Tech billionaires have big plans for us. We are under no obligation to comply.
Be thankful for tools that leverage our humanity.
Avoid tools that reduce us to automatons.
And develop the wisdom to know the difference.
~Tom Mahon~
The billionaires who own the digital world have big plans for us and our children.
And as they race against each other to become the world’s first trillionaire, they draw us ever further into their all-seeing, all-knowing, all-digital eco-system.
The plan has worked so far, encountering only minimal resistance from us. In fact, we seemed quite happy to be taken in. But now it’s entering hyperdrive, and it’s getting serious.
As a decades-long observer, participant and promoter of the digital world, and who chose to drop out at some personal cost, I think it’s time we review our situation before we step any further into the quicksand.
By no means am I saying turn back the clock and give up all the benefits of the new technologies. That’s not going to happen, nor should it. But, in the words of Elmer Fudd, Be cao-fu. Be vewwy, vewwy cao-fu.
The Billionaire Boys Club (BBC) has done an excellent job selling us on the attractions of “the digital life.” It started out simply enough in the ’80s with desktop computers at work, big screen entertainment at home, and portable sound systems for in between. We were free to take all or some, and leave the rest behind.
But coming soon, children will be asked, or told, to have “smart devices” surgically implanted to serve as “performance enhancers.” And what parent would balk at that, if doing so meant leaving their child relatively retarded compared to all the other “enhanced kids”?
As a freelance tech writer in the early ’70s, my first clients assured me that their mainframe computers would make air travel safer, health care more affordable, and education more broadly based. They meant it, and I believe it.
But for all the computerization ever since, none of those hopes came to fruition. In fact, every sector that addresses the public good is in bad shape now: health, education, infrastructure.
For all the digitization that has gone on in the past half-century, and the unprecedented fortunes that “innovators” and investors have made, the quality of life for the majority is stagnant or declining.
The polite term to describe this is “income inequality,” but in fact we’re teetering on the brink of dystopia, and entering a new feudal order of indentured servitude.
And whereas the first feudal system a millennium ago considered land (real property) to be the basis of wealth, the new system considers knowledge (intellectual property) as the basis of wealth.
Who could have imagined, in the exuberant early days of the Internet, that within a quarter century it would allow a foreign power to elect an American president? Or make us question the very notion of truth? Or keep track of our movements and words, and soon our feelings, to the point we may get rewarded or punished for a thought even before we act on it.
Our prospects are not bright. With home appliances hooked to the Internet of Things (IoT) we are under constant surveillance; jobs are replaced by smart machines and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.); and the focus of much research in health, education and welfare will benefit only a relatively few ultra-wealthy who plan to upload their brains to computers and remain conscious forever in the Singularity.
Of course, I could be very, very wrong. And I hope I am. But as I watch the digital kingpins lay out their desired future for us, it seems clear their wish to digitalize our live is presented as an inevitability; a fait accompli. You have to get on-board. There is no alternative. This is your future.
I date the start of this digital arrogance to Bill Gates’ 1995 best-seller, The Road Ahead, in which Gates repeatedly says, “In the future, you will…”
Who sez? Certainly, he could direct the future of his company, but even having a net worth of billions of dollars should not give someone the authority to determine the future of society.
Let’s acknowledge the obvious. We are not digital beings: we poop and pee and belch and fart, and we grow ear wax and toe jam and belly lint. We are analog beings. Products of nature. And we do not need to apologize for that. Of course, we can and should use digital technology as appropriate to make life easier, safer, and build a more just, civil and equitable society. But we will not outgrow our natural ways, at least not for a very long time.
The original selling point for digitization was that it allowed making limitless copies, and each copy would be as good as the original. (Whereas, if you pull a fourth-generation photo print, it loses significant detail.)
The technology is not the problem; it never was. The problem is that a small group of multi-billionaires have taken upon themselves the authority to reprogram us as they race against each other to become the world’s first trillionaire. And that is happening all around us right now.
And it is as serious a problem as climate change, though largely overlooked.
The difference between this new Feudalism and the old one is that serfs back then had only to look out from their hovels — hungry, cold and ill-clothed — to see the grand estate on the hill to understand their situation. Today’s serfs are increasingly encased in a virtual, artificial, augmented bubble of giggle-happiness such that they will defend the system even as it grinds them down.
Or, they (we) are left in a state of perpetual rage, as tsunamis of violent and salacious entertainment appear on our digital devices 24/7 to hold our attention until ads come on to arouse our greed and envy. We have elevated traditional vices — rage, violence, greed and envy — to be the virtues of our consumer society. And only a century ago, consumption was considered a fatal disease (tuberculosis).
It’s wonderful that health care is at last embracing digital technology, for its efficiencies, its portability and its economy.
But delve further into the issue, and notice how much dis-ease, and resulting disease, is caused today by the stress at home, work and school as people burn out trying to live at lightspeed.
Tools are meant to serve us. Not the other way around. We should not have to reconfigure ourselves every 18 months to keep up with Moore’s Law.
The digital industry driving the consumer society is starting to look more like organized religion: convincing people that their natural selves are dirty or broken (“wash off those icky pheromones”) and need grace and perfection (“and buy some perfume”).
So, we are urged to put away the corrupted old self, and are born again as gleaming avatars on the global social media screen. It’s just a matter of having the passion to scale from who we are to become awesome. And if we get with the program, we’ll find salvation and happiness at last in “the cloud.”
Who needs prophets; we have though-leaders instead.
I’m not a Luddite. I am very aware of how much efficiency , economy and convenience the digital revolution has brought. Think of it, the Internet provides nearly instant access to nearly infinite information. It’s every philosopher’s dream. And after two heart attacks, I know I owe my life to advanced medical technology.
I promoted the digital revolution for a long time, from Ground Zero in Silicon Valley, until I began to see where it was going. Then I couldn’t promote any more.
My criticism is not based on scholarship, but on lived experiences. I was severely criticized by my supervisor once for using sentences in my reports. I asked what I should use instead, and was told, “Bullet points: four to a page and six words to a bullet.” I assured her that I would try, but it would be a hard habit to break.
I interviewed Intel co-founder Robert Noyce one afternoon in 1983 after the introduction of Intel’s crown jewel: the microprocessor; arguably the most important tool since the printing press. He spoke like an excited child about how that device could go to places no human could go to get information that was previously unavailable, whether deep under the sea or far out in space.
But around the turn of the 21st Century, something flipped. Traditionally, tools were made to leverage our limited human capabilities: our muscles, senses and brains. But increasingly, the tools are designed to leverage us, to shape and manipulate us to the desired ends of the tool-owners. So when they say, “In the future, you will…”, they mean it.
Increasingly, we’re now the products of the tools; the manufactured output. We have let ourselves become the tools of our tools, and of the tool-owners. And we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Listening to many ‘innovators’ and investment bankers today, I hear they want to make the world a better place, and make several billion dollars while doing so. But I’ve never seen a presentation — whether expressed in sentences or bullet points — that defines “better.” At least not in any way that contributes to the betterment of anybody I know.
In the coming phase, we’re told, we have to adapt to these, among many other, inevitabilities:
· Internet of Things (IoT)
· Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)
· The Singularity
IoT — This scheme aims to hook everything to the Internet, the better to measure, manage and manipulate all things: natural and man-made. And, incidentally, require the use of a bazillion chips.
But why do we have to hook everything in our own lives to the Internet. Agreed, it’s very efficient in an industrial or commercial setting, but not in our daily lives. And the industry knows full well that anything with an Internet Protocol (IP) address is hackable and subject to surveillance. (Or, is that the whole point of the exercise?)
The digital industry is driving full speed ahead with this scheme, never mind the energy required to keep track of everything on the planet, and the evident hubris thinking we can manage the earth better than nature can.
I sometimes wonder if the thought-leaders ever step outside the digital bubble long enough to see the damage that human mis-management has already done to Earth. (Or is that the point of creating an artificial, virtual, augmented world, so we don’t have to see how we have trashed our natural home?)
A.I. — Nothing speaks more to the distain our digital masters have for us than the drive to automate every job under the sun. And when asked what that will mean to employment, incomes, even a sense of purpose for the un-billionaires, their glib reply is, “It’ll all work out well. Trust us.”
I don’t. Based only on the recent public misstatements of guys in the BBC, it will be a long time before they show they are trustworthy and acting in our best interests. Their underlying message is, “Don’t get in the way of our plans to be trillionaires.” And my reply is, “Watch us.”
(I watched several semiconductor start-ups in the 1980s as they formed “strategic alliances” with Asian chip firms. In exchange for several million dollars of investment, a US firm would trade away its Intellectual Property — its unique know-how — to access fabrication (manufacturing) facilities in Asia. And when I’d ask venture capitalists back then if there was some risk in this, they jaunty reply was, “Well, Tom, we certainly hope not.” It’s no surprise that in time some of those Asian firms left their US “strategic partners” in the dust.
(The ability of some savvy, number-crunching bankers to engage in magical thinking — “It will all work out just fine” — is breathtaking.)
And then there is the dirty little secret under all of these issues: greater system complexity yields greater fragility. In a race between Moore’s Law and Murphy’s Law — Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong — experience says to put your money on Murph.
(In fact, in advance of a possible Internet crash it would be prudent if every home and work place had two weeks’ supplies of food, water, gasoline, cash, etc. However unlikely such a global Internet crash is, it is as prudent as preparing for a major earthquake in coastal California.)
The Singularity — Soon the algorithms themselves will be so sophisticated they will create the next generation algorithms. We will finally have become the tools of our tools, and no one knows for certain whether our tools may decide on their own that they don’t need us anymore.
In fact, we may be approaching the time when we confront a social, even biological, event horizon — crossing a line beyond which there is no turning back.
The leading proponent for this is Ray Kurzweil, a technology scholar and futurist, many of whose predictions since the 1960s have been spot on.
The promotional copy for his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, describes it as “an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today — the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.”
In the hope of living until that happens, Kurzweil is reported to take about 150 supplements a day. This leaves open the question of why not skip the pills and enjoy the day before him.
This Singularity would be to intelligence on Earth what the Cambrian explosion was to life on Earth a half-billion years ago. Back then, for reasons still not understood, there was mass explosion of complex organisms over a relatively short period of time creating the diversity of living things we have on Earth now.
And while the Singularity, if it happens, might benefit the brotherhood of tech-elite billionaires, what of all the others? What if 90+ percent of people are made redundant at work — not just coal miners but brain surgeons and supreme court justices. What then? To them and to society?
The reality is, nobody know for certain what would happen. In effect, this RBSP (Really Big Science Project) could be a major transformation — perhaps irreversible — of life and mind on Earth. And it seems to be undertaken with an attitude of, “Let’s just throw the switch and see what happens.”
To them the uncertainty of the fate of the human race is the exciting challenge. Perhaps never has such an abundance of intelligence been offset by such an astounding lack of wisdom.
The Singularity may be our destiny, and over time our descendants may shift from carbon-based individuals, such as we are now, to a silicon-based, global mesh of intelligent awareness. Proceeding with caution in that direction is appropriate. But rushing to an event of that magnitude simply to occur within the lifetime a very small group of ultra-wealthy men takes hubris to a whole new level.
We do so well accumulating massive amounts of information, but acting on that information wisely seems to elude us. The great tragedy of the Scientific, Industrial and Information Revolutions is that they were largely undertaken with no reference to virtue, meaning or long-term purpose.
We talk endlessly about “progress,” but never ask what we want to progress towards. If we could build a handheld device containing all the information in the universe, but if we lack serenity or compassion, so what? I mean that literally, “So what!”
The world we have known — of waste, greed and infinite consumption of finite resources — is collapsing all around us. But rather than use our accumulated information to plan a humane, civil, virtuous society we seem to want to make our vices more easily accessible. The availability of porn 24/7 probably does not help sustain family life.
Even the moral documents we use to guide us date from a far distant past, a time we cannot even imagine, written by men who could never have imagined our world.
I was in the technology bubble for decades, and eventually had to pull out because I saw how many of us that were clever enough to be in there were not clever enough to examine the Kool-Aid we were drinking and serving to others.
We get caught up with the rush and our good fortune to be on the winning side of history, and don’t notice when a number of our colleagues are gone by the next trade show.
The speed of the products, the rush to create a winning time-to-market strategy, the privilege of having gourmet dinners brought to your office every night so you don’t have to go home (to your family) for dinner — it all feels really, really good. So much so, we become incapable of self-correcting.
And that does you no good when you turn 45 and grey hairs start to show. And if you haven’t made your millions by then, your work life is pretty much over, with not even a gold watch to show for the effort.
I’ve asked designers of A.I. software what they plan to do when their software replaces them. The several times I have done this, I got the sense they had never considered that possibility. What then? And to whom and how and why?
©2019, Tom Mahon
Coming soon: Where to go from here
