Technology can save the world or destroy it
In the last 300 years, technology has increased productivity exponentially. In 2020, one hour of work produced 24 times more goods and services than in 1870. The reason is innovation: converting knowledge into solutions through technology. As economist Paul Romer says, the dark matter of growth is ideas.In OECD countries, growth –measured in GDP per capita– was 4% annually from 1950 to 1973, 2% from 1976 to 2007, and 1% from 2010 to 2021. This slowdown may be due to a lack of disruptive and innovative ideas for various reasons: the loss of acceleration in technological growth produced by World War II, the withdrawal of the private sector from basic science, the aging of the scientific workforce, the transformation into a more comfortable and risk-averse society…Juan Antonio Zufiria, former director of IBM, has written an excellent report on the issue, on which this article is based. Zufiria, like Daniel Susskind, is optimistic and believes that it is possible to recover the pace of growth with innovation and technology. Both Zufiria and Susskind believe that technological change must be directed and prioritized. The biggest drawback to achieving this is the decoupling of capital and labor incomes: lower growth in labor incomes in developed nations – the EU and the USA – has led to increased inequality, measured by the Gini index. It is in these societies that innovation and technology are concentrated, and internal inequality is a brake on the improvement of their productivity. There is a relationship between efficiency and inequality.In the 20th century, production was linked to a workforce. When General Motors had a stock market capitalization of $300,000M, it had 300,000 employees. Today, Google or Microsoft, with double the capitalization, have 30,000. The workforce has lost power entrepreneurially and only maintains it as "quality", with few highly qualified workers. The battle between capital and labor that the Industrial Revolution brought – and that Marxism theorized based on Hegel's principle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis – does not exist today: it is beginning to be testimonial, except in public service. At the same time, the ability of companies to outsource activities has contributed to increasing the decoupling between labor and capital.The equality between poor and rich countries has increased thanks to globalization. Absolute equality reduces economic efficiency, but inequality above a Gini index of 0.4-0.5 also does, and this is what will end up happening within developed countries if the current trend is not corrected. Ten people currently concentrate 0.52% of world wealth.Development occurs in the world, and the world has limited resources. Economic growth is entropic, meaning it reduces the quality of energy in a way that the second law of thermodynamics makes irreversible: burning wood and running train machinery makes it impossible to return to the origin and recover the burnt wood. Fundamentally, this reality can be synthesized into the warming of the world and the progressive destruction of its reserves.
The technologies that can improve productivity by partially reversing this trend are three: artificial intelligence (AI), fusion, and biology. There are others, such as quantum, computing, plant protein, etc., but none of them is disruptive. Doing things better is not enough. What is true, based on the experience of the last 70 years, is that we do things better, but with less and less speed of improvement, and we distribute them worse among humanity. Wealth and power tend to concentrate.AI –a combination of algorithms, data, and computing power– is still very unknown. Daron Acemoglu considers that AI will increase productivity by 0.6% in the US and cause a 20% loss in employment, but estimates are still quite scattered. Unemployment will affect white collars and, therefore, the economic shock may be greater than in previous contexts due to technological advancement. The energy consumption of data centers is high, and this may generate significant social opposition; in fact, it is already happening. In the second quarter of 2025, projects worth $98,000 billion for data centers in the US were halted.Fusion –simulating the temperature and pressure conditions found in the sun to generate heavy atoms from light atoms and energy for lost mass, e=mc2– has the advantage of being a clean process, without waste, but also the difficulty of acting on magma at 100 million degrees. The reaction takes place in a laboratory and is maintained for tenths of a second. Currently, it is more in the field of technology than science. It is the time of engineers. Some opine that we will have fusion energy on the electric grid by 2040... The end of the research is in sight.Technology will also transform biology. Extending people's lives and curing more diseases, however, can have profound social effects if, as is possible, only the rich can afford it and therefore live longer than the poor. Between 2001 and 2014, the richest Americans increased their life expectancy by three years, while the rest remained the same. But what if the difference was twenty years?It is clear that the transformation of medicine and the expulsion from the labor market of trained people from middle incomes as a consequence of AI can pose a social danger. It is for these reasons that technology can save the world or destroy it.
