In past posts, I have pointed to the consequences of technological change and how some of its outcomes leave a lot of people behind or pose a danger to our human nature. Now a book has arrived that makes a very comprehensive case for the interplay of power and technology and why it is important to harness technology for the benefit of all not just of the few. This book is Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson.
This and similar books are all the more important right now because, first, we have a rich historical record to draw from (so no excuse on the base of ignorance) and, second, we stand close to crossing a threshold unlike any other as we move toward the end stages of AI development.
Humankind has followed a relentless march of technological innovation because of favorable biological and cultural factors. We have developed highly intelligent brains and have developed cultures that can established the institutional scaffolding for technological advancements. These primary factors do not, however, preordain which direction technological developments will take. This, the book argues, depends, as history shows, on two other forces.
The first is power – mostly state power. For example, the first industrial revolution in late 18th century would not have taken hold, at least as fast, without favorable government laws that pushed farm workers to the cities to provide abundant and cheap labor to factories. Nor would the later success of the industrial capitalist model would have been as successful without the exercise of colonial power and the slave-holding plantations of the New World.
The second force is persuasion, that is the ability to steer a society down a technology path by the power of vision and tenacity of gifted or powerful individuals. An example is the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps who against all odds pushed for the building of the Suez Canal and later the Panama Canal. He succeeded but at the expense of many fellow human beings. Thousands of workers were employed at starving wages and under atrocious working conditions. The first attempt to cut a canal through Panama resulted in more than 20,000 fatalities. Acemoglu and Johnson use this example to argue that the vision of a few individuals may produce spectacular results but, in these and other cases, there is a huge human cost that we tend to ignore in the name of so-called progress.
Power and persuasion are at work right now and if unchecked they will soon determine the next direction of human history. In authoritarian countries it is the dominance of a strong man (like Putin) or of the undisputed party (as in China) that sets the direction. But we, in democratic countries, should not placate ourselves with the illusion that we the people have full control of our future direction. Although we do rely on elected representatives to influence our direction, as in the case of climate friendly laws, a lot more is decided by the huge market power of few mega corporations who have practically cornered the market where it matters the most for the development and use of influential technologies. Primary examples of that are the market for the acquisition and aggregation of personal data and the funding of AI research and development. Right now, it is the vision of few executives and corporate owners that is poised to set the direction of our future. As Acemoglu and Johnson write “Vision is power and power is vision.” But then what about the rest of us? How do we ensure our vision is put on the grand table on which our human destiny is negotiated?
The authors warn that technological changes should not be judged solely on their intellectual and scientific merits and on how much they thrill us as manifestations of human achievement. Instead, they should be judged by whether they promote shared prosperity and enhance the human condition. Technologies that merely replace human labor and push workers down to low-paying jobs are not friendly to shared prosperity. That was the case during the first part of the First Industrial Revolution. Human-friendly technologies are those that improve human productivity and share the productivity gains with labor. This is what the authors call the productivity bandwagon that carries us to shared prosperity. However, Acemoglu and Johnson show, this happens only when there are countervailing forces that compel those who control the new technologies to boost workers’ skills and accept a more equitable distribution of the gains. This happened when labor unions and the Progressive movement emerged in the latter part of the 19th century in the U.S. And it happened again in the period between World War II and the 1970s when labor unions were still strong. On the contrary, the tremendous pace of technological breakthroughs over the last forty years has yielded meager results for working class people and exacerbated income and wealth inequality, which are the exact opposites of shared prosperity.
How technological change impacts human work is one part of the equation. The other is how it affects human relations, our emotions, our sense of facts and falsehoods, our relations to authorities, in general, our control over information and privacy. In riveting detail Acemoglu and Johnson describe how social media and internet search firms manipulate emotions and information to increase clicks and attention in order to maximise ad revenues with disregard to the privacy or well-being of their customers. Despite warnings from government and politicians as well as from groups of experts, research and development in AI also appears to succumb to the profit motive. Just days ago, we became aware of that when concerned scientists from OpenAI accused its executives for directing the firm toward profit opportunities at the expense of human safety even survival.
The situation is no better in countries where the government controls private initiatives. The book offers a chilling account of how China has prioritized surveillance and monitoring of its citizens as the primary goal of AI development. The use by several Western countries of algorithms, like Pegasus, which can spy on civilians, shows that democracies are not immune from the malicious use of technology.
The lessons we can draw are critical for how we manage our future direction. Technological change is not equivalent to progress unless it promotes shared prosperity and human well-being. Machine intelligence is not equivalent to machine usefulness. The direction of technological change is not destiny but a matter of choice. And choices are made mostly by those who control the agenda and the vision. Unless we are willing to surrender control and vision to an oligarchy, we the people must claim our seat at the table. This means that we the people have the right to share in the control and vision of technological change. The bottom line is not to block technological change but to choose what benefits humankind and earns our consent.
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