مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Daniele Archibugi’s article takes the film ‘Blade Runner’ as a foil for discussing how Schumpeterian economics may be related to epochal changes in the direction of long-term economic growth. He explores whether an exhaustion of technological opportunities is part of the explanation of the financial crisis of 2008 and the continuing shortcomings in the recovery from it, and, ultimately, what opportunities exist for future economic growth and technological innovation. This is a heavy burden for a film, the central theme of which is the equally weighty question of what it means to be human. In the film, this theme is developed using artificial human beings or ‘replicants,’ who are violently ‘retired’ (somewhat gratuitously since they are past their sell-by date and programmed to self-destruct anyway) by the film’s anti-hero who develops divided loyalties. The film offers rich visual detail of an imagined future but a rather sparse account of how that future came to be. As Archibugi observes, while the film is setin a distantfuture, it recapitulates features of our contemporary world such as the physical stratification of wealth and social class, the continuation of war (although con- flicts seem to have been relocated to certain ‘off world colonies’), the migration of people, and, perhaps, the consequences of climate change. Thus, the film offers elements of both discontinuity and Helpful comments from Ben Martin and Robin Mansell on earlier versions are gratefully acknowledged. E-mail address: w.e.steinmueller@sussex.ac.uk continuity whichArchibugi argues are characteristic of Schumpeterian growth processes.

In considering epochaltechnological change, Archibugi focusses our attention on two groups of technologies that feature in the film – information and communication technology (ICT) and biotechnology. He observes that since the film was produced, our accomplishments have outstripped the film’s vision with regard to the first, but barely progressed against the second. As technological prediction, therefore, the film is not very helpful (the predictive value of sciencefiction will be considered further in the conclusion). Archibugi seeks to explain this disjunction in the rate of progress in these two groups of technologies since the film’s original release in 1982 by recourse to technological uncertainty and technological opportunity, and the complementary role of investment and entrepreneurship. Biotechnology’s technological potential, and the opportunities to transform it into a general purpose technology that might be used to grow plant or animal ‘replicant’ tissues for our food, fibres for our clothing, or even, as in the film, companions and soldiers, have not (as yet) materialised. Instead, as Archibugi observes, most of the realisation of biotechnology’s potential is in a relatively small segment of the pharmaceutical industry. In this industry, instead of creating giant new firms such as thefilm’s Tyrell Corporation, biotechnology has most often augmented the size of incumbents and clearly has not achieved ‘creative destruction’ that portends epochal technological change. A large part of the potential of ICT has materialised in contrast, with corresponding inflows of investment and outflows in the form of diffusion and adaptation which imbue everyday objects with increasing information processing and display capabilities – be they phones, cars, home appliances, and so forth. In terms of entrepreneurship, if we take the film to represent a vision of a few decades into our future, the man in the high castle of the film may be more akin to an aging Elon Musk, rather than Eldon Tyrell, the film’s mastermind of replicant production.

The deeper issue that Archibugi addresses is the contributory role of technological opportunities to the slow recovery from the 2008 crisis experienced to date. Crises of the magnitude of 2008 have many sources. The leading technology of our era, ICTs, certainly contributed to the instabilities and volatility that provided the tinder for this conflagration. ICTs, in combination with other technologies such as containerised shipping, accelerated global merchandise and service trade, enlarged the accompanying financial flows at risk of financial instability. ICTs, in combination with a neoliberal faith in the economic rationality of markets, helped to create and to gain acceptance for financial instruments that subsequently became toxic banking assets. Institutions meant to regulate risk-taking, again under the influence of neoliberal ideology, demonstrated their incapacity to adjust to this changing landscape. More positively, the same landscape conditions also supported a huge expansion in market access for rapidly growing developing countries and with it the resulting transformation of millions of peoples’ lives, generally for the better but, in some cases, for the worse.