Mindless

Preface

This book tells three stories about the impact of machines on the human condition: on the way we work, on the way we live and on our possible future. The stories follow in order, since they relate the growing intrusion of machines into our lives over time; but they are linked together by both history and anticipation, from the first simple machines to the complex technology of our own day, in which interconnected systems of machines colonize an increasing range of activities of hand and brain. Each story brings us nearer to the cliff edge at which every increase in our own freedom to choose our circumstances seems to increase the power of technology to control those circumstances. Each story contains within it a vision of heaven and hell: the promise of freedom from necessity, from religious dogma and from natural disaster confronts its opposite in the specter of uselessness, of algorithmic dictatorship and of physical extinction. The resistance of humans to schemes for improving their conditions of life is one of the constants, and paradoxes, of all three stories. It has rarely led technologists and social engineers to conclude that their schemes might affront some basic requirement of human flourishing, preferring to attribute resistance to obstinacy, stupidity, ignorance and superstition.
Its inspiration was a short essay by John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930). Extrapolating from the progress of technology in his own lifetime, Keynes predicted that his putative grandchildren would have to work only three hours a day “to satisfy the old Adam in us.” The theological reference was explicit: machines would do most of our work for us, making possible a return to Paradise, where “neither Adam delved nor Eve span.” Keynes’s prediction was rooted in the very old idea that, once the material needs of humanity had been met, a space would be opened up for the “good” life. Efficiency in production was not good in itself, but the means to the good, and only insofar as it was the means. Keynes did not say that individuals, freed from work, would necessarily choose to lead a good life; rather that this choice would be open to them. Machines were simply a means to an end.
The idea came to me of updating Keynes’s essay in prophecy, taking into account not just what has happened since 1930, but factors which Keynes might have taken into account in 1930. This makes for a much longer composition than Keynes’s, but perhaps not longer than his would have been had he not intended to write a jeu d’esprit to cheer people up at a time of economic depression.
It turned out that Keynes’s prognostication was only partly right. Since 1930 technological progress has lifted average real income per head in rich countries roughly five times from $5,000 to $25,000 (in 1990 dollars), much in line with Keynes’s expectation, but average weekly hours of full-time work in these countries have fallen by only about 20 percent, from about 50 to 40 hours, far less than Keynes envisaged. He seems to have got three things wrong.
He ignored the distinction between needs and wants, leading him to neglect the possibility that insatiability might corrupt our Adam, making him not a lover of the good and beautiful, but a slave to junk. It is insatiability, natural and deliberately created, which keeps machines in business, by ensuring that the material requisites of happiness remain permanently scarce. Secondly, Keynes treated work purely as a cost, or as economists call it, a disutility, whereas it is both a curse and the condition of a meaningful life. People weigh the cost of living against the pleasure of work. Thirdly, Keynes ignored the question of distribution, and therefore the question of power. He implicitly assumed that the gains from efficiency improvements would go to everyone, not just to the few. But there is no automatic mechanism to ensure this, and since the ascendancy of neoliberal economics in the last forty years, the social mechanisms for securing real wage growth have weakened or gone into reverse. While some people have reduced their hours of work because they can afford to, many others are compelled to work longer than they want to in a desperate effort to hold on to what they have already got. For this reason the economic future facing our own grandchildren is much less rosy than it seemed to Keynes in 1930.
But this isn’t the end of the discussion. Like Marx, Keynes believed that the reduction of necessity would automatically lead to an increase in freedom: indeed his economics of full employment was designed to get us over the hump of necessity as quickly as possible. He was curiously blind to the possibility that the machines which freed us from work might colonize our lives. In retrospect the entanglement of actual machines with ideas about how to organize the machinery of living seems inevitable once science took control of both departments. It led to what I call the “torment of modernity.” In his classic The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek warned against “the uncritical transfer to the problems of society of the habits of thought of the natural scientist and the engineer.” But it was precisely the engineering ambition of making society as efficient as the factory or the office that built the modern world and turned Keynes’s realm of freedom into Weber’s “iron cage of bondage.” My second story, then, is about the relationship between technology and freedom. It asks the question: is machinery the agent of liberation or entrapment?
The wider possibilities of technology were dramatically visualised in Jeremy Bentham’s famous design for a Panopticon in 1786. This was an ideal prison system, in which the prison governor could shine a light on the surrounding prison cells from a central watch-tower, while himself remaining unseen. This would in principle abolish the need for actual prison guards, since the prisoners, aware of being continually surveilled, would voluntarily obey the prison rules. Bentham’s ambitions for his invention stretched beyond the prison walls, to schools, hospitals and workplaces. His was a vision of society as an ideal prison, governed by self-policing impersonal rules applicable to all. His key methodology was the one-way information flow: the governor would know all about the prisoners but would himself be invisible.
Bentham’s world is coming to pass. Today’s digital control systems operate not through watchtowers but through computers with electronic tracking devices, and voice and facial recognition systems. We enter Bentham’s prison voluntarily, oblivious to its snares. But once inside, it is increasingly difficult to escape. Platforms and governments can direct the flow of their online communications to us through our devices, while at the same time “mining” the data about our own tastes and habits. Who gets the better of the bargain is moot.
Keynes was, of course, aware of the malign uses to which surveillance technology was being put in his own time, notably in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. But he seems to have been thrown off guard by his belief that free societies provided sufficient safeguards against an Orwellian outcome. He was insensitive to the possibility that surveillance might creep up, unobserved, and even unintended, until it was too late to reverse. So we must alert our grandchildren to the potential malignity of the machinery they take for granted.
“Assuming no important wars and no important increase in population . . .” With these words Keynes briskly dismissed the most obvious impediments to the realization of his utopia. It seems extraordinary that he should have done so at that particular time. Europe had just been through the most destructive war in its history, and in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) Keynes himself had predicted, accurately as it turned out, that “vengeance will not limp”; in the same book, he had also attributed the Bolshevik Revolution to the “disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity.” The possibility that such events might repeat themselves on an ever more horrific scale was not allowed to cloud the sunny prospect he unfolded for his grandchildren. Did he suppose that the First World War had been a sufficient “wake-up” call? Such abstraction from existential challenges is not possible today. They have become too urgent and encompassing. My third story, therefore, is about the destructive power of uncontroled technology.
Our planet has always been threatened by natural disasters – the dinosaurs were probably extinguished 60 million years ago by an asteroid hitting the earth. However, for the first time, life on earth is being threatened with anthropogenic disasters – disasters caused, directly or indirectly, by our own activity. Nuclear war, global warming, biologically engineered pandemics now hasten to end not just hopes of a better life but life itself. Men, wrote H. G. Wells, must either become like gods or perish. Some scientists and philosophers conceive of the new God as a super-intelligent machine able to rescue humanity from the flaws of purely human intelligence. But how can we be sure that our new God will be benevolent? It is a sign of the times that no one pays much attention to what the old God might have advised in these circumstances.
The consensus view today is that the march of the machines is unstoppable: they will only get more and more powerful and could well spin out of control. Hence the demand, which has migrated from science fiction to science and philosophy, to equip them with moral rules before they go “rogue.” The problem is to find agreement on moral rules adequate to the task in face of the epistemological nihilism of western societies, and the resurgence of geopolitical conflict between the democracies and autocracies.
So what should we advise our grandchildren? There are basically two alternatives. We can either urge them to seek technical solutions for the variety of life-threatening risks which present technology will bequeath them or we can urge them to reduce their dependence on machines. In writing this book I have come to believe that the first endeavor, while it might salvage fragments of human life, will destroy everything that gives value to it. The second alternative is the only one that makes human sense, but it requires the recovery of a framework of thought, in which religion and science both play their part in directing human life. Einstein put the case with exemplary lucidity: “science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” Such a recovery on a sufficient scale to affect the course of events in time seems to me inconceivable. The arguments of the book, therefore, lead to a somber conclusion. In biblical terms, a plague of locusts is a necessary prelude to the Second Coming.
The book is over-ambitious. It is primarily about how western civilization came to be captured by the dream of utopia through science and about the successive stages by which this dream turned sour. Based on my own academic grounding in history and economics, it nevertheless trespasses on highly specialized fields of study and is open to the criticisms that scholars usually level against intruders into their protected domains. Each topic dealt with in this book has accumulated a vast specialized literature, much of which I have only been able to scratch the surface of. As Steven Shapin has noted, the interdisciplinary environment is an “endangered habitat.” My only defense is that the relationship between humans and machines has become the most urgent problem of our time, and that its treatment is properly philosophical, not in the sense of philosophy as a discipline, but in the traditional sense of thinking about the meaning of human life. I have preferred to pursue this inquiry in ordinary language, which invites memories of an earlier language in which such matters were talked about.