Chimpanzees, Wasps and Functionless Functionality

When is a tool, not a tool? Appar­ently when it is a quasi-tool or a proto-tool. A tool provides func­tion­less func­tion­al­ity.
These were a couple of the epi­gra­mat­ics Barry Allen shared dur­ing a talk on tech­no­logy, cul­ture and civil­iz­a­tion.¹
I could not pos­sibly do justice to philo­soph­ical reflec­tions on the nature of a tool, so I stop there on the philo­soph­ical and refer you to my foot­note, but as an eco­nom­ist I was par­tic­u­larly drawn into his dis­cus­sion of the pro­gres­sion from first to second order machines. First order being ‘devices that extend human capa­cit­ies by exploit­ing a mech­an­ical advant­age’ and second-order fea­tur­ing ‘an assembly of first-order machines, coupled to pro­duce a mul­tiply­ing effect.’ This form of organ­iz­a­tion seemed to dove­tail with a sim­ilar dis­cus­sion that Allen raised about our abil­ity to effect­ively fix prices, but our seem­ing imab­il­ity to determ­ine the true cost of a tool. His talk at this point expan­ded from a focus on indi­vidual arti­facts to a com­ment on soci­etal inab­il­ity to leap the chasm between mon­et­ized value and soci­etal impact. Engin­eers, Allen charged, were driven by effi­ciency alone in design, where recyc­lab­il­ity could in fact be a sim­il­arly over­rid­ing design decision. My thought was that this itself could be fur­ther exten­ded into a form of second order eco­nomy, in which we find a means to extend rather than reduce liab­il­ity for design. This accepts that we are good at fix­ing the price, but have to find a means to determ­ine real cost and in fact cre­ate an incent­ive at the out­set to do so. This is not dis­sim­ilar from the overly simple and trendy concept of car­bon cred­its we are start­ing to prac­tise today. Mon­et­iz­a­tion of the long-term envir­on­mental cost is a great start, but we can­not cur­rently come to grips with the fact that progress/innovation whatever we choose to call it leads to our cre­ation of tools with great prom­ise by nar­row ana­lysis of imme­di­ate effect, but that have far wider con­sequences that we know or would care to invest in try­ing to dis­cover. The idea of the unknown in our ‘first-order eco­nomy’ is some­thing we label as risk. An eco­nomic player is called upon to find their own bal­ance between the level of risk and what they per­ceive as return. The real­ity is that if risk is redefined to carry longer term liab­il­ity for design decisions, this will force more broad explor­a­tion of wider impacts of tools at the design stage rather than in when we are try­ing to develop remedi­at­ive responses to unin­ten­ded con­sequences of the tool design in the future. The imme­di­ate chal­lenge to this rethink­ing is the charge that it will stall innov­a­tion. My only response to this, is that we are now forced to innov­ate in response to unin­ten­ded con­sequences and this may in fact demand greater costs envir­on­mental, eco­nomic or oth­er­wise than if we chose to force earlier design decisions in the cre­ation and applic­a­tion of tech­no­logy.
In clos­ing, Allen remarked on ethanol/ethane and the fact that this is one of the clearest examples of delib­er­ate human avoid­ance of true cost. Get­ting bey­ond the social costs of redis­tri­bu­tion of the har­vest from the food chain into a resource for mech­an­ical propul­sion, corn is the single-most water intens­ive crop under cul­tiv­a­tion. We are abso­lutely aware that by using it in a com­bust­ive pro­cess, the com­pon­ent parts are irre­voc­ably lost to the nat­ural cycle and yet we are clearly des­troy­ing our ground­wa­ter resources.
Allen chal­lenges that there have never been civil­iz­a­tions in human his­tory that waste tools as we do. Second-order factor­ies are idled and hav­ing lost their oppor­tun­ity are often not recom­bin­ant to another second-order machine.

1. Quasi-tools as I under­stand are objects used by beings without con­scious or intel­li­gent aware­ness that the object provides any par­tic­u­lar func­tion. Innate use of a pebble by a wasp to block the entrance to a birth cham­ber for example. In con­trast, a proto-tool, is con­sciously chosen for use, but has not be fash­ioned to per­form that func­tion, lack­ing delib­er­ate design to enable that func­tion. A ‘tool’ per se shares two descript­ive aspects: that its func­tion is man­i­fold and not lim­ited by pur­pose, instead exten­ded by tech­nique to form cul­tural tech­no­logy. Secondly, the tool is an arti­fact that lacks defin­i­tion without hav­ing a place within an eco­nomy — that is, it has been pre­vi­ously linked to oth­ers in an eco­nomy of socially com­pli­ment­ary action (design, man­u­fac­ture, sale, license, etc.) when we engage with it. [↩]