Is technology a moral force?

Part 1 (Kevin Kelly’s interview in Christianity Today)

Part 2 (my reply, posted here)

Part 3 (drawn from the comment thread to my post):

Kevin Kelly: Nick,

Thanks for the careful read and thoughtful response.

Curious lingo??? I think there is no doubt that God speaks just like Kevin Kelly.

But to the crux of our disagreement:

You end with:

“The best you can argue, therefore, is that technological progress will, on balance, have a tendency to open more choices for more people.”

This is precisely my argument. I am not arguing that technology increases the options for everyone equally. Of course new technologies remove some options. Lots of excellent horse buggy and whip makers lost their opportunities. I talk about a very tiny net gain in options when you tally up all the options lost compared to the ones added. That very tiny micro net gain accumulated over time is progress.

You say:

“Look at any baby born today, and try to say whether that child would have a greater possibility of fulfilling its human potential if during its lifetime (a) technological progress reversed, (b) technological progress stalled, (c) technological progress advanced slowly, or (d) technological progress accelerated quickly. You can’t.”

You can. If you take a random human on earth from 10,000 years ago, from 1,000 years ago, from 100 years ago and from 10 years ago, the chances are greater the nearer we pick the more that person will fulfill their potential. Or, second experiment, ask a random person today when they would prefer to live, and the more fulfilled they are, the more recent they want to live.

You say:

“It’s absurd to believe that if Mozart were living today, he would create the great works he created in the eighteenth century – the symphonies, the operas, the concertos.”

It is only absurd if the great works had already been created. That is if someone else had written Mozart like symphonies. But if no one had written symphonies like Mozart I don’t think it absurd that if Mozart was born now, he could write symphonies. Many are still writing classical symphonies. People are still writing operas and concertos. Artists are still painting still lifes and realistic portraits Writing novels. And making careers doing so. Why not Mozart? His music doesn’t have to sound EXACTLY the same. Symphonies that a 21 century Mozart would write today may be sound different, but could still be genius. Would you say that if Dickens was alive today he would not write great novels? Would you say that if Van Gogh was alive today it is absurd to think he would paint?

I’ve been thinking hard about the source of our divergent views since we agree on a lot. And in part it may be due to this:

I spent my formative years not in college, but in the middle ages. I mean I lived in medieval towns, and feudal villages and ancient camps. I have lived in the past, not just read about it. I spent a lot of time among illiterate people, simple people with very little technology. Years in places that for all practical purposes are a time before Mozart. I feel I have a visceral feeling for both the advantages and joys of that type of life, and of its disadvantages.

I feel I have a good sense of how difficult it was for a Homer to appear. It’s hard to describe to someone outside how constrained life and roles are in pre-industrial, to say nothing of post-industrial, cultures. 99% of everyone born was a farmer or herder. Only 1% achieved anything different.

My thoughts return again and again and again to the thousands of village boys and girls I met who spent their childhoods (and beyond) plowing behind an ox year after year, or mindlessly following sheep and goats for weeks on end away from home, wanting wanting wanting to leave — to do something greater.

Homer was lucky, a one in a million. The other million Greeks, as well as you and I if we were born then, had no such luck. Their lives would only be improved in satisfaction and fulfillment if they moved to the future. I know this in my bones. In particular I remember a remote Greek island I stayed on where the women were still veiled, the folk spoke a dialect of classical Doric, and all they wanted was electricity. There were farmers and housewives but no Archimedes. I have not been back for 40 years, but I bet today there are many more occupations, far more diversity of achievements. I bet 50% or more of the population of that island are now doing something other than farming or herding.

I can’t tell you how many hours/days/weeks I spent sitting around with people who had a lot of time to sit around. I would say they had a contentment, but I would never say they came close to fulfilling their potential. They generally agreed, because they encouraged their children to NOT follow their footsteps for this reason.

This progressive view does not stem from my theology. In fact it is the reverse. My theology stems from this formative experience.

Carr: Thanks, Kevin. Because your argument that technological progress is a moral force, a force of “love,” as you put it, has practical implications for how we approach technology – as individuals and as a society – I think it’s essential that we question your argument, which is what I’m trying to do.

You seem to swing between two explanations for how technological progress expands choices. One is based on a statistical analysis of utility: do new technologies (in general) have the effect of opening more choices for more people? I have no beef with you here. Human beings are toolmakers, and the main reason they make tools is because tools are useful. They extend human power and hence options. So it’s not a surprise that, on balance, technology would leave us generally with more options. This explanation does not require us to believe there is any moral force, any force of love, influencing the course of technology.

The second explanation you give is not about cold calculations of utility. It is about technological progress being a moral force that allows individuals, as individuals, to fulfill their “godly gifts.” As you say in the interview: “we are obligated to materialize as many inventions as possible, to hurry, so that every person born and to-be-born will have a great chance of discovering and sharing their godly gifts.” Please note that here you are not talking about statistics; you are talking about individuals: every person born and to-be-born.

I think it’s revealing that when I challenge your second explanation (which is the basis for your argument that technology is a force of goodness, of godly love), you quickly (in your comment above) take refuge in your first explanation. You revert to statistics, pointing to “a very tiny net gain in options when you tally up all the options lost compared to the ones added.” That is not the same as expanding the potential of “every person born and to-be-born” to fulfill their “godly gifts.”

I ask a question about a particular baby – a real child – and suddenly you want to talk about a statistically random child, a theoretical child. Does your God think about children in statistical terms, or does He think about them as individuals?

To put it another way: If there’s a God behind your first explanation, it’s a capricious god, who doesn’t seem particularly interested in the fate of his creations as individuals. He’s God as Statistician, concerned with “very tiny net gains.” The God you explicitly identify behind your second explanation is a god of love, a god who is interested in expanding the options for every one of his creations, each of whom is blessed with unique “godly gifts.”

Which God is it?

I truly believe your argument about Mozart (or Dickens, or anyone from the past) is specious. Just because the piano persists does not mean that Mozart would still be Mozart if he were born today. The world of human beings – the technium, as you describe it – has changed dramatically, opening some new opportunities and closing others, and it’s impossible to know how that complexity of changes would affect the fate of any given individual. And, as I said above in my reply to Mike, if Mozart’s gifts would survive history moving forward, why would they not survive historical change moving backward? Music existed before the piano. No, I don’t think that it’s absurd to think that Van Gogh would paint if he were born today (though it’s by no means assured); I think it’s equally plausible that he would paint if he had been born 500 years earlier than he had.

On the one hand, you want to tie individual genius to the particular technologies of the day. On the other hand, you seem to say that individual genius is not constrained by the technologies of the day. Which is it?

Let me make a final point, not for rhetorical reasons but because it’s one I struggle with in thinking about the effects of technological progress. You like to take a statistical view of technology’s effects, which leads you to speak of percentages of the population. For instance: a greater percentage of people live in material comfort today than did a few millennia ago. That’s a valid way of measuring things. But there’s an equally valid way of measuring things that looks at absolute numbers rather than statistical norms. The view is very different depending on which way you measure things. For instance: you could argue that technology has improved life on earth because a lower percentage of people exist in a state of physical suffering today than used to. But one of the most important effects of technology has been to allow for an enormous increase in human population. And if you look at absolute numbers, you might well find that more individuals exist in a state of physical suffering than did before. The statistical analysis obscures the individual sufferer. So is technology good because it has reduced the percentage of people who suffer, or is technology bad because it has increased the number of people who suffer?

Kelly: Good questions, Nick.

I think you throw out three main challenges, which I short hand here:

1) Which God is it? Individual or statistical?

2) Does time and technology constrain genius?

3) Does God care about a percentage or a quantity?

My quick reply.

1) You ask “Does your God think about children in statistical terms, or does He think about them as individuals?”

The first answer — which is not very satisfying — is that as a omniscient God he thinks both. But I don’t think it takes a God to hold both views in your head. I think that you can increase options for individuals by increasing the average option or increasing the options for the average individual. I argue that increasing technology gives a “greater chance” for an individual to become fulfilled. I do not argue that a technology A, or even set of technologies A-Z, will automatically optimize the potential of person N. I argue that it will increase the potential for potential.

Perhaps you object to the idea that a moral force could be statistical? Or that love might somehow be an impersonal force? That love is something that only occurs between two humans and is not found elsewhere in the universe?

To answer your first question directly, I think “a god who is interested in expanding the options for every one of his creations, each of whom is blessed with unique “godly gifts,” ” does this very thing by expanding the options for all. This steady expansion (known as progress) may not touch each individual (our and their loss) but because it can liberate gifts an average, like most freedoms, it is a moral force.

2) You ask, “On the one hand, you want to tie individual genius to the particular technologies of the day. On the other hand, you seem to say that individual genius is not constrained by the technologies of the day. Which is it?”

I say the presence of technology enables individual genius and the lack of technology constrains individual genius. The particular technologies available greatly influence what can be produced. If time were symmetrical, running backwards with no effect, you would be right. (” if Mozart’s gifts would survive history moving forward, why would they not survive historical change moving backward?”) But time and progress is asymmetrical. That is the whole point. So while some options diminish, most accumulate, and none completely disappear, although they may obsolesce. We have more choices. As the book Shock of the Old establishes, more of the old technologies are still very much with us. In Mozart’s case all his technologies — and options — are still here. All of Dickens’ tools are still here. That’s why, while Mozart’s gifts can go both ways, his tools only go one way.

3) Your last point is very interesting. What kind of moral progress is there if it only entails the expansion of percentages and not absolute numbers? I would say it is not a very robust progress then. But I take a very long view of progress (my books starts pre-history), and in this view the rapid expansion of population during the industrial age is still progress in absolute numbers because all those people living in rural areas were still better off than the hunter/gatherers of yore. And while we tend to ignore it, I believe there was very slow mild progress (increase in options) even in remote agricultural areas over the millennia. The peasants in China in 1776 were better off — on average — than the peasants of 1776 BC, or even 776. And as I maintain the poverty of urban slums is much preferable to the poverty of the countryside, so the mass migration into cities in absolute numbers is a sign of progress.

To sum, I think you bring up two main questions:

Is progress real? I believe the evidence is clear it is.

Is progress a moral force? I think it is, but this may be a matter of definitions.

Carr: Thanks, Kevin. I think we’ve both had our say, so I’m inclined to leave it there. But I can’t resist making two quick points. You say, “the presence of technology enables individual genius and the lack of technology constrains individual genius.” That’s not always so, as the Homer example shows. Technological change can disable individual genius as well as enable it. There may be many people on earth today who would have been better able to fulfill their genius, or in general their potential, had they lived in an earlier, less technologically advanced time. We’ll never know. You also say, “all those people living in rural areas were still better off than the hunter/gatherers of yore.” How do you know that? There’s a strain of recent research which suggests that many hunter/gatherers led pretty good lives – idyllic, in some ways. The number of available “options” is not the only measure of the richness of a life.

Kelly: Yes, I think we’ve had our say so we’ll leave it there, but I’ll just add to your final points;

You mention:

“There may be many people on earth today who would have been better able to fulfill their genius, or in general their potential, had they lived in an earlier, less technologically advanced time.”

Yes, there may be, but I find it hard to imagine who they are.

You also say, “all those people living in rural areas were still better off than the hunter/gatherers of yore.” How do you know that?

Having visited some tribes, and watching the record of others, and reading the literature by the impartial. Simply put, very few people continue that way if they have a choice.

“There’s a strain of recent research which suggests that many hunter/gatherers led pretty good lives – idyllic, in some ways.”

I’ve read that research very carefully, and you might call their lifestyle many things, but no one, especially the researchers would use any word like idyllic or anything close to it. Like the Amish it has many attractive qualities, but the closer you get, the less attractive it becomes for yourself. I know. I considered it and looked very closely.

Nick, as I said earlier, I think this difference is really what we differ on.

11 thoughts on “Is technology a moral force?

  1. Seth Finkelstein

    Hmm … I thought of getting in on the earlier iteration, but the risk/reward ratio seemed unfavorable, as I disagree somewhat with both debaters (and thus can make no friends from my view). Kelly seems to me to be too deterministic in a simplistic way, but Carr’s rebuttal strikes me as throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

    To be impressionistic about it, I perceive the problem as roughly:

    Kelly: Good deeds are the only way to advance humanity. So we should thus try to do as many good deeds as possible every day.

    [kind of vapid and starry-eyed, even if its heart is in the right place]

    Carr: There’s no way to tell what’s a good deed. If you pull a child out of the path of speeding car, maybe that child will grow up to be a genocidal mass-murderer, so saving its life would ultimately be a bad deed.

    [strictly true, but on its own, rather sterile, as we need a moral theory even though imperfect, in order to function]

    [Disclaimer – this is brief quick comment about an acknowledgedly complex issue, which attempts to gloss an idea in a few words, and should be taken with that in mind].

  2. Nick Carr

    Hmm. Scarily impressionistic, Seth.

    Here’s an alternative impressionistic sketch:

    Kelly: Automobiles are good because they get us to where we want to go more quickly than if we went on foot, and being able to get where we want to go faster has a tendency to increase the number of options we’ll have during the course of our lives, as we’ll waste less time in transit. Therefore, we have a moral obligation to increase the speed of cars as much as possible.

    Carr: What about the child in the road?

  3. Designcomment.blogspot.com

    Or consider,

    We spent a lot of money in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger building roads to enable us to get between A and B faster, without considering what sort of a place A or B should be, when we get there.

    My recollection of a comment by Ciaran Cuffe, architect and Irish house of parliment member for the Irish Green party said at Open House debate, ‘Has Dublin Changed for the Better’, October 2008.

  4. Twiliteminotaur

    It’s a bit worrying to see technology elevated to a religious status, an uneasy feeling similar to the one I get when I read Singularitarian Time Magazine spreads.

    It’s difficult to say that technology in the geological-scale view has not increased human options and possibility for utility. But “Happiness” and utility are sticky Gordian issues. As Warren Buffet, one of the greatest beneficiaries of modern technology has said, “Time is the most valuable asset.” If this is true, perhaps we apotheoses of tech with our realtime-media absorbed neuroses, overloaded schedules and eternal scarcity of time are really far poorer, ultimately, than the 2-4 hour mongongo nut gathering day of the Bushmen who had all the time in the world to relax and spend with family. Perhaps “technium” is closer to a nerd-equivalent of cocaine. It looks so great on the missionary’s TV, so you leave the rainforest to score some. At first you get a euphoric rush and feel like anything is possible. But over time, your high-paying, high-tech digital addiction becomes a cage of Angry Birds, virtual personas you must maintain, social ladder-climbing, and general keeping up with the Hamptons. Soon you discover your most precious asset — time — sucked into the black hole that the “technium” drug has left in you, feeding it just to stay afloat.

    While many rural flock to cities, it is equally true that many of the highest-powered cityslickers seek out more tranquil, more sane, lower-tech lives, moving out into the country and trying to live off the land i.e. the organic, local and resilient community movements. it’s also debatable whether the millions of Chinese who leave their rice paddies in order to become slave-labor iPad makers working 16 hour days for a dollar inhaling asbestos are improving their lives.

    But ultimately, I think my fear is when we project a “morality” on technology such that it is good in and of itself. A hammer is a tool, which can be used for good or evil: you can build a house or you can smash in a skull. Atomic energy can be used to annihilate all life on Earth many times over, or it can be used to keep your lights on. Was hundreds of thousands of people dying horribly in a nuclear blast, many more suffering cancers and other effects of fallout an expression of God’s love? Computers can be used to help us communicate more easily, or computers can be used for high-frequency-trading creating a malignant financial system disconnected from reality and ultimately helped a near-global economic meltdown. Games can help surgeons improve success rates, or they can become a distracting time-sink techcrack. In short; technology is not “love” or “godly”, but rather a set of inert instruments which allow options that can both positive and negative affects. Just as “guns don’t kill people,” so technology is neutral: it is people that give it a moral valence through their use of it.

  5. Designcomment.blogspot.com

    Nick & other readers,

    I would like to leave you with this thought. It relates to when I was reading your book, The Big Switch in 2008, when the whole world was falling down around our ears here in Ireland, with the financial collapse. In your chapter 8, The Great Unbundling, you made reference to Thomas C. Schelling’s experiment, ‘Dynamic Models of Segregation’.

    I don’t know if you ever seen the adapted movie of Roddy Doyle’s book ‘The Committments’, released in the early 1990s when I was a first year architecture student in Dublin city. A lady who is now the Dublin City civic architect, her name is Ms. Ali Grehan worked in some of the areas in which the movie was filmed in her early career.

    She delivered a talk on that theme in April 2008, of which I have created a transcript here:

    http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2010/02/filling-urban-void-part-two.html

    In her April 2008 talk to open an exhibition called ‘Filling the Urban Void’, Ms. Grehan made several references to a paper called ‘Cracks in the City’, 1996 by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris.

    Having listened to her talk which I recorded on my Olympus digital dictaphone at the time, and later in that same year reading the chapter which made reference to Schelling’s experiment in you book, I was greatly struck by the similarity in your conceptual focus.

    Although Ms. Grehan was dealing everyday with the real physical environment of post-Roddy Doyle Dublin city. And you were trying to envisage digital environments about to be created for the first time.

    I just thought I would mention it for your interest. I went to the trouble at the time I remember of photocopying some of your chapter in ‘The Big Switch’ and personally delivering it to the offices at Dublin City Council, marked for her attention. Perhaps it is a lead you may like to follow up some time.

    You can see in the photograph of the panel here,

    http://www.architecturefoundation.ie/2008/10/24/open-debate-part-of-open-house-2008/

    In October 2008, Ms. Grehan had just been appointed as Dublin City architect, when all hell was breaking lose in our economy. That is Mr. Ciaran Cuffe sitting beside her in the panel that night in the photograph. Mr. Cuffe lost his seat in the Irish parliment as did all Green party members in the last early 2011 general election.

    All the best, and I hope you enjoy her transcript. BoH.

  6. John Schoettler

    Oh man, do I love the dialogs between Nick and Kevin. It’s like sitting next to the two smartest guys in the room while they talk about the one of my favorite subjects. I always appreciate the thoughtfulness and intelligence of you both and you two are really contributing to making this world a better place.

  7. RootSpring

    It is folly to speak of technology as either good or bad. The determinant in all moral equations is the intention of the subject. The act of directing your attention to virtue is virtue itself. If a beautiful woman should end up in a monk’s lap without his willing it, this is not an indictment against his morality, his dignity. His will not to follow after desirous objects is still pure, his mind bent on self-sacrifice is unstained, and that is the measure of his morality. The world burns by itself. Moral beings restrain themselves. Morality is always a personal matter, only in response to the temptations of an impersonal world, however simple or sophisticated. This is a much overlooked point about Buddhist karma – that actions depend on the intentions. The popular story is of the doctor who cuts open a man with good intentions but ends up killing him. His morality and his future is not sullied by the incident.

    I think it is true that temptations/illusions have more power in a complex world. Distractions are many and the morality of the people living in the drunken confusion of later ages does decline. Our mistake is in directing our intentions toward equivocal ideals like democracy or technology and imbuing them with all the faith and fervour of an ersatz-religion. Immanuel Kant said there are things that should not be discussed in terms of value, and that these can be said to have dignity. Well what in technology is not judged by value? How can we have a sense of morality when our sense of dignity, of agency, is every day blindly shuttled through the system as user, commuter, consumer. These labels for our ever-morphing interoperability make even job titles redundant. What can we say of the long forgotten humanity of the moral individual?

  8. Designcomment.blogspot.com

    I suppose, coming from an education and a background working in a creative profession like architecture myself – it gives me at least some jurisdiction to speak about artists and their use of technology. So bear with me a moment or two, and I hope I can offer you some trivial insight into the average life of the artist working in the digital era.

    Twilitem inotaur wrote above,

    “But over time, your high-paying, high-tech digital addiction becomes a cage of Angry Birds, virtual personas you must maintain, social ladder-climbing, and general keeping up with the Hamptons. Soon you discover your most precious asset — time — sucked into the black hole that the “technium” drug has left in you, feeding it just to stay afloat.”

    I really liked your reference to Warren Buffet and his take on time etc. In fact, I was so taken by that remark, it provoked me to reflect a little on my own life experience, and share with you a small piece of it, via my custom blog entry here:

    http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2011/07/out-of-memory.html

    A sample:

    “Territoriality is something that always emerges as a phrase sooner or later in the best episodes of CSI Las Vegas, or some other sit-com, where a team of crack investigators try to get one step ahead of a maniac on the loose. It usually involves a map on a board with a lot of little coloured pins on it. But what I saw in the company directors face, the day my old pal lost his multi-layered masterpiece to the Apple OS9 operating system, was territoriality enough for me. I soon got out of that line of work, and am thanking myself ever since then for doing so. If I had stuck around though, I’m sure I would have made it up to the level of company creative director myself, and developed the technique of cracking my own wry smile in the process.”

    Hope you enjoy it.

    This was a nicely crafted sentence by Twiliteminotaur also:

    “Computers can be used to help us communicate more easily, or computers can be used for high-frequency-trading creating a malignant financial system disconnected from reality and ultimately helped a near-global economic meltdown.”

    All the best, BoH.

  9. Designcomment.blogspot.com

    I came across a short documentary called ‘The Expressionist’, featuring Michael Wolff earlier this evening, and was struck by how his comment on materials and putting them together in new ways, seemed to echo very much the 1759 Edward Young quotation that I posted earlier here.

    http://documentary.net/the-expressionist-michael-wolff/

    What Michael’s honest belief is, is that artists today are pigeon holed very much into disciplines, and aren’t allowed to cross those boundaries. I have had a brief chat with Michael about this in the past, and he suggested that the Whole Earth catalogue and those years, that era in culture and art, was a rare and valuable time in which boundaries became temporarily dissolved.

    Steve Reich, the music composer spoke today on Irish radio about his cab company he worked in with Phil Lesh, and the furniture moving business he conducted with Philip Glass. They did everything and anything to keep going until they could make a living out of music. It is funny, that Michael Wolff mentioned Lesh and his pals rehearshing in his house years ago too. It seems, that at certain times in our history, a lot of boundaries do seem less important, and that leads to interesting stuff. BoH.

  10. Stewart Dinnage

    I could be a million miles off base here as I’m (self confessed) not well read in the classics, however. The use and slight fall back by Nick to Homer as an exemplar individual of genius who may not have had the same opportunity to develop and display that genius in a later stage of human progress is an interesting choice in itself.

    Is it not disputed that Homer was an individual?

    Is it also not the case that the classic works attributed to Homer are likely only to have been spread through oral story telling?

    Would the creative genius of Homer (whatever that means) have been totally unknown to both authors were it not for progress in information technology (written books) which occurred long after the original creations?

    These “genius” and creative individuals envisaged are interesting with regards to technological progress in their own right. Are we to suggest that the book (and associated technological progress) would have limited a modern Homer like genius?

    If so I’d ask this, if creativity is as Csikszentmihalyi suggests, a form of cultural evolution that can only be deemed creative based on other people valuing the creation (an implication could be, more people giving greater value = more creative) then surely before Homer some truly stunningly creative cavemen may have existed, but like trees falling that no one observes, did they make a sound, or were they genius.

    I’d say progress in communication is the only reason either author has the examples of genius in mind that they do. I’d also ask in western history, how many examples of female creative genius have they considered, especially going backwards in time?

    Obviously much of my suggestion is based on Nick’s thoughts that technology changes us (as it may change what we deem genius or creative). Should Homer be born today an ability to recount a long oral depiction of stories may now be of less value to others, this may even be seen a loss by some. I’d say before Homer individuals ability to secure a family dinner by bashing its brains in was probably seen as more valuable than making lots of odd noises out of their mouths, times change. I’m not sure the brain bashing skills devaluation is such a loss, when we see what replaced it.

  11. Designcomment.blogspot.com

    Thinking about this,

    “What Michael’s honest belief is, is that artists today are pigeon holed very much into disciplines, and aren’t allowed to cross those boundaries.”

    I guess, what I am trying to say, is that ‘tools’ as we define them are not constrained by the boundaries of technology. I think the point that Michael Wolff makes is that ‘tools’ are also mental muscles. That at various times in human development, we are operating with the full spectrum available to us, or not.

    Alan Kay, the famous software pioneer, is fairly adamant on this point also. He would say things like, the universities today have caved into the vendors. The Stanford education is more like a vocational education today, using pre-made, proprietary tools. The kids nowadays don’t build anything. In his days at Parc Labs, it was remarkable how quickly a couple of guys like Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson could build a whole system up from scratch, because it was cheaper than ordering one from DEC.

    Kids nowadays are not encouraged to do this. We have gone through many revolutions of Moore’s Law, yet computers are only a few times more powerful than they were in the 1970s at Parc.

    I suppose, what I am saying is, the tools are mental as well as technological – and that, in order to create the necessary technological progress in making of new tools – our range of mental tools has to be quite broad. There is a sort of circular thing going on there. BoH.

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