New World Same Humans #40
Who is in the driving seat of history: humans, or our machines?
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This week, a news item got me thinking about an old question. Who is really in the driving seat of history: we humans, or our machines?
The essay that follows is my attempt at an answer that makes sense, and is useful, in 2020.
Given the scale of the question, a million and more viewpoints are possible. So if you find yourself – as you no doubt will – wanting to disagree, challenge, or add to my thoughts, then come to the NWSH Slack group and join the debate. You can find details on how to sign up at the end of this email.
For now, though, find a quiet spot, lean back and absorb this essay, which is called Welcome to the Technocene.
📥 Fast Download: Welcome to the Technocene
🤔 Do we shape technology? Or does it shape us? Researchers at Columbia University say CEOs are changing the way they speak on quarterly earnings calls, to cater to the AIs they know are listening. It’s a tiny glimpse of an old and complex question: do we shape our technology, or does it shape us? Right now, that question feels particularly timely. Because it is being posed afresh – and perhaps in its most powerful and final form – by AI.
🤷 We’re supposed to believe it’s a bit of both. To restate: does society give rise to the technologies we build and use? Or is the other way around: do the technologies we build give rise to the society we see around us? Karl Marx produced the 20th-century’s most famous answer: tech produces society. But technological determinism is now out of vogue. Mainstream thinking is that technology and society exist in a complex interplay of influence in both directions.
🧬 New thinking on evolution challenges that consensus. What if mainstream thinking is wrong? In What Technology Wants, iconic technologist Kevin Kelly argues for a radical idea. That is, that technology evolves along a pre-determined path, the narrow boundaries of which are set by the fundamental properties of the universe. Kelly points to evidence that biological evolution is like this, too. Under this view, machine intelligence is technology’s inevitable end destination.
🤖 Thinking machines are wresting control from us. It’s worth clarifying this talk of end points. When we say that machine intelligence is technology’s end point, that doesn’t mean no more technological evolution will occur. It means that in some important sense AIs are the last, or ultimate, machine. Why does this matter? Because the arrival the last machine means our question about technology and society feels more potent than ever. We’re supposed to believe in a back-and-forth of influence in both directions. But now we’re aware this interplay feels ever more one-sided. In the grip of a new kind of machine, we feel in danger of losing control.
🌍 Welcome to the Technocene. Debate will continue to rage over technological convergence. But the idea offers us a powerful way to reframe our view of what is happening now. It does that by asking us to believe that technology is a force with its own imperatives. In recent years, we’ve come to understand ourselves as living in the Anthropocene: an age in which humans have more influence over nature than it does over us. Perhaps, though, we should better understand ourselves as living in an age in which technology has started to wield more influence over us that we do over it. Under this view, the Anthropocene is over. We live, now, in the Technocene.
🤔 Do we shape technology? Or does it shape us?
Imagine you’re the CEO of a publicly traded company. Each quarter, you perform a well-worn rite known as the quarterly earnings call.
On this call, you talk a bunch of journalists through the company’s recent performance. You can’t change the results; they are what they are. So the call is, in part, an exercise in rhetoric. Get it wrong and the markets may decide that Things Are Not Going Well. The share price will fall. Your bosses – the shareholders – will be unhappy.
These calls are, in short, a big deal. And this week, intriguing news emerged about the way they are evolving.
Researchers from Columbia University say CEOs and senior executives are changing the way they speak on quarterly earnings calls, in order to cater to the algorithms they know are listening. They’re reportedly avoiding words known to trigger negative algorithmic judgement, such as ‘claimants’ and ‘cease’. And placing more stress words that AIs seem to like, such as ‘improving’ and ‘innovator’.
We built AI to serve our needs. Now, some of the most powerful in our society seem – in this small way at least – to be serving it.
This story is just a tiny glimpse of that reversal. But it’s enough to remind me of a far broader question. Do we shape our technology, or does it shape us? When it comes to the unfolding of history, who is really in the driving seat: humans, or machines?
That question has a long history of its own. But right now, it feels particularly timely. Because now, that question is being posed afresh – and perhaps in its most powerful and final form – by a new kind of technology: the thinking machine.
If we are to shape our destiny in the 21st-century, we need to find an answer.
🤷 We’re supposed to believe it’s a bit of both
To restate the question in a more detailed form: does society give rise to the technologies we build and use? Or is the other way around: do the technologies we build give rise to the society we see around us?
The most famous answer to that question is very famous indeed. It was produced by Karl Marx, who came down heavily on the ‘tech gives rise to society’ side of the argument. Close to the heart of Marxism is the idea that technologies determine the fundamental economic relations between us, which in turn determine the shape of the societies in which we live. When technology evolves, that gives rise to a new set of economic relations, and society changes accordingly.
This is technological determinism. And, via Marxism, during the first half of the 20th-century variants of it formed the dominant story about technology and its influence on human societies. As Marxism’s star waned, though, that story faded away. Today, strangely enough, you can hear a ghostly echo of technological determinism in the worldview of Silicon Valley’s techno-utopians, a tribe not otherwise known for their adherence to Marx. But the intellectual mainstream has embraced a view that can best be summarised as a bit of one, a bit of the other.
Technology and society, holds this view, exist in a complex interplay. Sure, technology shapes society. But society – its institutions, structures, cultures and more – also shape technology. It’s back and forth; chicken and egg.
🧬 New thinking on evolution challenges that consensus
But what if the mainstream view is wrong?
In What Technology Wants, the iconic writer and technologist Kevin Kelly argues for an entirely different view of all this. One that escapes the chicken-egg problem of ‘does tech create society, or society create tech?’
The evolution of technology, says Kelly, is tightly constrained by the pre-conditions set by our universe: that means the laws of physics, and the nature of energy and matter. And, as such, that evolution travels along a narrow path determined by those conditions. New technologies – the wheel, the camera, the computer – are not in the final summation invented by human societies. Rather, they are emerge from an inevitable evolutionary process, which is predetermined by the fundamental properties of the universe.
This idea is controversial. And it is founded in another controversial idea, which is that biological evolution works in the same way.
Mainstream evolutionary theory has it that the evolution of life on Earth has followed a highly contingent course. Rerun the story, says this idea, and via random chance things would play out differently. But now, some biologists argue that evolution isn’t like this at all. Rather, they say, the fundamental properties of our universe push lifeforms to converge on a set of inevitable answers to the challenges posed by survival. This idea is called evolutionary convergence, and its proponents point to evidence of it in nature. The eye, for example, has evolved independently up to 40 times. Time and again, evolution has converged on this form. Is that simply coincidence? Or is it best understood as something more? Is the basic form of the eye, in some sense, embedded within the fundamental properties of the universe?
Kelly’s view is that just as the eye is inevitable, so too is the camera. And just as human intelligence is the inevitable end point of biological evolution, so machine intelligence is the inevitable destination aimed at by the evolution of technology.
🤖 Thinking machines are wresting control from us
It’s worth clarifying this talk of end points.
When we say that human intelligence is biological evolution’s end point, that isn’t intended to suggest that evolution is no longer happening. We all know it is; we can see that.
Similarly, the idea that machine intelligence is technology’s end point doesn’t mean that no more technological evolution will occur. But it does mean that in some important sense thinking machines are the last, or ultimate, machine. We see that idea most powerfully in the realisation that they are the last machines humans will ever have to build. Because once we create thinking machines that are complex enough, it will be them, and not us, that build their descendants.
Why does this matter?
Because the arrival of this moment – the moment of the last machine – means the chicken-egg question about technology and society feels more potent than ever. We’re supposed to believe that the answer to the question, ‘does tech make society or society make tech?’ is a complex back and forth of influence in both directions.
But we’re aware that in practise this interplay feels ever more one-sided. A new kind of technology is starting to shape society in ways we don’t understand. In the grip of a new kind of machine, we feel in danger of losing control.
🌍 Welcome to the Technocene
Debate will continue to rage over convergence, both biological and technological. I find something compelling about the idea. In particular, in its ability to reframe our view of what is happening now.
In recent years, the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley – which was informed, as we saw, by the ghost of technological determinism – has faced a push back. Critics have argued that society can, and must, shape technology to its own ends. These critics often reach for the same phrase when they seek to frame the challenge posed by thinking machines: ‘AI is just a tool, like any other’. They mean, ‘AI, like any other technology, is something we use. It does not, and should not, use us.’
I share the impulse to push back against 20 years of techno-utopianism. But whenever I hear, ‘AI is just a tool’, I find something unconvincing about it. The CEOs changing their speech to suit algorithmic judgement are not experiencing AI as, ‘only a tool’, but as something else, too.
Convergence suggests another way of thinking about all this. It does that by asking us to believe something radical. That the technologies we build – the tools we create – are not in the final summation invented by us. But rather are the result of an inevitable evolutionary process, with its own set of imperatives. And that means those imperatives, and the tools to which they give rise, shape us as much as we shape them.
We intuitively know that’s always been true. In their own way the hammer, the printing press and the car reshaped human societies. But technological convergence makes us see that truth afresh. And it reminds us that now, via AI, we’re at the start of a new and even more powerful incarnation of this truth. In some sense, the last and ultimate incarnation.
So what to do?
In 2020, we understand that the human relationship to nature is undergoing a profound shift. For most of our history, human existence was a struggle for survival inside a natural world that was all-powerful, and impossible to control. But now, human activity on Earth is such that we influence nature more than it influences us. That is a historic reversal, and we capture it via the idea that we now live in the Anthropocene.
In fact, though, there is a symmetry here. Just as we are becoming the dominant partner in the human-nature relationship, so the power of our machines is reaching a tipping point where machines will soon wield more influence over us than us over them. In other words, technology is becoming the dominant partner in its relationship with us.
Perhaps our relationship to technology, then, is now best understood as something akin to the relationship we once had with nature. Technology, under this view, becomes something we are immersed in, and cannot fully control or even totally understand. Seen this way, we are encouraged to reorient our stance towards technology in productive ways. To let go of the fantasy that technologies, including AI, are only tools over which we can have mastery. And instead start to see them as forces in their own right, and with their own imperatives. But forces we can, with continual efforts and constant vigilance, sometimes bend to our ends. It seems strange to think of machines, our own creations, this way. But perhaps it is more accurate.
We found it useful to name the Anthropocene. I think we should name this idea, too. Indeed, perhaps our interests would be best served by the understanding that the defining feature of our age is no longer our influence over nature, but the influence of technology over us.
Under this view, the Anthropocene is over. We live, now, in the Technocene.
Join the debate!
Thanks for reading this week.
We all know that technology is doing much to shape the world around us in 2020. But are you convinced that we now live in the Technocene? Or do you think AI is best understood as simply another tool? If you want to share views with a super-smart, curious and friendly group, look no further than the NWSH Slack!
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David.