Sex, Bombs and Burgers (2 page)

Millions of years later, little has changed. People still fight for food and sex, and we still use food (and other gifts) to try to get sex. These hard-wired, intersecting instincts have, over time, become our obsessions. Open any newspaper or watch any television broadcast and you’ll see the proof. Endless broadcast hours and column inches are given over to the latest updates on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the ongoing obesity epidemic or the latest diet craze, and the sex lives of celebrities or politicians caught in prostitution scandals. War, food and sex are everywhere because we demand them.

We feel compelled to fight each other, to compete and amass more than our neighbours have, whether through physical combat, political battle, verbal sparring or even just sports. War is an integral part of the human experience. Lust, meanwhile, leads people to do stupid, stupid things, from risking unwanted pregnancy and diseases by having unprotected sex to courting identity theft by giving their credit card numbers to shady websites or provoking the loss of their families and relationships by conducting poorly concealed affairs. Mythology is rife with conflicts fought over sexual jealousy, such as the Trojan War, which started when the King of Troy’s son stole the King of Sparta’s daughter, while even Adam disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit in hopes that Eve would get it on. The need for food is just as basic. Wars still start over the land that produces food, while in the most extreme cases, a lack of food even drives man to eat fellow man.

Huge industries have developed around each need; war, sex and food are not only humanity’s oldest businesses, they are some of the biggest as well. But the question does arise: with three such basic instincts, why the need to tinker? If our needs are so elemental, why does meeting them require such ongoing innovation? The reasons, it turns out, are many.

The Whys Have It

As Thomas Friedman explains in
The World Is Flat
, the iron law of American politics is that the party that harnesses the latest technology dominates. FDR did it with his fireside radio chats, JFK did it with his televised debates against Nixon and the Republicans did it with talk radio. More recently, Barack Obama did it through his use of social media such as YouTube and Twitter, leaving his opponent John McCain—who admitted he didn’t even know how to use his computer—looking like an out-of-touch Luddite.

The American government believes that this rule of politics, a diplomatic form of war, extends to the actual battlefield, which is why its military is both a big creator of technology and a longtime early adopter. Most obviously, superior technology gives an army an advantage over its enemies, at least temporarily and especially psychologically. Once the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, there was no question the Second World War was over. Similarly, the Gulf War was quick and decisive—it lasted only two months—because coalition technology such as smart bombs, GPS and night vision allowed for a devastating aerial bombardment. By the time the ground war started, Iraqi troops were ready to give up. Today, insurgents in Iraq are more determined and aren’t as intimidated by technology—still,
imagine how scary it must be to see robots firing at you. That’s the sort of edge the U.S. military is always looking for, says Colonel James Braden, who fought in Desert Storm and is now a project manager for the marines. “I don’t ever want to be in a fair fight,” he says.
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As military officials are quick to point out, technology also saves lives. Whether it takes the form of body armour, night vision or robot scouts, that’s worth any price. “America, Canada, the U.K., Australia and others are countries willing to make a substantial investment in the safety of their sons and daughters, and thankfully so,” says Joe Dyer, a retired navy vice-admiral and executive with robot maker iRobot. “The value we place on any life is the engine that drives that. Two things—a reduction in the number of people that we put in harm’s way and an improvement in the survivability for those that go into battle—those are the central pillars of American technology.”
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In recent years, technology has focused on making fighting not only safer, but more comfortable. Pilots are now flying robot drones in Iraq from air bases in Nevada, then going home to pick up their kids from soccer practice. Front-line troops, meanwhile, get to spend their downtime with Xbox video games. There’s no more playing the harmonica or writing long letters to Betty Sue back home. Now they’ve got email and the internet.

Besides saving troops’ lives and making them more comfortable, technology can limit the damage inflicted on the enemy, particularly on civilians. This is important in weakening the pervasive circle of hate, where the ruined lives of one war become the revenge-bent soldiers of the next. “There’s an efficiency in attack, but there’s also a minimization of damaged infrastructure and collateral damage and lives lost in military
forces and civilians,” says Dyer. Today’s enemies, he adds, may become tomorrow’s allies.

In the United States, investment in military technology has also become a pillar of scientific research. The military and its various labs, especially the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, do much of the long-term work that is too expensive or far-out for industry. The internet is one example; created by DARPA during the Cold War, the communications network took a full twenty years to get up and running. Vint Cerf, the computer scientist who made the network’s first connections, says civilian companies don’t have the patience for such projects: “If I had to cite one aspect of DARPA’s style, it was its ability to sustain research for long periods of time.”
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As we’ll see, since its inception in the late fifties, DARPA has generated one important technology after another, including cellphones, computer graphics, weather satellites, fuel cells, lasers, the rockets that took man to the moon, robots and, soon, universal translation, thought-controlled prosthetics and invisibility. None of these were developed in one fiscal quarter. War historians and social scientists say DARPA has “shaped the world we live in more than any other government agency, business or organization.”
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National labs staffed with rank-and-file scientists are also key. For these institutions, performing research for the military is a win-win-win situation: they get funding to do basic scientific work and the military gets the results, which are ultimately passed on to the civilian world. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, west of San Francisco, is a good example. The lab was opened in 1952 with a mandate to conduct defencerelated research. Livermore is responsible for looking after the U.S. nuclear arsenal, so much of its research has concentrated
on that area. You’d think such a lab would operate under the strictest of security—and it does, but the scientists there are only too happy to talk about how their weapons work has spun off into everyday life. Those spinoffs have been numerous: three-dimensional collision-modelling software, originally devised to predict the impact of bombs, now used by carmakers to simulate crashes and by beer companies to test new cans; genetic research that kicked off the Human Genome Project; laser-hardening systems that are now helping planes fly farther; and the latest, a proton accelerator beam that promises to revolutionize cancer therapy. George Caporaso, a scientist who has worked on beam research at Livermore for more than thirty years, says there’s no way such breakthroughs could have happened in the civilian world. “When I came here I saw the scale of things that were being done, things private industry wouldn’t dare take a risk to explore, only the labs could do that,” he says. “Really high-risk, high-reward things ... very important problems for national defence and security ... things that in many cases no one else can do.”
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A good deal of technology thereby comes from military spending. And with developments tied to how much money goes into research, the pace of innovation looks set to increase. In 2008 the world’s combined militaries spent an astonishing $1.4 trillion, or about 2.4 percent of global gross domestic product. That amount, up 45 percent since 1999, was a new record. For the most part, this is an American story, as nearly two-thirds of the increase came from the United States.
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American military spending increased 10 percent in 2008 to $607 billion, or 42 percent of the global total, seven times more than second-placed China, with a relatively paltry $84.9 billion.
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The United States spends so much on its military that the Pentagon’s secret “black budget” of $50 billion is more than the entire defence budget of most countries, including the United Kingdom, France and Japan, and more than triple Canada’s.
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Much of this money flows to DARPA, universities and national labs such as Livermore. By one estimate, as many as a third of major university research faculty have been supported by national security agencies since 1945.
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No wonder the United States produces a disproportionate amount of the world’s science and technology: despite having only 4 percent of the world’s population, the country spends about half the world’s research and development dollars.
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It has also made technology part of the cultural fabric. As a U.S. Army report states, “Technology is part of how Americans see themselves, to reach for it is instinctive.”
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Some military inventions have been commercialized in obvious ways; the atomic bomb, for one, was turned into nuclear energy, while jet fighters became jetliners. This book will feature many less obvious spinoffs, like how radar led to the microwave oven or spy satellites spawned Google Earth. The important thing is that the technologies eventually came to market. “The whole history of Silicon Valley is tied up pretty closely with the military. Integrated circuits were designed to guide warheads. All the constraints that were necessary to make that successful drove a lot of the miniaturization to work,” says John Hanke, who helped create Google Earth. The military is “willing to pay millions of dollars per user to make it possible. Things have this very high value that you don’t necessarily see in the consumer space. Once the technology and the basic R&D is paid for, then companies start looking for those secondary markets where you can take the things they know how to do.”
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We’ve come to the point where it’s almost impossible to separate any American-created technology from the American military. Chances are, the military has had a hand in it, and industry has been a willing partner. In the case of Livermore’s collision-modelling software, car companies have been working with the lab since the 1980s to refine the tool. The carmakers and the lab swap software code back and forth in an effort to make it better. “There’s give and go in both directions,” says Ed Zywicz, one of Livermore’s programmers.
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James Braden, the Marine colonel, says the military’s relationship with industry has never been as good as it is today. “As you improve a ground combat vehicle, some of that spins off into the automotive industry and on the flip side of that, many of the things the automotive industry comes up with spin off into our ground combat vehicles,” he says.

War also drives economic activity, a truth that governments have always known. The Second World War, for example, ended the Great Depression by stimulating demand for everything from shoes to steel to submarines. In 1933 a quarter of the American workforce was unemployed and the stock market had lost 90 percent of its value since the crash of four years earlier.
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President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, a package of social reforms, steered the economy in the right direction, but the crisis was still in full flow when war broke out. The United States saw steady economic recovery, first as it supplied its allies and then when it formally joined the war in 1941. The entire might of American industry moved to support the war effort and the nation reaped the benefits. In 1944, when defence spending reached an astounding 86 percent of the federal budget, gross national product climbed a correspondingly huge 28 percent.
In dollar terms, GNP went from $88.6 billion in 1939 to $135 billion in 1944. These are growth rates that economists and stock investors see only in their dreams.

The benefits went beyond mere numbers. By 1944 unemployment had dropped to 1.2 percent of the population— it has never again been that low—and even those people who couldn’t normally find jobs, including many women and African-Americans, were gainfully employed. The contributions of those particular demographics during the war also did much to further their respective rights movements in the years that followed.

History looks to be repeating itself since the “war on terror” began in 2001. American defence spending has shot up 74 percent to $515 billion since 2002. Gross domestic product saw a correspondingly solid rise of 2.9 percent on average between 2001 and 2008, before the global recession set in. In 2007 unemployment was among the lowest it has ever been. The United Kingdom, a major ally in the war on terror, experienced similar benefits. GDP grew an average 2.3 percent while unemployment hit its lowest point in more than two decades in 2007. This growth was not coincidental. As of early 2009, the war on terror had cost the United States more than $850 billion—but much of that taxpayer money didn’t just evaporate, it went right back into the industries that did the heavy lifting.
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Trying Out New Positions

The pornography industry spends money on technology too, though it generally doesn’t create it: there are no labs with scientists in white coats working on better porn innovations.
Instead, the industry exerts its influence as an early adopter. Porn dollars often make it possible for technology-creating companies to stay afloat and improve their innovations to the point where they’re ready for a mainstream audience. Just ask Brad Casemore, the product manager for a small Toronto-based company called Spatial View. In 2009 the company introduced software that allows iPhone owners to view 3-D photos and videos. A porn company, Pink Visual, was one of the first to license the technology and produce content with it. “The people in the industry feel a great sense of urgency to stay ahead of their competitors and, no pun intended, they have a really demanding audience,” Casemore says. “It’s an audience that’s continually looking for new ways to access content.”
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