Who Owns the Future? (19 page)

This humor often presents itself arrogantly, to bring the naïve intuitions held by nontechnical people to shame.
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It is true that people consistently underestimate technological change in some ways. The information technology gadgets imagined in the 1960s or 1980s for the starship
Enterprise
(as it would be centuries in the future) already feel antiquated. People are unable to appreciate how significant technological change is likely to be, even in their own lifetimes. On the other hand there is still no consumer flying car, and probably won’t be one for a long time. So technological change is overestimated just as frequently.

• 
Malthus:
Politics is the means to material extinction.

Our successes will be our undoing. As we approach abundance, we will overpopulate and overconsume, or otherwise screw up, until catastrophe strikes. The Malthusian humor suggests a fatal, deterministic ineptitude in politics.

• 
Rousseau:
Technology is the means to spiritual malaise.

As we approach Abundance, we become inauthentic and absurd.

• 
Invisible Hand:
Information technology ought to subsume politics.

Adam Smith sketched a character known as the “Invisible Hand,” who can serve as a figurehead for subsuming politics under information technology. Markets (or more recently, other, fundamentally similar algorithms) make decisions instead of human, political deliberations. This humor either ignores or rejects Abundance, for markets become absurd as supply approaches infinity.

• 
Marx:
Politics ought to subsume information technology.

Marxism anticipates Abundance but elevates politics infinitely and indefinitely. Once the machines can do all the work, politics will decide what’s best for people, so that all will benefit from the bounty.

• 
H. G. Wells:
Human life will be meaningful because primordial, pretechnological tribal drama will be reinstated once we are sufficiently challenged by either our own machines or by aliens. So, technology creates human meaning through challenge rather than through providing Abundance.

The genre of science fiction was born to express a distinct humor, which contemplates the possibility that the future might not necessarily be framed with people at the center. Humans might instead face potential irrelevance in a world dominated by either our own future machines or superior aliens. Most science fiction constructs a narrative of the triumph of human relevance against all odds.

Much science fiction ends badly, however, and so serves either as a cautionary tale or a fascinating display of nihilism. In any case, anticipating a struggle for relevance suggests a new meaning of life or natural mission for humanity when technology gets good. This humor is dubbed “Wells’s Humor” in honor of H. G.’s novel
The Time Machine,
a superb early example.

These seven humors mapped conversations about the human future up until the end of World War II. The 20th century brought two more humors into prominence, and a third into being, though that final one still hasn’t gained the prominence it deserves.

• 
Strangelove:
Some person will destroy us all when technology gets good enough. Human nature plus good technology equals extinction.

With the bomb came the Strangelovian possibility of species-wide suicide. This was darker than Malthus, as it replaced unintentional self-destruction with instantaneous decisive destruction accessible with the simple press of a button.

• 
Turing:
Politics and people won’t even exist. Only technology will exist when it gets good enough, which means it will become supernatural.

Not long after Hiroshima, Alan Turing hatched the idea that people are creating a successor reality in information. Obviously Turing’s humor inspired a great deal of science fiction, but I’ll argue it’s distinct because it poses the possibility of a new metaphysics. People might turn into information rather than be replaced by it. This is why Ray Kurzweil can await being uploaded into a virtual heaven. Turing brought metaphysics into the modern conversation about the natural future.

Turing’s humor also provides a destination, or an eschatology that the Invisible Hand’s humor lacks. Turing’s algorithms could inherit the world in a way that the Hand could not. This is because we can imagine software, improperly, I’ll argue, operating without the need for human operators, and even in an era of Abundance depopulated of people. Abundance kills the hand, but not Turing’s ghosts.

• 
Nelson:
Information technology of a particular design could help people remain people without resorting to extreme politics when any of the other, creepily eschatological humors seem to be imminent.

Ted Nelson, in 1960, came up with a brand-new, still-emerging humor, which suggests information as a way to avoid excesses of politics even as we approach an inevitably imperfect Abundance. It essentially proposes a consilience between the Invisible Hand and Abundance. This is the humor I am hoping to further with this book.

Each humor captures a distinct hypothesis about how politics, what it means to be human, and technology are related. They all concern the role of politics and the human will, or intentionality, in ever higher-tech futures. Will politics become obsolete or absolute? Will people be subsumed or will we transcend what had been our condition?

There’s a way the humors cycle around into each other. Someone might be playing the technological triumphalist, celebrating the brashest entrepreneurs of the moment, but then end up imagining a weirdly socialist utopia in the future. This is one of the most common switch-backs, one that never fails to amaze me. “Free Google tools and free Twitter are leading to a world where everything is free because people share, but isn’t it great that we can corner billions of dollars by gathering data no one else has?” If everything will be free, why are we trying to corner anything? Are our fortunes only temporary? Will they become moot when we’re done?

It’s not the only twist of its kind. If you play the back-to-nature card, you end up in an artificial game, chasing authenticity without a map or a way to verify that you’ve found it. “What this music software is about is getting in touch with the real emotion and meaning of music, which is done in this case by adjusting the pitches of people who can barely sing so that they can sing in perfect harmony, together. Singing in harmony is the most wonderful musical connection. But wait—maybe it would be more authentic if they weren’t singing perfectly. That’s too robotic. What is the percentage of perfection that represents authenticity? Ten percent? Fifteen percent?” This is a ricochet between the “Abundance” and “Rousseau” humors.

I hear variations of familiar switchbacks almost every day. These ubiquitous conversations of the tech community retrace the moves of older conversations—sometimes much older ones.

MEANING AS NOSTALGIA

Even technologists tend to have a streak of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romanticism in us. We occasionally imagine and celebrate a kind of comfort, authenticity, and sacredness rooted in a past that never existed.

The obvious figurehead for this humor is Rousseau, but E. M. Forster could also serve as the cultural marker for nostalgic technophobia because of his short story “The Machine Stops.” This was a remarkably accurate description of the Internet published in 1909, decades before computers existed. To the dismay of generations of computer scientists, the first glimmer of the wonders we have built was a dystopian tale.

In the story, what we’d call the Internet is known as the “Machine.” The world’s population is glued to the Machine’s screens, endlessly engaged in social networking, browsing, Skypeing, and the like. Interestingly, Forster wasn’t cynical enough to foresee the centrality of advertising in such a situation.

At the end of the story, the machine does indeed stop. Terror ensues, similar to what is imagined these days from a hypothetical cyber-attack. The whole human world crashes. Survivors straggle outside to revel in the authenticity of reality. “The Sun!” they cry, amazed at luminous depths of beauty that could not have been imagined. The failure of the Machine is a happy ending.

This theme has become commonplace in popular culture. A more recent incarnation was presented in the
Matrix
movies, in which humans live inside a Virtual Reality simulation. In the movies, those who become aware of their status, and able to manipulate it, are more vital, virile, and better dressed than those who do not. In the bucolic rural happy ending of
Minority Report,
which I contributed to, the gadgets that had filled the screen in all the earlier dystopian scenes were banished from the set. In
Gattaca,
the “In-valid,” the natural, nongenetically engineered brother, is more vital and true, and benefits from incantations of optimism that evade the heart of the “Valid,” genetically engineered brother.

The Rousseau humor is ambiguously ironic and sometimes even funny. See Woody Allen’s
Sleeper
for an example of the humorous potential. I call it ironic, since we find ourselves psychologically victimized by technologies that we’ve chosen to adopt. The irony is ambiguous because it often isn’t clear how much choice we really had.

The people in Forster’s story were complicit in being hypnotized by the machine; they built it, after all. Why not keep it turned on, but also go outside once in a while? That’s the irony.

On the other hand, the machine might be all that’s saving the story’s characters from short, diseased lives out in the real world; but then again, maybe it would have been possible to build a less alienating machine that would have created just as much security. That’s the ambiguity.

And if, as I argue, the world must eventually become somewhat artificial in order for people to thrive, must experience enabled by the Machine be forever inauthentic, infertile, or shallow in comparison?

The Rousseau humor of reacting to technology is as common and influential as any other. It is common because it is based on a substantial, unavoidable conundrum.

Once the ground rules of life are changed, you no longer have the ability to understand what you might have forgotten from a previous incarnation. No adult really knows what was lost in the process of growing up, because the adult brain cannot quite realize the mentality in which childhood memories are fully meaningful. With that level of change comes a kind of partial death.

The transition from childhood to adulthood is a natural example, but technological change has put successive generations of adults through similarly intense artificial disruptions.

It is impossible for us to completely enter the experiential world of the hunter-gatherer. It’s almost impossible to conceive of the subjective texture of life before electricity. We can’t quite fully know what we have lost as we become more technological, so we are in constant doubt of our own authenticity and vitality. This is a necessary side effect of our survival.

Recent examples of the nostalgic Rousseauian humor have included the deconstructionist school of philosophy, the “natural” medicine and food movements, and the rise of what are purported to be traditional, fundamentalist versions of the world’s religions, particularly as related to human reproduction. We use newly coined ideas of authenticity to attempt to hold on to something we can’t quite articulate that might have been lost in the course of becoming modern.

My purpose is not to ridicule the Rousseau humor. As I have argued, its rationale is not only legitimate, but unavoidable.

At the same time, it’s important to remember that nostalgia for lower-tech times is based on fake memories. This is as true in the small scale of centuries as it is in the vast scale of life. Every little genetic feature of you, from the crook of the corner of your eye to much of the way your body moves when you listen to music, was framed and formed by the negative spaces carved out by the pre-reproductive deaths of your would-be ancestors over hundreds of millions of years. You are the reverse image of inconceivable epochs of heartbreak and cruelty. Your would-be ancestors in their many species, reaching back into the phylogenetic tree, were eaten, often by disease, or sexually rejected before they could contribute genes to your legacy. The genetic, natural part of you is the sum of the leftovers of billions of years of extreme violence and poverty. Modernity is precisely the way individuals arose out of the ravages of evolutionary selection.

Unfortunately, Rousseau’s humor can sometimes lead to loathsome behavior. Taking it to extremes is destructive, and you’ll often find a trace of the nostalgia humor in the ideologies of terrorists of any origin, from jihadi suicide bombers to the people who attack abortion clinics and animal research centers.