Technology to the rescue
Apparently deciding to take a break from electronics for the month, IEEE Spectrum takes a look at agricultural technology for its June 2013 issue. Spectrum is sufficiently impressed with what it sees to predict the coming of an age of plenty with food for all, whatever food crises and starvation might be feared by less optimistic forecasters.
Keith Fuglie (pp. 20-26) leads the optimism with an article explaining his supreme confidence that agricultural technology will provide nutrition for everyone into the foreseeable future. Whether or not we're going to starve is a topic for a different blog, but I do want to comment on the technology-bound world-view apparent in Fuglie's article and many of the others that follow it.
From the standpoint of technological optimism taken by Spectrum's contributors, all problems can, must and will be solved by technology. While a technology magazine like Spectrum could be expected to focus on the technological aspects of its subject matter, technology-bound articles like Fuglie's do not even appear to imagine that solutions might also come from policy, design, economics, culture and other areas. It's technology or bust (but of course there will be no bust because technology is presumed capable of solving any problem).
One can imagine an engineer who, upon seeing a piece of litter beside the road, sees an opportunity to develop an army of rubbish-collecting robots. A city taking up this army could spend millions of dollars to free its citizens from the trivial hassle of putting their litter in a bin. Pro-robot councillors, I suppose, might argue that litterbugs will drop litter regardless of how cheap and easy the bin seems to tidier citizens, and the robots will completely solve the problem where civic virtue might only partially solve it. But that tells a pretty sad story of the cost of laziness and irresponsibility: one might say that the technology has improved, but the citizens haven't.
