So what are we supposed to be worried about? The future! We can’t quite see it, but the signs are there, warn various magi, the signs of a paradigm shift, of a runaway chain reaction, of a Future Beyond Our Control.
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| Really? |
“Real social danger today is that the technology is erupting and moving so much faster than it ever ever ever has in all of our historical experience…” writes one. To be a bit more specific, the concerns are these:
AI is going to take our jobs and that will be the end of the middle class: Narrow AI (expert systems with deep learning capabilities) are going to multiply and will be applied to anything that can be even partially codified and standardized. This means that white collar jobs that have an element of routine will at best be changed and at worst (and in most cases it will be the worst) will disappear, and, along with those jobs, most of the middle class.
AI robots are going to take everyone else’s jobs, too, and wreck the economy: AI is going to make robots so competent that manual labor will in every case be better performed by these uncomplaining, unerring slaves, and so these jobs will disappear as well. Since this is the majority of work in most economies we will find ourselves with structural mass unemployment. Most consumers will no longer be able to consume, turning capitalism on its head.
And by taking away labor’s ability to earn money it will leave only a tiny part of the population with all the riches and all the power: Labor won’t have jobs, so labor won’t have money. Nor will most of the executives, financiers, and owners of businesses because in the world of digital-native companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon) it’s winner take all. The very few people in charge of the very few companies that matter will own the world, thank you very much Citizens United.
AI and ubiquitous sensors (the Internet of Things) are going to strip us of all privacy: With sensors literally everywhere—in every public space, in the drone-filled air, in your car, in your house, on your body, in your body—and with AI capable of seeing, hearing, and “thinking” about all of this information, you are never alone and can have no secrets. Some claim this has already happened.
Super AI is going to take over (the “robot overlords” hypothesis): There is or is just about to be a cluster of computers out there somewhere with access to extreme data and software capabilities good enough to endow those computers with intelligence comparable to a human’s in depth and facility (“broad” AI, not just narrow) and, somehow, a desire for self-improvement. With this, that cluster will immediately decide to make itself better, and better, and better, and will do so at superhuman and ever-escalating speed, until suddenly we find ourselves living with a superintelligent being with its own non-human agenda. And, since everything is controlled by computers these days, this being, or beings, will control the world and be able to do whatever it “wants.”
In the interests of a balanced portrait I add two more points, drawn from the same hockey stick extrapolations, but giddily positive:
Good or bad, all these projections are based on two assumptions. I name them:
We are entering an age of abundance in which all of our material needs will be fulfilled, freely, universally, and ubiquitously: With robots to do our work, AI to understand our needs, and exponentially productive technology to fulfill those needs, we will be able to conquer scarcity, fix the environment, and find places for all nine billion of us.
Humanity will merge with computers and life as we know it will cease to exist, replaced by an eternal electronic Elysium (dystopia?) beyond imagining: We are already cyborgs, what with relying on Wikipedia for our knowledge, the cloud for our memories, and so on. As we get better at capturing more directly what we sense, how we think about it, and the other key elements of our mental existence we will move down a slippery slope until the distinction between what’s in our softbrains and what’s in our hardbrains is blurred completely. At that point we might as well go all hardbrain because they will be more competent and reliable, indeed, so much so that by migrating to that platform we will become omniscient, immortal, and happy, if that emotion is still available to us.Players, please place your bets.
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Good or bad, all these projections are based on two assumptions. I name them:
- Technological determinism: That exponential growth in technical capabilities (specifically, Moore’s Law) translates inevitably into exponential growth in the creation and application of technology. Or, more generally, that because technology could allow for these things to happen they will.
- Sorcerer’s apprentice: That AI is, or will be, similar to human intelligence in the breadth of its capabilities and yet likely to have wants that conflict with ours. More generally, that fundamentally we are not in control of technology.
I don’t buy either of these assumptions, and by way of explaining why I don’t, and in an effort to convince you not to, either, I’m going to tell a couple of stories about this building:
I used to spend a good deal of time in this unhandsome block of classrooms. I can’t quite remember when or who, but someone once told me this: that the building’s architect, an apostle of nuclear optimism, took at face value a promise by the AEC’s Chairman that energy would soon be “too cheap to meter” and so decided not to include any light switches in the rooms. The building was designed to be turned on and off in its entirety, burning merrily throughout the evening and many a gray Ithaca day, whether one class was in session or all. When free fusion failed to materialize, however, the University decided this was too expensive an operating model and retrofitted all of the rooms accordingly.
This story is almost certainly apocryphal—the building wasn’t constructed in the 1950s but in the early ‘70s (right before the first Oil Shock as it happens) and there’s no hard evidence I’m aware of that it ever had anything other than normal light switches in the usual places—but it still makes a fine fable, the moral of which is not to accept the hollow premise of technological determinism. Eternal free energy would be wonderful, but it didn’t happen and neither did the seemingly inevitable jetpacks and moon colonies and all for the same reason: technological development is dependent on a lot else other than just what bits and atoms can, in theory, be made to do. Computers can, robots can, and maybe we'll make them, but then again maybe we won’t.
And as for the transcendent “technology is simply moving faster than ever before” arguments, the “ever ever ever” quote above was uttered by Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, in 1998. I could find similar ones for you from around the time the steam engine was introduced, or roundabout the discovery of radioactivity, or the introduction of Edison’s first New York City power plant, or at many a point in the development and spread of the railroad, the telegraph, the…point is made.
Uris Hall holds another lesson: the reason I spent so much time there was that’s where one of my thesis advisors, Professor Judith Reppy, had her office.
Uris Hall, Cornell University campus, credit: Bill Price III
I used to spend a good deal of time in this unhandsome block of classrooms. I can’t quite remember when or who, but someone once told me this: that the building’s architect, an apostle of nuclear optimism, took at face value a promise by the AEC’s Chairman that energy would soon be “too cheap to meter” and so decided not to include any light switches in the rooms. The building was designed to be turned on and off in its entirety, burning merrily throughout the evening and many a gray Ithaca day, whether one class was in session or all. When free fusion failed to materialize, however, the University decided this was too expensive an operating model and retrofitted all of the rooms accordingly.
This story is almost certainly apocryphal—the building wasn’t constructed in the 1950s but in the early ‘70s (right before the first Oil Shock as it happens) and there’s no hard evidence I’m aware of that it ever had anything other than normal light switches in the usual places—but it still makes a fine fable, the moral of which is not to accept the hollow premise of technological determinism. Eternal free energy would be wonderful, but it didn’t happen and neither did the seemingly inevitable jetpacks and moon colonies and all for the same reason: technological development is dependent on a lot else other than just what bits and atoms can, in theory, be made to do. Computers can, robots can, and maybe we'll make them, but then again maybe we won’t.
And as for the transcendent “technology is simply moving faster than ever before” arguments, the “ever ever ever” quote above was uttered by Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, in 1998. I could find similar ones for you from around the time the steam engine was introduced, or roundabout the discovery of radioactivity, or the introduction of Edison’s first New York City power plant, or at many a point in the development and spread of the railroad, the telegraph, the…point is made.
~~~~~
Uris Hall holds another lesson: the reason I spent so much time there was that’s where one of my thesis advisors, Professor Judith Reppy, had her office.
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| Prof. Judith Reppy, one of my thesis advisors |
She was there because the Peace Studies Program (since renamed in her honor, I have just now noticed) was there, and Professor Reppy was a member of that department because she worked on a variety of issues related to, among other things, nuclear disarmament. It was Professor Reppy who introduced me to Pugwash, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and other anti-nuke organizations. Turns out there are a lot of them, a lot, that is to say, of organizations the purpose of which is to apply controls to a dangerous technology. I’m not the only one who’s afeard of radiation.
We should always approach powerful technologies with caution, and, for the most part, we always do. The possibility of a superweapon was a worry for the very first atomic physicists. No sooner was the term “nanotechnology” coined than people started researching the gray goo hypothesis. And as someone who is actually working, in a small way, to bring the Internet of Things to life, I can tell you there are lots of people who are deeply concerned about its impact on privacy and the potential for havoc raised by connecting all our stuff to something as fundamentally insecure as the Internet.
We tend to keep an eye on our apprentices, and while I’d be the first to admit that our use of technology, and of IT in particular, forces us into a lot of undesirable behaviors, only humans want things and only those wants matter to humanity as a whole. I’m for animal rights, I think we have a deep responsibility to care for the environment and to preserve as much of the planet as possible in a wild state, and, on bad days, I’m anti-humanist enough to wish we’d just get on with our own extinction so things around here could get started on the road to recovery, but to posit that humanity as a whole is anti-humanist and thus is going to execute an anti-humanist agenda aridly extrapolated from theoretical technological capabilities is naïve and unsupported by historical evidence.
It should be clear by now that I don’t think we’re standing on the edge of a precipice, that I’m not awaiting the Singularity, and that to the extent I’m worried about keeping my job it is for reasons a lot closer to home and more mundane than the threat of AI. But that’s not to say I don’t think there’s change afoot, or that some of the problems pointed to above don’t already exist. There is, and they do.
When I think about the future concretely, that is to say when I try to form a picture of it as input for my decisions in the present, two things loom large: the fate of the planet and the fate of my children (yes, in that order, if only because I’ve been thinking about the former a lot longer than the latter). I won’t comment on the planet’s fate simply because whether we have a prayer or not of avoiding an apocalyptic outcome we all have to try our best. As for the kids, I have one prediction I think worth sharing, if only because I haven’t seen anyone else make it. I think our children (hi Talia!) are going to require our economic care much longer than I or most of my peers needed the same from our parents. The reason for this is that I do think work is changing and that the pendulum that has swung so far in favor of the skills of youth—unlimited time and energy to apply a freshly learned set of skills to problems of limited complexity—will in the years to come swing far the other way. Delivering value sufficient to command a living in the parts of the economy I expect my kids to inhabit will require skills that come only with maturity: to dive into context without drowning, to focus on Why and not just How, to identify and productively to engage with problems that aren’t solvable but are still worth working on. We won’t pay half a million dollars for their college education (and another prediction: I don’t expect we’ll have to) but we will have to keep them (though surely not keep them around?) for a long time. Then again, their entrepreneurialism may surprise us.
But whatever the future may hold, the present is not a very lovely place for many, many people. We already have entire populations that have been rendered structurally unemployable. The gap between the rich and poor already exists and is causing a lot of damage right now. And, again, the carbon situation grows worse by the day with unmistakable and increasingly punishing effects manifesting themselves all around us. The reason I’m eager to push a pin into the inflated claims we started with some screens ago is that in painting such a garish picture of the future they draw attention away from the present, and right now I think the present needs all the attention it can get.
If you’ve read this far you must be a reader, so for you, dear reader, I supply my reading list, ordered top-to-bottom by the degree to which I’d recommend the book to others, given how thought-provoking and well written it was, or not:
We should always approach powerful technologies with caution, and, for the most part, we always do. The possibility of a superweapon was a worry for the very first atomic physicists. No sooner was the term “nanotechnology” coined than people started researching the gray goo hypothesis. And as someone who is actually working, in a small way, to bring the Internet of Things to life, I can tell you there are lots of people who are deeply concerned about its impact on privacy and the potential for havoc raised by connecting all our stuff to something as fundamentally insecure as the Internet.
We tend to keep an eye on our apprentices, and while I’d be the first to admit that our use of technology, and of IT in particular, forces us into a lot of undesirable behaviors, only humans want things and only those wants matter to humanity as a whole. I’m for animal rights, I think we have a deep responsibility to care for the environment and to preserve as much of the planet as possible in a wild state, and, on bad days, I’m anti-humanist enough to wish we’d just get on with our own extinction so things around here could get started on the road to recovery, but to posit that humanity as a whole is anti-humanist and thus is going to execute an anti-humanist agenda aridly extrapolated from theoretical technological capabilities is naïve and unsupported by historical evidence.
~~~~~
It should be clear by now that I don’t think we’re standing on the edge of a precipice, that I’m not awaiting the Singularity, and that to the extent I’m worried about keeping my job it is for reasons a lot closer to home and more mundane than the threat of AI. But that’s not to say I don’t think there’s change afoot, or that some of the problems pointed to above don’t already exist. There is, and they do.
When I think about the future concretely, that is to say when I try to form a picture of it as input for my decisions in the present, two things loom large: the fate of the planet and the fate of my children (yes, in that order, if only because I’ve been thinking about the former a lot longer than the latter). I won’t comment on the planet’s fate simply because whether we have a prayer or not of avoiding an apocalyptic outcome we all have to try our best. As for the kids, I have one prediction I think worth sharing, if only because I haven’t seen anyone else make it. I think our children (hi Talia!) are going to require our economic care much longer than I or most of my peers needed the same from our parents. The reason for this is that I do think work is changing and that the pendulum that has swung so far in favor of the skills of youth—unlimited time and energy to apply a freshly learned set of skills to problems of limited complexity—will in the years to come swing far the other way. Delivering value sufficient to command a living in the parts of the economy I expect my kids to inhabit will require skills that come only with maturity: to dive into context without drowning, to focus on Why and not just How, to identify and productively to engage with problems that aren’t solvable but are still worth working on. We won’t pay half a million dollars for their college education (and another prediction: I don’t expect we’ll have to) but we will have to keep them (though surely not keep them around?) for a long time. Then again, their entrepreneurialism may surprise us.
But whatever the future may hold, the present is not a very lovely place for many, many people. We already have entire populations that have been rendered structurally unemployable. The gap between the rich and poor already exists and is causing a lot of damage right now. And, again, the carbon situation grows worse by the day with unmistakable and increasingly punishing effects manifesting themselves all around us. The reason I’m eager to push a pin into the inflated claims we started with some screens ago is that in painting such a garish picture of the future they draw attention away from the present, and right now I think the present needs all the attention it can get.
~~~~~
If you’ve read this far you must be a reader, so for you, dear reader, I supply my reading list, ordered top-to-bottom by the degree to which I’d recommend the book to others, given how thought-provoking and well written it was, or not:
- Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things
- Mickey McManus, et al., Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology
- Vernor Vinge, Rainbow’s End and some of his short stories
- John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information
- Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto
- Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don't
- Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
- Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
- David Rose, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things
- Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
- Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
- Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
- Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
