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Professor of Circuits and Systems &o/e Polytechnique F&d&ale de Lausanne,

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acques Neirynck questions whether “technical progress” is progress at all. The argument depends on a law of physics which says that the entropy of a closed system is continually increasing - in the case of the physical world that technology is depleting global resources and creating disorder. We are inevitably approaching another entropy watershed when the world could leave one technical system and enter another, with spectacular results. There is a nagging question among the public opinions in Europe these days: why were we so successful in technology during the last ten centuries and why are we losing ground since the end of World War 2? There was a kind of magic with us and, suddenly, we have lost that magic touch. Why? Indeed, we are strongly tempted to analyse the process of technical evolution as black magic. We often speak progress”, which is in itself a about “technical judgment of value: we do not even question whether that evolution is a progress or a decay; we readily confuse progress of technology with progress by technology. We rarely ask questions such as what is the origin of technical evolution? Why is it moving faster in some places than in others at any given time? Is it possible to accelerate or to slow down technical evolution? We are prone to answer implicitly that technical “progress” is a result of human genius or that the “best” people have always managed to succeed where others failed. These are the circulating arguments which obscure the above mentioned questions rather than cast light upon them.

There exists now a line of thought, a theoretical argument which provides an illuminating point of view

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on technical evolution. This argument was developed originally by Georgescu-Roegen,i widely publicized by Rifkin2 and further developed by the author of this paper.3 It stresses the importance of the most fundamental law of physics - the second law of Thermodynamics - which states that the entropy of a closed system is continually increasing. The consequences of this physical law can be studied by a term coined by Claude Levi“entropology”, Strauss.4 Whereas anthropology deals with the internal organization of human groups, entropology studies the external constraints resulting from the physics of the environment. In a certain sense, entropology states the problem and anthropology presents a solution. The rules of entropology can be simply summarized in a few statements: every technical process uses some raw materials and some energy; that energy is then degraded and becomes useless; the raw materials wear out until they become mixed with the environment and practically irretrievable; often the wastes are pollutants; it is impossible to perform depollution without creating another pollution of another kind elsewhere. Hence, the planet Earth moves inexorably from a state of order to a state of disorder: resources of energy and materials are being exhausted inevitably; the most readily available resources are used first. To sum up, technology transforms locally raw materials into valuable goods at the price of increasing global entropy: at large, it creates disorder. the monetary value of any good is a measure of the increase of entropy which its manufacturing has induced, as long as it is determined by a free market totally transparent. If these are the rules of entropology,

how is it that

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1990

mankind lives in a manner more and more comfortable? Even if life is perhaps more stressful in Paris today than it was two centuries ago, the life expectations have doubled. It looks as if things become easier and easier and not vice versa. That is exactly the point where technical evolution enters into the picture. An animal species is only subjected to biological evolution, a relatively slow process. When resources are depleted, the number of animals decreases in order to accommodate to what is available. When a predator species lives in a closed environment with a prey species, the number of animals has a tendency to oscillate more or less according to a sinusoid, around an acceptable ratio of preys and predators. This oscillation will last indefinitely as long as the environment does not change radically. If it does the animal species will probably be subjected to a biological evolution which would allow some subgroups to survive under the new conditions. At the beginning, the human species has undoubtedly followed the same pattern when Homo erectus replaced Homo habilis or when, in turn, it was replaced by Homo sapiens. Yet, for forty thousand years, our species has followed a very different method of accommodation. This method caused us to undergo a technical evolution, i.e. to leave the body as it is but to create artificial limbs which are tools, weapons, machines, factories, etc. Since these artifacts are outside the human body, they can be improved, discarded, replaced or repaired without the undue delays associated with any biological process. In other words, the human species undergoes a very special kind of evolution outside the scope of the classical biological evolution. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that the purpose of that evolution is the same: to improve the chances of survival. In that respect, there should be no significant evolution as long as the species is correctly adapted to its environment and, reciprocally, there should be a fast evolution when the species must quickly adjust itself to a new environment. This means that technical evolution is not a gratuitous process which stems from the fantasy or the curiosity of man. It is a response to a challenge, the trivial The paradox of technical challenge of survival. evolution originates from the fact that meeting the challenge is a circular process. If there is a shortage of resources, the human species develops a new technology which allows it to gain access to resources Yet, these resources will previously unexploited. sooner or later be depleted as a consequence of the law of entropy. This will happen as a result of the development of technology. The more efficient a technology is, the sooner the crisis will occur; hence

the development of technology generates new challenges. In other words, in the frame of entropology, technical evolution is a vicious circle. A study of technical evolution4 shows that it is not a continuous process but rather it proceeds by jumps, usually designated as technical revolutions. Rifkin has coined the term entropy watershed to emphasize that it is a crossing of the division line between two technical sysferns, i.e. a set of technologies adapted to each other in such a way that every component of the system enhances the result of the other components and that the absence of an important component cripples the complete system. These ideas could appear somewhat abstract, but they can be applied to many historical situations which could make them more comprehensible. The occurrence of several neolithic revolutions in the Near East (8000 BC), in China (3500 BC), in Peru (2000 BC) and in Mexico (1500 BC) seems to prove that they are the typical answer to the challenge of depleted resources for a Paleolithic technical system relying on hunting and gathering. The decline and the fall of Rome can be explained by the impossibility to feed a town of 1 million inhabitants by an overextended empire of 75 millions inhabitants. The existing technical system at the time lacked efficient telecommunications and transportations. The crisis of the XIVth century in Europe is the result of a very fast population expansion (20 millions people in France alone) which exceeded the resources of agriculture in that technical system. The religious wars and the colonizations of other continents were cheap ways of escape. The first industrial revolution in England during the 18th century was a real crossing of the entropy watershed between the medieval and the industrial technical systems.

The Rules of Technical On the

basis of that historical to formulate a few rules: 1 Technical

Evolution

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evolution is a discontinuous change between two discrete technical systems and occurs when an entropy watershed is crossed. 2 People living in a given technical system always eliminate people living in the previous technical systems. Technical evolution is irresistible and irreversible. 3 Technical evolution is ambiguous and ambivalent depending on which side of the entropy watershed one sits. 4 Technical evolution is a fast and accelerating process of entropy increase which anticipates the natural extinction of humankind by depleting our capital of resources.

NEIRYNCK: 5 Technical evolution will be autonomous, i.e. driven by the blind forces of entropology, as long as the features are not recognized by the previous industrial executives.

What is Next? These sobering views on technical evolution are a far cry from the classical chitchat on technical progress by research and development. If they can be validated by more studies, they could lead to realistic forecast. It is clear that the nuclear power venture is a failure: less than 5% of the total energy consumption of the world originates from nuclear reactors, practically the same amount we produce by burning wood and cow-dung. Hence, we are still in a technical system whose main source of energy is oil. The physical depletion of oil will occur sooner or later and it will be anticipated by economically or politically induced shortages as we had in 1973 and 1979. There lies the next entropy watershed whether we like it or not. Will we discover a new source of cheap, abundant and nonpolluting energy during the next twenty years?

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Nobody can answer sensibly that question. It is not politically sensible to rely on an invention, like efficient nuclear fusion, which perhaps will never occur. Hence, the only valid political project for the next decade is to study the best ways to cross that next entropy watershed while avoiding wars, famines and diseases. Presently, we have already plenty of these plagues. Is that not a sign that we are already facing an entropy watershed? If one were to ask that question to residents of New York, Mexico City, Cairo, Berlin or Beirut, they would probably concur with that view unless they were very wealthy. If a person is really poor, nobody will ever ask him that question and, anyway, nobody will listen to his answer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 1 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The entropy laul and the economic process, Harvard University Press, 1971. 2 Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy, Viking, New York, 1980. 3 Jacque Neirynck, Le huitihe jour de la crhtion, Presses 4

Polytechniques Romandes, Lausanne, 1986. Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, Plon, Paris, 1955.