We live in an age exemplified by breakneck technological progress and the consequences of this fact define every facet of our societies. However, in this essay I will argue that our near-unrestrained embrace of technological progress is essentially a Faustian pact where we receive wealth and power without understanding the price of the bargain that we have made.

This essay will attempt to answer two questions:

1. Is it possible to predict the development and the consequences of a new, revolutionary technology?
2. Is it possible to stop the march of progress?

In order to answer both questions this essay will look at each step in the development of nuclear weapons; from when science fiction writer H. G. Wells first thought of the idea of the atomic bomb in 1913, until it finally became a reality 32 years later in the New Mexico desert.

This essay is an revision of a previous essay, I will be taking my old essays and video essays and rewriting them. This one this the first of many.

– An Age of progress –

I think that it is indisputable that technological progress has been the defining characteristic of our lives. But talking about technological change in the 21st century feels somewhat like being a fish giving a lecture about water. Breakneck transformation is all we have ever known.

Although radical change has been constant for the last 150 years, it has accelerated to such a pace that the lived experiences of two people born a decade apart are so different that they cannot directly relate to each other. One hundred years ago there were no names for each generation, but today the difference in experiences between each age cohort are so fundamental that we have the need to develop new words like “Zillenial“.

An average millennial opened their Facebook account in their university years after having an IRL childhood. Compare this to someone born in 2010, now turning 16, who has had a presence in social media since birth, when their picture was first uploaded by her parents. This is certainly a tangent, but it illustrates the speed at which technology changes our lives, in fact, we are so used to new technologies we take them as a given.

The fact is that every single new and improved technology can have an enormous impact on the way that we live and exist as a society. Perhaps this is not always clear, just like it is impossible to observe the force of a single wave crashing against the bow of a ship when in a storm. Just because we cannot isolate and measure the impact of a single technology does not negate its capacity to fundamentally change our lives.

The synthetization of a couple of organic molecules in a lab made it possible for the birth control pill to hit the market, this in turn led to the most fundamental change in the way that society looks at sex, love, and by extension, life itself. For without it the sexual revolution and much of the counterculture of the 60s could not have happened. A single, marginal advance in organic synthesis techniques changed the lives of billions of people.

It is fun to try to measure the impact of marginal technologies that we use day to day. Something as innocuous as the development of photography in the 1850s became the catalyst for the modern art movement given that realistic portraits and landscapes lost their purpose and their market to the cold and instantaneous action of the camera. Thus, the visual art world desperately searched for new styles of painting that no camera could ever replicate, thus leading to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and later the avant garde styles that persist until today.

– Can we Predict the Future? –

But, of course, being blind to the drastic consequences of each new technology creates a great amount of anxiety for the future and this anxiety leads to the question; Can we predict the future consequences of new technologies? Is it even possible to know where technology is taking us? Or are we completely blind, and thus powerless, to stop the glorious march of progress?

However, the problem is that we cannot use the scientific method to predict what will happen because we have no data to work with. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in 5000 years of written history can be used to understand the impact of something like AI or nuclear weapons, since they are completely revolutionary inventions.

So, without the scientific method at hand, the only thing that we have left is to try to speculate what the consequences of progress will be. An interesting case of this is the little-known fact that the concept of nuclear weapons was predicted not by a theoretical physicist or by a captain of industry, but by a science fiction writer. The science fiction writer; H.G. Wells.

I believe that observing the process of the development of nuclear weapons, from outlandish fantasy to annihilating reality, offers a perfect example of how strange our predicament is. In the age of science, our only vision into the consequences of our own scientific progress is not science itself, but instead it is the fantasy of a science fiction writer.

But even more than this, it offers a clear case of the impossible and Sisyphean task of stopping new technologies. Now I will outline the timeline of nuclear weapons form their first prediction to their development and finally to their use over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But as I go through each progressive step, I want you to do two things; You will imagine that we live in a timeline where the Cold War ended in an apocalyptic nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw pact with thousands of scorched cities and billions dead. Second, at each step you will ask yourself: Is it possible to stop this process, which starts as a fantasy and ends in a world enveloped by nuclear fire?

– From Science Fiction to Los Alamos –

Perhaps the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th marked the time in history where technological progress reached its maximum velocity. In these decades industrial technique resulted in breakneck technological progress. Which led to never before seen levels of industrialization and urbanization within a couple generations. It was against this backdrop that Wells and Jules Verne began writing science fiction. Wells first introduced the idea of nuclear weapons was in 1913, the title of the book was “The world set free”.

But how was did he manage to predict the most important weapon of the 20st century 32 years before the Manhattan Project unleashed the power of the sun onto the rocks of the New Mexico desert?

In 1896 radiation was discovered by Henri Becquerel and after him came the other pioneers of nuclear physics with big names such as Curie and Rutherford. However, Wells was inspired to write this novel after reading a paper by Frederick Soddy, which notes that uranium emits energy through ionizing radiation, and since this lasts for thousands of years, it meant that there were gigantic amounts of energy inside even a few grams of radioactive materials.

In the novel, nuclear science develops a way to quickly create radioactive material. This opens up the possibility of using this material as a weapon which leads to “The Atomic War”, an incredibly destructive confrontation between the industrial powers of the world that which takes place in 1956.

Wells imagined atom bombs being about the size of a hand-grenade and that they were dropped from airplanes onto battlefields and cities. However, the bombs released their nuclear energy by exploding continuously for 17 days, scorching and irradiating entire nations. To quote the book:

“Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands” (The World set Free, Chapter 2, §5

As a result of this terrible war, a shellshocked world decided that if it remained divided, it would inevitably destroy itself and that the only way to avoid collapse would be the creation of a world-state that made any further war impossible.

If we compare Wells’ predictions to the real world, they are absolutely visionary! They might be inaccurate on a couple technical aspects, but are spot on in their implications. He recognized that humans have a tendency to use energy sources, like gunpowder, for military uses and that radioactivity would be no different. But radioactivity was different because it gave humans the capability to destroy humanity itself.

Until the actual development of nuclear weapons, the most thought-out account of what the consequences of nuclear weapons would be was a silly science fiction book. However, this idea had very real consequences.

Ironically, Wells and his science fiction played an important role in the real-world development of nuclear weapons. Reading “The world set free“ gave the idea of using a chain fission reaction to make a nuclear weapon to Leó Szilárd, a future leading member of the Manhattan project, and the later father of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb.

He decided to patent the idea of chain reaction to keep it in obscurity, after successfully achieving the first successful fission with Enrico Fermi in 1942 he recalls the following: “Knowing what this would mean—and I knew it because I had read H. G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public.” During the Second World War it not only became public; achieving fission became a top priority for the Allied governments.

16th July 1945, the US detonated trinity, the first atom bomb with a yield of some 25,000,000 Kilograms of TNT. In quick succession, the world rushes to catch up.

• 1949, the Soviet Union detonates Pyérvaya mólniya (First Lightning) with a yield of ~22 kilotons.
• 1952, the United Kingdom detonates Hurricane, ~25 kilotons.
• 1960, the French Republic detonates Gerboise Bleue, ~70 kilotons.
• 1964, the Peoples Republic of China detonates Qiū Xiǎojiě (Miss Qiu)~22 kilotons.
• 1974, the Republic of India detonates Smiling Buddha, ~8 kilotons.

Since then, South Africa, Pakistan, North Korea and, (allegedly!) Israel have developed nuclear capabilities with many other countries developing their own programs. At the height of the cold war in the 80s there were an estimated 70,000 warheads ready to fly. There has been much speculation about how close the world came to nuclear war.

Famously at the height of the Cuban missile crisis Vasily Arkhipov stopped the captain of the submarine B-59 from firing their nuclear weapons. But let’s imagine that the Cuban Missile Crisis ends in a nuclear war, then we would have a timeline that would begin in 1896 with the discovery of radiation and would end in 1962 with a world consumed by nuclear fire.

Now the key question to ask is; at what point would it be possible to stop this process? When H.G. Wells was writing, his ideas about nuclear weapons were not taken seriously, in the same way that the Terminator was not taken as a serious warning against AI.

When nuclear weapons became a distinct possibility, a nuclear arms race started to be the first nation to have nuclear weapons because this would mean an incredible advantage over its rivals. Once the major Powers have nuclear stockpiles, the use of nuclear weapons is just a matter of luck and time.

Thus, we can generalize that there are five stages to the understanding of any future technology:

1. We are completely ignorant of the technology, the world before the discovery of radiation.
2. We are when we begin to understand the technology, but we can begin to speculate about the future possibilities, H.G. Wells writes a science fiction book about nuclear weapons.
3. The technology develops until it becomes a possibility, the atom is first split in Germany and Manhattan Project begins.
4. The technology becomes a reality, but its consequences are unknown, first detonation in the New Mexico desert.
5. We understand the implications of the technology from hindsight and can make an ethical judgment about it, the Cold War ends without a nuclear Exchange.

This leaves us with the conclusion that there was no way to prevent the development of nuclear weapons. And this has a very simple explanation; if a technology does not yet exist, it is impossible to see the advantages and the dangers of this technology. Only after the existence and widespread use of this technology is it possible to see the consequences of its use, but by that point it is too late to stop it all.

And by no means is this only the case with nuclear weapons or AI, let’s take the example of heroin, it was developed in 1897 as a painkiller and was sold as a non-addictive substitute of morphine.

I think that in hindsight, we can say that whatever its medical benefits, the world would be better off if never had existed. However, it is impossible to go back, we cannot eliminate the idea of heroin even with its total and criminalization. Once something is invented, it is impossible to de-invent it; technology only ever seems to march forward and never to step back.

– Our Faustian Pact –

However, I want to quickly return to the list of the five stages of technology, because something very interesting happens between the second and the third steps. The first two are made up purely of speculation and scientific research, but the third fundamentally changes character because it is the precise moment where the technology begins to promise its inventors power.

This only becomes stronger with each successive step, which increases the importance of the technology, be it AI, Birth Control, or nuclear weapons. Each one of these inventions is irresistible at an individual level, given that they promise wealth, prestige and the immortalization of one’s name. At the corporate level, state-of-the-art technology promises market dominance and expansion, and at a national level it represents economic prosperity, and of course, military power.

The simple fact that all technophobes do their best to ignore is that one cannot opt out of technology in the 21st century without suffering from the drastic consequences. One can point out groups like the Amish in a bid to prove that you can actually manage to live in the modern world without technology, but one forgets that they are not by any means in control of their own destiny.

The Amish live their traditional lives in peace only because they live under the shadow of the most powerful country in the world. The same is true of most other technophobic cultures of the world, they can only afford to reject technology because they are in a remote part of the world with little contact with the outside world (the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island and the tribes of the deep Amazon) or because there is a technologically advanced military power giving them protection.

The reality is that technology equals power and power is always going to be cool. No one will willingly give up technology when they realize that it means powerlessness, it means getting around and not being able to compete with the rest of the world. No matter what arguments you can make pointing out the woes of breakneck technological change, but no one wants to find themselves in the position of Tibet.

Therefore, I believe that the project of technological deceleration is dead on arrival. The rejection of technology might promise a better way to live and a more grounded and lasting happiness, but it will never be as sexy as a MiG 31 doing Mach 2.8. This means that no one with actual power (i.e. not living in a cabin in Montana) will never choose to reject the power that technology promises. We, for all intents and purposes, are driving at full speed and we cannot get off.

This means that for the foreseeable future every single society around the world will embrace new technology for economic, social, and military purposes. Therefore, technologies like AI will inevitably find their way into any and all functions where they can increase efficiency; from cheaper automated costumer service to improving the targeting accuracy of suicide FPV drones. Whenever one party, in corporate or military terms, embraces a technology that improves their efficiency, their competition are also forced to embrace the same technology or risk being left behind.

But beyond economic and military issues, the magnetic embrace of every new technology directly affects our mundane everyday lives. For example, most of my age cohort (Early Zoomers) will tell you in no uncertain terms that social media is a drain on their lives and that they will not permit their children the same unlimited access that we had in our formative years.

But this leads to a very obvious question: Since we have the studies that show the damage of social media, and most of their users openly admit that these applications are bad for them, why do we not uninstall the damn application and socialize the good old face-to-face way?

Because the simple fact is that social media triggers our reward mechanisms more effectively than actually socializing. Tinder can give us easy dopamine by swiping 34 profiles in 43 seconds, more than what one would get by striking up a conversation at the coffee line with the girl in front of you. Technological progress has made it possible to trick our social reward systems, which is not unlike what we do with high-fructose corn syrup in our diets. Of course, both are immensely profitable, and this is not going to change anytime soon.

Now, there are many people (we could call them technophiles) who will celebrate that we cannot neither stop nor get off the train, but that is because they are insufferable optimists or tech bros with a AI start up (vested interests). They believe that technology will help us be more efficient and capable, thus giving us the tools to solve the problems that we are currently facing as a civilization.

But I think that what we have not found a ticket to Candyland, and instead we have struck an age-defining Faustian bargain. The idea of a Faustian bargain of course comes from Goethe’s play Faust, where the protagonist trades his soul to the devil Mephistopheles. This expression is often defined as a deal where a person trades either his principles (or something of great value) for worldly power and pleasure (or something of only superficial value).

But for this essay I want to use another definition of a “Faustian Pact“, which I believe is closer to the essence of a deal with the devil. Faust does not make the wager with Mephistopheles because he is stupid; he does it because he does not (yet) understand the price that he is paying for the power that he acquires.

A Faustian Pact, by necessity, requires the ignorance of the dear price that is going to be paid in exchange for the obvious material benefits of the wager. And now, my dear reader, do we know what price we are going to pay for our reckless pursuit of ever greater efficiency? Do we know the price that our children will pay after us?

Perhaps the people over at e/acc are correct and there will not be a cost at all, but we cannot know if this is the case beforehand and, in my estimation, this should be enough to make us consider new technological developments with at least a little more caution. But yet again, no matter how much caution we try to exert, we cannot abstain from embracing technological progress.

Our technological civilization will continue marching forward and we will experience the consequences firsthand. However, what makes this state of affairs tragic is that we have willingly chosen this as a society. We really could limit and prohibit many technologies, we could even go full Amish, but we consciously have decided that the pursuit of wealth and power is worth the consequences, whatever they might be.

In time, our societies will begin to accustom themselves to each new technology. Parents will know how to deal with the innovations that they experienced firsthand, and society will develop rules, guidelines, and regulations that will reduce the negative consequences of said technology. However, this is a process that is both gradual and reactive; it can only do damage control after society has been radically changed and after the first generation has served their term as guinea pigs.

– This is good, actually –

So, even if I tend towards positions that are anti-technological, I am actually quite optimistic when it comes to the future of our technological society. I believe that new disruptive technologies will pose serious challenges to all societies and that they will have to adapt to these changes or be subsumed. I think that this is a positive development because it exerts more pressure on each society to become more resilient and to not assume that they have it all figured out.

As a general principle, I believe that all that is good comes from hardship, that the cultures that develop excellence are often the ones that develop under great pressure. The harsh northern winters are greatly responsible for the resilient, highly functional societies of northern Europe, while the warm Mediterranean sun does not seem to have the same effect. By the same logic, I believe that the challenges of technology will force all societies to face the problems of modernity and thus become more resilient or else.

In fact, today I believe that many weak and inflexible cultures are having a very hard time adapting to modernity, for example, the everything-is-a-sin Catholicism that was the dominant in the place where I grew up is cracking under the weight of the problems of the 21st century. For this same reason young Iranians are not embracing the rigid theocratic Islam of the previous generation (despite the lead flying their way).

The cultures that survive the 21st century will be the ones that are strong and wise enough to overcome the new challenges that technology brings. This will result in some cultures thriving despite the new challenges, and others failing to cope with them and breaking as a result.

And although I believe that the result will be positive, that does not make our day to day lives as guinea pigs any easier. However, it is precisely up to us to help our societies adapt to the consequences of our Faustian pact with technology…