Elodia Vielle Blanchard, Centre Alexandre Koyre

This paper is based on a historical study of the limits to growth controversy that took place in the 1970s, and of the rise of mathematical models dealing with “global human future”. It is concerned with the question of “technology and the future” in two different ways. First, it relates how computer technologies helped to represent future developments for human society as a whole, by constructing mathematical “global models”; second, it shows that the various models involved in the limits debate testified to two different “views of the world”, in which technology always played a fundamental role.

The military objectives of the Second World War, and of the Cold War, stimulated research into computerized management methods in the United States, associated with the development of “system theories”. These methods and theories were at first closely linked to their military application areas, but then evolved through application to various civilian contexts. This was the case of Jay Forrester’s methodology, called System Dynamics. It was conceived in order to optimize industrial management, then applied to urban management, and subsequently the newly formed Club of Rome chose to use it to examine the question of the future of humanity.

Computers completely renewed the field of “future studies”, which had developed in the 1960s, mainly in Europe, in reaction to the American “technological forecasting” tradition, criticized for its technocratic aspects. The Club of Rome report showed the results of simulations made using the system dynamics model. It concluded that it would be better to stop demographic and industrial growth, in order to avoid a huge ecological and economic collapse. This idea, which was not well received among scientists and economists in particular, stimulated the conception of new models supposed to prove it to be wrong.

For instance, William Nordhaus elaborated his DICE model at the Cowles Foundation, in reaction to the conclusion of the Club of Rome report, and the derivations of this model are still used today in environmental economics. In this paper I shall examine how the visions of the world, and in particular of the possibilities of technology, differ between The Club of Rome and Nordhaus. On one side technology is seen as potentially dangerous, difficult to control, and at the same time unable to resolve the real problems. On the other side, technology is seen as extremely powerful, and problems posed by “nature” as never very serious. The conclusion of my presentation will be that the technologically utopian position has today completely replaced the technologically pessimist position common in the 1970s, and called for a renewal of social values and of ways of life. Today, solutions to the ecological crisis are seen as essentially technological.