Remnant to challenge that idea. His new book, The Conservative Futurist, makes the case for a risk-taking, future-oriented American society driven by technological change. But what would such a society look like in practice? How could it come into being? And what makes futurism and conservatism compatible?

Show Notes:

– Jim’s page at AEI

– Jim’s book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

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  1. Kara

    I can get behind Penthokoukis's general policy recommendation to support R&D, but I was disappointed that he refused to acknowledge that there could be any downside to innovation. The external impacts on the environment of chemicals from DDT to PFAs are well documented, and make me very skeptical of claims of the boundless potential of innovation. Jonah often criticizes what he calls the "unity of goodness" mentality the left has for government policy. That is the mistaken assumption that any policy that does good in some circumstances does good in every circumstance. I think that Penthokukis makes a mistaken assumption about the "unity of goodness" of technology. I am generally a technoskeptic, but I'm willing to a live in a country that supports innovation if my right to opt out is recognized. I also want far more primary ecological research to be supported and conducted so that we can better understand the impact of microplastics on the oceans or the impact of drones (much less flying cars!) on bird behavior.

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  2. Philip.R.M.Hunt

    One big screw up we made with nuclear power was that in the 1950s we rushed into commercial deployment too soon. We should have done some more R&D before deployment. Almost all of the 20th century commercial US nuclear power plants were scaled up versions of the pressurized water reactor developed to power Navy submarines and surface ships. The main advantages of PWRs are that they have high power density and are very responsive, neither of which are needed in commercial plants. The disadvantage of PWRs is that safety is provided by expensive additional equipment and by highly trained and disciplined crews (also expensive). Reactor designs that were more inherently safe were later developed but the industry was already committed to PWRs.

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  3. Philip.R.M.Hunt

    I have worked in telecom and in nuclear. Telecom does not need much regulation because it is not much of a risk to human health and environment. Nuclear is the opposite, so it needs to be heavily regulated to protect people and the environment. The lazy fairy cares about profits and does not care at all about safety. So, if the cheapest way to do a thing also happens to be pretty safe, then everyone is happy. Unfortunately, in nuclear power, a lot of the cost is in providing safety. If you just leave it to the lazy fairy to take care of safety, companies will just build Chernobyl style plants because they are the cheapest type to build.

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  4. Philip.R.M.Hunt

    As a patent attorney, I am disappointed that no consideration was given in the podcast for the role that intellectual property plays in the innovation ecosystem. It is a government intervention, but one that works well to enhance market incentives. As Lincoln (the only president to be awarded a patent) said "patents add the fuel of interest to the fire of genius."

    It sounds like the main theme of Jim's book is that over regulation stifles technological innovation. I don't think all regulation has this effect, just some. Price regulation is the worst. Regulated monopolies like electric utilities are not very interested in innovation. Their prices and profits are managed by public utility commissions. There is no upside for owners to take a risk on a new technology if there is no possibility that they will enjoy a profit boost. On the other hand, safety and environmental regulations can spur innovations. I have seen a lot of patents for inventive new ways to improve safety that were in response to new regulations.

    Government funded research is the most important driver of innovation. I kept waiting in the podcast for that to be mentioned and it finally did but I thought it got short shrift. Businesses are reluctant to invest in research in which the pay-off is more than a few years off. I know this from advising inventors starting up companies to make and sell their invention. The federal government is the main provider of funds for research that eventually gets the science close enough to for applications to be within striking distance for entrepreneurs to take over.

    One big reason why innovation for things like nuclear slowed down in the 1990s was the post-cold war peace dividend. Congress cut the budget for "big physics" and shifted most of it to medical research. I was a grad student in nuclear fusion research in the early 90s when this happened. Our lab had a hard time getting grants, so I and a lot of others dropped out. I went to work in a telecom company lab alongside a former tenure track professor (atomic force microscopy) who quit his professorship because he could not get grants.

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    Ben Connelly

    “Who is actually concerned about the poor?”

    Great line. I am in wholehearted agreement with Jim on capitalism.

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    Dan

    I take Jim's point about mandates and electric vehicles, as well as Jonah's point about the information problem. I think evidence for how markets can fail is externalities, and in this instance particularly carbon. It's seems like there's overwhelming consensus among economists that a carbon tax to address the carbon externalities of IC engines would be effective in addressing the problem of too much carbon in the atmosphere without mandating any particular solution.

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      George.Skinner

      A carbon tax is the market-friendly approach. It ends up running into 2 big problems with the right wing: first, any new tax is essentially taboo. Reagan-era policy aimed at excessive marginal rates has degraded into “Tax bad! Must smash!!” Second, there’s still a sizeable faction on the right that doesn’t accept the need to address climate change (or even climate change) at all. Still, I still hope that we’ll eventually see people realize that if they don’t want to get steamrolled by progressive policies towards climate change, they need to offer an alternative.

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    Njh2005

    I think the first thing Jim should say if he travels back in time 60 years and gets a meeting with the President is, “Don’t go to Dallas, Mr. President.”

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  8. Echack

    A conservative choosing Clarke and Asimov as exemplars of sf futures is a bit off the mark. Asimov was very, very much a liberal that believed in the technocrats planning and running society. That's the whole point of the "robots" series and the Foundation books. In the Lije Bailey mysteries everyone lives in mile high skyscrapers, everything is rationed according to your job rank, and they eat yeast instead of bugs. Clarke is not quite as explicitly a technocrat, but there is a strain of it in his work.

    The author to cite is Robert Heinlein. Elon Musk is a modern day version of D.D. Harriman from Heinlein's "future history", a man that privately financed the first trip to the moon. Heinlein moved from being a socialist before WW2 to a libertarian-leaning classical liberal by the early 50s. His later works are full of private actors influencing the future in positive ways.

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      Ben Connelly

      I totally agree on Asimov and Clarke! I loved the Foundation and Robot novels, but absolutely hated the collectivist ending of Foundation and Earth. I wrote a long essay one time about Asimov’s soft totalitarianism (implicit in each of the Robot, Empire, and Foundation novels).

      Jack Butler makes a good case for Dune as a conservative sci-fi movie. I love Hyperion even though it was pretty leftist. Kim Stanley Robinson is a woke communist and I enjoyed 2312 even as I’d rather die than live in that future.

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      Probably Wrong

      Heinlein is wild. One minute you’re reading “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” where a penal colony lunar base recapitulates the American Revolution but with more libertarian sensibilities and an AI George Washington, nodding cheerfully along, and then suddenly its all “Starship Troopers” tirades about voting rights and “Stranger in a Strange Land” disquisitions on how human sexuality is too prudish and we should all form sex cults to find enlightenment.

      Hmm, actually, you mentioned Elon Musk. Maybe he’s a fan of Robert’s.

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      1. Echack

        There was a pretty clear dividing line between Heinlein before "Starship Troopers" and after. With the changing mores in US society and his financial security, he could let loose with a lot of his ideas on sexuality and more, allowing him to finish "Stranger in a Strange Land". He had realized that he couldn't get SiaSL published in the 50s when he started writing it and put it aside. It's not clear how much of the tirades in SST are his beliefs or his extrapolating from the world he had built there. I think the views on sexuality in SiaSL are close to his own, based on what we know of his personal life.

        His pre-SST writing was more straightforward science fiction. Not as talky, for one. He wrote a lot of novels from the late 40s for what now is called the 'young adult' market - back then they sold lots of hardback of his work to libraries, so he had to write to meet the sensibilities of that market and his editor at Scribner's. His other fiction was sold to a variety of markets - the pulp sf magazines, Boy's Life (the Boy Scouts magazine), and major periodicals like Saturday Evening Post. All had pretty strict taboos on sex and explicit violence.

        I bet if someone asked Musk if he had read "The Man Who Sold the Moon", he'd say yes.

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          Ben Connelly

          I didn’t like Stranger in a Strange Land, but have to admit I loved Starship Troopers

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  9. Emma

    I just returned from Dubai. I was jealous of their look to the future. Thry have ideas. Sadly, when I got back to the states, I returned to the same nonsense. A country that can't pass a budget more than 45 days out and no policy solutions for anything.

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    1. Iblamethedrugs

      There's no way Dubai can be recreated on a continental model. It's like Disneyland, Mackinac Island, or the old Hong Kong.

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      1. Emma

        I was referring to their focus on technology, Health Care, and education.

        Instead of our country focused on banning books, "wokeness" and protecting an outdated medical and education system instead of reforming it.

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        1. Iblamethedrugs

          Fair enough. But remember, Dubai is a wealthy borrower culture. All their tech, modern healthcare, etc. comes from elsewhere. They create nothing on their own. They're a luxury city with no unique culture, no literature, no music, no contributions to intellectual life for the world at large. Even their architecture is internationalist.

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  10. WBM

    There was one thing I wanted to push back against. That is the issue of stalling progress as it relates to supersonic jets, and the space program. I don't think our current lack of supersonic commercial planes has much to do with the sonic booms. Also I do not blame the government for cutting back after the Apollo program. The big issues with both those things are the laws of physics.

    In the case of supersonic transport the problem is that the planes require so much fuel. For the price of a Concorde ticket why not buy a business class ticket with a lie flat seat. You can probably find a schedule that is more convenient even if the flight is longer. With the space program, what could they have done after landing on the moon. Mars is orders of magnitude harder than the moon. The technology just wasn't there to do more than they were doing. Technological progress isn't a straight line proposition.

    With that said I agree with the general direction of the discussion. I really wish we would have created an environment that would have allowed us make much greater progress with nuclear energy.

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    1. Echack

      NASA went into a downturn because there was no political will to continue to spend 1.5-2% of the federal budget on space exploration. Given the rising expenditures on the Vietnam war and the Great Society programs, it was inevitable that there would be a cutback.

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