Attendees
Eric, Vanessa, Grzegorz, Kate, Bisi, Gordon, Alpha, Mingming, Jason, Nikhil
Moderator
Discussion Topic
How is technology changing human relationships and organizational structure including governments, rule of law, the class system, power structure in society? Who are the winners and losers? What can we learn from history? What are the implications going forward for the short-term and long-term?
Introduction
Village is a diverse community of people who are genuinely curious about understanding the world and the people around them better. We get together once a month for moderated discussions on important issues such as sustainability, health & wellbeing, and education. In our last dinner, we discussed Human Nature (read the post here). This month, we met to discuss technology: specifically, how it impacted us in the past, how it influences us today, and how we think it will define our futures. In this post, we’ll take you through each of the main questions we discussed, along with the views expressed by our group during the discussion.
Is technology good or bad for humans?
Defining Technology:
Technology is any underlying structural advancement in any field, whether it is healthcare, agriculture, media, etc. Technology is not restricted to hardware or software but can be defined relative to the field that is being discussed (i.e. new compounds for drugs in medicine or new genetically-modified seed variants in agriculture).
View 1: Technology is both good and bad for humans.
Technology has made the ability to collaborate and communicate with other people much easier and more widespread, but has exposed new issues such as privacy concerns and the spread of misinformation. The same technology that enabled good things (more collaboration and communication) enabled these bad things (lack of digital privacy and spread of misinformation).
There are inflection points throughout humanity where technology may go from being good → bad or bad → good for society. Technology may not always lead to continuous improvement and instead, its impact ebbs and flows throughout time.
View 2: Technology is good for humans.
The underlying crux of this argument is that it isn’t feasible to compare humans within the same generation to evaluate whether or not technology is good or bad for humans, and instead we have to compare humans cross-generationally. For example, technology has raised the baseline for everyone (better technology in medicine has enabled all people to live longer than previous generations).
Even though technology creates new problems (such as the misinformation issue discussed or further inequality), because technology has raised the baseline for all people it is objectively good for humans.
Aside from raising the baseline for humanity, technology has enabled humans to have a breadth of new experiences. One example that came up was our ability to go to Trader Joe’s and eat fruits and vegetables that wouldn’t typically be grown in our region. Although it may seem small, these little experiences lead to enrichment in one’s life unfathomable in previous generations.
View 3: Good and bad isn’t objective - it’s better to evaluate technology on more objective measures.
Competition: Technology has enabled more competition on a global scale - this may lead to further advancement of humanity but may also cause unintended consequences (such as jealousy or lower levels of happiness).
Power Dynamics: As technology scales, power dynamics are also impacted. For example, instead of having a bunch of local CD stores where customers could check out their staff picks, Spotify creates the top playlists and controls where most listening goes. This is a fundamental shift in the way people discovered new music previously (from localized discovery to global discovery)
However, another view could be that the level of “shelf space” is much higher due to technology - people who couldn’t open up a CD store in the physical world can now create their own playlists online with very low barriers to entry and be discovered by listeners.
Inequality: Technology has led to the consolidation of wealth and power among few individuals (instead of having local monopolies, the scale of technology enables global monopolies).
How will AI impact humanity? Is it a special case?
View 1: AI is different from all previous technological advancements in that it is replacing (at a wide-scale) humans’ fundamental value in the capitalist system (labor).
If humans are no longer required for production and output in society, this may cause detrimental effects to self-worth and happiness if people anchor those emotions on their output.
AI may start to advance itself, and not necessarily humanity. It’s possible that AI gets to a point where it continues to iterate on itself, optimizing for production / output in a way that may be misaligned with the advancement of humanity.
View 2: AI is not that different from prior technological advancements, because we’ve seen humans replaced throughout history.
We’ve seen humans replace other humans - take Coal Miners being replaced by Green Energy alternatives for example. Or take car manufacturing moving from the Midwest of the United States to Mexico.
One counterargument to this was to consider who owns AI:
If AI follows the trends of other technology - with ownership being consolidated among a few, then it is quite different from humans replacing humans, in that the value generated by AI may not go to other human beings but be consolidated among a the people who own this technology in society.
If the value generated by AI were distributed across society then the effects may be more similar to humans replacing humans.
We’ve seen technological advancements that were as impactful at the time as AI is at the current moment, and we were able to control consolidation of power. For example, Rockefeller used to control wealth at the scale of 4% of the U.S. GDP, which is outsized even compared to our super-billionaires today. Government moved to correct this inequality in the past, which will continue to happen in the future.
How might technology impact humans in the future?
View 1: Technology may advance to a point where all basic needs are met and humans can no longer perceive reality.
It’s possible for humanity to gamify itself. That is, lead ourselves into situations where we are aware of “brainwashing” but are ok with it for the simplicity and dopamine that it grants us.
If there’s no perceived difference, then we have achieved some level of equality in society.
If technology advances far enough, and people don’t have to work anymore, we may end up with these utopian societies where people can do whatever they want without being distracted by work. On the flip side, we can end up in a dystopia where because people are not distracted by work, they engage in criminal activities and extreme indulgence.
View 2: Because technology was created by humans, who have biases and preferences, those biases and preferences will be embedded in technology moving forward and lead to potentially detrimental effects.
One key discussion point on this was how racism has been found to be embedded within technology and algorithms and is only discovered once it has caused issues (we have seen this with AirBnB and host / resident match rates as well as with algorithms used to estimate the probability of crime).
View 3: The level of impact will be determined by the level of government influence and interference.
We have already seen in societies with more powerful governments that the government has been able to limit new technologies (Chinese government banning crypto).
In the future, if problems start to arise because of technology (i.e. we hit an inflection point where more technological advancement would lead to negative outcomes for humanity), it will be the government’s responsibility to change the course on behalf of its citizens (an optimistic view that assumes governments will act in the best interest of the people).
Closing Thoughts
Technology is still run by people at this point in history, and people can determine the future course technology runs and technology’s effects on humanity. If and when humans reach a point of material prosperity without human labor, two scenarios were discussed. The communist utopian scenario where people enjoy equality and free time and all enjoy prosperity depends on the willingness and ability for government or property owners to redistribute their wealth. Another alternative is akin to the current environment of San Francisco, where some people have given up their current reality to consistently enter into alternate mind states with the aid of drugs.
Let us know what you think about:
How do you think gene editing will impact humanity? Should we have rules around how this technology should be used?
What do we lose by having such a strong emphasis on technology and advancement? For example, if our children study STEM fields at a higher proportion than before, what will we miss?
Will there be a point when technology interferes with autonomy?
Will technology lead to the consolidation of choices that impact humanity at a wide scale?
What happens when technology does something bad without any human influence (classic example of self-driving car hitting and killing a human being)?
Interested in joining us for our next Forecasting Club dinner? Apply to Village here.