What if Tech Were a Fad?

This is an actual conversation I had:
- Buddhist scholar: "Tech is a fad."
- Engineer (me): "I think you may be right. But it's a fad that will last for the rest of my lifetime."

So what if I was wrong?
Not to say I believe that statement was wrong, but what might you get by thinking about things as if my Buddhist friend were right?

Wired Magazine posted an article about Lost Tribes of the Amazon using land that modern people consider unfarmable in order to grow crops. Here is an example of knowledge that was indeed lost about leveraging the natural system in which we live:

" “Human engineering, if we do it cleverly, can work together with natural ecosystem engineering,” said McKey.

The mounds appear to have been constructed from layers of surrounding topsoil, which was shoveled out and layered like cakes. That formed the basis of the mounds, which put crops above the flood line...

 

Species of ants and termites settled in the mounds, where their colonies wouldn’t flood. Their burrowing aerated the soil, and plant matter foraged from surrounding areas enriched it further. As a result, the mounds acted like sponges for rainfall, and outsourced insect labor made them rich in key fertilizer nutrients of nitrogen, potassium and calcium. The root systems of perennial plants kept the mound structures intact, and likely did so when mounds were rotated out of production.

 

As for the original inhabitants, little is known. They belonged to so-called Arauquinoid cultures, which emerged 1,500 years ago..."

What if we didn't have the starting assumption that the brute force available to us from cheap, abundant energy was available? It seems that we would be forced into more solutions like this one (and one's I've blogged about earlier), where we learn to follow the flow of nature and leverage it's strengths rather than fight with and try to level and break it.

 

I am not saying that "no-tech" is where we want to go or will end up.

I am saying that thinking about design problems differently, with no chemical or technological sledgehammer in the toolbox, might lead to more elegant solutions. Perhaps like the ones we've already lost.