During Thanksgiving break 2013, when this blog was still new, I wrote a post in response to the techno-exceptionalism expressed by then Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and co-author Jared Cohen. Drawing parallels to the mythology of the Puritan adventure to North America, I found fault—as I still do—with the blind faith we were asked to place in the leadership of major tech companies on the grounds that their products could only have healthy effects for the world. Ten years later, the money behind artificial intelligence (AI), namely the VC firm Andreesen Horowitz, seeks to rally the faithful with the Techno-Optimist Manifesto (TOM), which begins by alleging that the following views are “lies”:
We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.
In fact, most of these outcomes have occurred in various forms over the last decade or so, though I would be inclined to more specific citations like new modes of harassment, mass theft of intellectual property, unprecedented privacy invasions, and rampant misinformation still threatening the fate of the American republic—the failure of which would indeed ruin everything. Tellingly, this opening salvo of the TOM is a prelude to broad lies of omission—first, by defending “technology” in general; and second, by implying that technological advancement is solely a product of capitalist models. Disguised by a general defense of technology (which needs no defense), the TOM’s purpose, it seems, is to warn against regulation of artificial intelligence, in which the authors and their friends have invested billions.
In response to the overall theme of the TOM, the rational truth is that, of course, we can have automobiles and breathable air at the same time, but such outcomes (which are technological achievements themselves) must sometimes be forced upon industry. And this is not wholly incompatible with free-market principles. When Henry Heinz founded his food company, he fulfilled a market need for products made from properly sourced and packaged ingredients in an era when food was often as unsafe as it was unsavory. With his early success came copycats, who cut corners with adulterated ingredients, and in response, Heinz dispatched his attorney son, Howard, to lobby Congress for food safety regulation.[1] No question, Heinz had a business motive, but the result was the legislative foundation for what became the FDA. The TOM ignores, if not outright scorns, such histories when it declares:
David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.
The “force experiment” in this instance is code for regulation, and no, regulation has not been “found wanting,” at least not to the extent that we can presume to live without it. Regulation is imperfect, as all systems are. Surely, the FDA is no guarantee that every meal we eat and pill we swallow will be 100% beneficial, but does this mean we are willing to simply trust the producers of these goods to self-regulate in our interests? The “You drink the water” scene in Erin Brockovich comes to mind.
It seems the authors of the TOM have spent too much time reciting the Tao of Ayn Rand, forgetting that “money” cuts both ways as a motivator, either serving or disserving the public interest, depending on which is the more profitable, and for which parties. Were this not the case, the market opportunity to develop technological solutions to climate change would have overwhelmed the market resistance to those solutions almost twenty years ago.
Now, with billions invested in artificial intelligence, the TOM presents a new sermon (on Mt. Gox?) demanding blind faith in AI’s capacity to make the world work better. And, yes, AI systems can potentially solve problems and improve the quality of life for more people. Many of the principles articulated in the TOM are well-founded, at least in spirit, because, of course, technology itself is not the problem. People are the problem. At best, people are diverse and do not fit neatly into anyone’s utopian construct; and at worst, people cannot be trusted, least of all those who write manifestos. Thus, the hubristic religiosity of the TOM suffers from the same magical thinking inherent to works as disparate as John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” sermon, The Communist Manifesto, and Atlas Shrugged.
“I am here to bring the good news,” the TOM proclaims, cribbing the doorstep preamble of a Jehovah’s Witness. “We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being. We have the tools, the systems, the ideas. We have the will.” Yes, but do they have the moral compass necessary to wield so much power without oversight? More accurately, does anybody deserve that level of trust? For us to assume that the forces behind AI development will only have the best intentions is naïve; for them to assume that they will faithfully achieve such outcomes is arrogant. For example, the TOM recites the following petitions, all but asking for a “Lord, hear our prayer” after each line:
We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.
We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.
We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.
We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.
We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.
We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.
Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
One could unpack the absurd implications of several items on that list—from the authors taking credit for Norman Borlaug[2] to the claim that the internet was invented to solve isolation to the mention of vaccines, in which trust has eroded thanks largely to “connections” enabled by the internet. But the broader point is that AI is not like inventions of the past. AI has the potential to transform every aspect of human existence, and Big Tech’s record offers no reason to grant the developers and their investors the kind of trust the TOM demands. After all, the manifesto represents many of the same folks who promised that their designs for Web 2.0 would elevate the human experience with mega doses of free-range “information,” and yet, that experiment (modest compared to AI) has imperiled democracy worldwide.
“We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human,” the TOM states. Interesting. Because here, it seems appropriate to remind readers that these same Keynesian prophets of “abundance,” just a few years ago, divined a future of leisure in which humans would be free to engage in creative pursuits rather than labor. As such, it is notable that the headline AI stories have been about generative AIs designed to produce “creative” works, which is one thing we don’t need machines to do, and which solves not a single problem while creating new ones. In this light, it is hard to believe that these techno-optimists are not simply covering their bets on new toys of questionable value and calling it “innovation.”
[1] The Food That Built America, History Channel
[2] Notably, Borlaug’s “green revolution,” which transformed the wheat harvest, saved a billion lives, and earned him the Nobel Prize in 1970, was funded by the Mexican Government and the Rockefeller Foundation. One could argue that the latter is a consequence of capitalism, but the TOM makes an argument that for-profit investment is the only model.
Image by: agsandrew
