♦   1   ♦

A Bitter Taste of Dystopia

The 2016 presidential campaign made everybody angry. Liberal Bernie Sanders supporters were angry at allegedly racist Republicans and a political system they perceived as being for sale, a big beneficiary being Hillary Clinton. Conservative Donald Trump supporters were furious at the decay and decline of America, and at how politicians on both sides of the aisle had abandoned them and left a trail of broken promises. Hillary Clinton supporters fumed at how the mainstream media had failed to hold Trump accountable for lewd behavior verging on sexual assault—and worse.

The same rage against the system showed up in Britain, where a majority of citizens primarily living outside of prosperous London voted to take England out of the European Union. In Germany, a right-wing party espousing a virulent brand of xenophobia gained critical seats in the Bundestag. And around the world in prosperous countries, anger simmered, stoked by a sense of loss and by raging income inequality. In the United States, real incomes have been falling for decades. Yet in the shining towers of finance and on kombucha-decked tech campuses for glittering growth engines such as Google and Apple, the gilded class of technology employees and Wall Street types continue to enjoy tremendous economic gains.

The roots of the rage are, in my opinion, traceable to the feelings of powerlessness that have been building since the incursion into our lives of the microprocessor and the computer. At first, we greeted computers with a sense of wonder. Simple things such as spreadsheets, word processors, and arcade-quality video games could be run on tiny boxes in our living rooms!

The technology wove deeper into our lives. E-mail replaced paper mail. Generations of Americans will never write a full letter by hand. Social networks reinstated lost connections and spread good tidings. Discussions flourished. Maps went from the glovebox to the smart phone, and then replaced our own sense of navigation with computer-generated GPS turn-by-turn guidance so prescient that neither I nor most of my friends can remember the last time we printed out directions to a party or a restaurant.

As the new electronics systems grew smarter, they steadily began to replace many human activities. Mind-numbing phone menu trees replaced customer-service reps. In factories, robots marched steadily inward, thinning the ranks of unskilled and semi-skilled human workers even as efficiency soared and prices of the goods produced plummeted. This happened not only in the United States but also in China and other cheap-labor locales; a robot costs the same in Shanghai or Stuttgart or Chicago.

And, around the time when computers first arrived, we began to experience a stubborn stagnation. Wages for the middle class seemed to remain depressed. The optimism of the baby-boomer era gave way to pessimism as the industrial heartlands hollowed out. Even the inevitable economic cycles seemed less forgiving. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the United States began to experience so-called jobless recoveries. In these frustrating episodes, though economic growth registered a strong bump, the number of jobs and wages remained flaccid in comparison with historical norms.

In the United States, a creeping fear grew with each generation that the promise of a life better than their parents’ would go unfulfilled. Meanwhile, the computers and systems starting advancing at an exponential pace—getting faster, smaller, and cheaper. Algorithms began to replace even lawyers, and we began to fear that the computer was going to come for our job, someday, somehow—just wait.

As income inequality grew, the yawning gap pushed the vast majority of the benefits of economic growth in wages and wealth to the top 5 percent of the world’s society. The top 1 percent reaped the biggest rewards, far out of proportion to their number.

None of this is to say that Americans are materially worse off than they were forty years ago. Today, we own more cars, our houses are larger, our food is fancier and cheaper. A supercomputer—the iPhone or latest Android model—fits in our back pocket. But human beings tune out these sorts of absolute gains and focus on changes in relative position. With that focus, a dystopian worldview is logical and perhaps inevitable. The ghost in the machine becomes a handful of culprits. Politicians fail us because they cannot turn back the clock to better times (which, in real terms, were actually poorer, more dangerous, and shorter lived). The banks, tech giants, and other big businesses treat humans as pawns or “eyeballs.” The socially responsible mantras of Facebook, Google, and Twitter have mutated into a single-minded focus on persuading us to click, tap, and consume digital content that neither benefits us nor is, deep down, what we want to consume.

So it is the soulless technology that is taking away our jobs and our dignity. But we as individuals can help control and influence it. The public outcry³ and e-mail deluge directed at the U.S. Congress over the Stop Online Piracy Act⁴ and the Protect IP Act⁵ are examples. Those laws sought to make it harder to share music and movies online. A campaign mounted by millions of normal citizens to deluge Washington, D.C., with e-mails and phone calls overnight flipped politicians from pro to con, overcoming many millions of lobbying dollars by the entertainment industry.

Technology taken too far in the other direction, however, can bring out our worst Luddite impulses. The protesters flinging feces at the Google buses in downtown San Francisco gave voice to frustration that rich techies are taking over the City by the Bay; but the protest was based on scant logic. The private buses were taking cars off the roads, reducing pollution, minimizing traffic, and fighting global warming. Could flinging feces at a Google bus turn back the clock and reduce prices of housing to affordable levels?

The 2016 presidential campaign was the national equivalent of the Google bus protests. The supporters of Donald Trump, largely white and older, wanted to turn back the clock to a pre-smartphone era when they could be confident that their lives would be more stable and their incomes steadily rising. The Bernie Sanders supporters, more liberal but also mostly white (albeit with great age diversity), wanted to turn back the clock to an era when the people, not the big corporations, controlled the government. We have seen violent protests in Paris and elsewhere against Uber drivers. What sorts of protests will we see when the Uber cars no longer have drivers and the rage is directed only at the machine itself?

So easily could the focus of our discontent turn to the technology and systems that hold the promise to take us to a life of unimaginable comfort and freedom. At the same time, as I discussed in the introduction, the very technology that holds this promise could also contribute to our demise. Artificial intelligence, or A.I., is both the most important breakthrough in modern computing and the most dangerous technology ever created by man. Remarkably, in similar times in the past, humanity has time and again successfully navigated these difficult passages from one era to the next. The transitions have not come without struggle, conflict, and missteps, but in general they were successful once people accepted the future and sought to control it or at least make better-informed decisions about it.

This is the challenge we have ahead: to involve the public in making informed choices so that we can create the best possible future, and to find ways to handle the social upheaval and disruption that inevitably will follow.