Ever since a great ape discovered that the burning thing that had fallen from the skies could be used not only to cook meat but also to scare away or hurt rival hominids, technology has posed as much a risk as a benefit to society: a tool to improve our lives and a threat to our sense of identity or even our very existence. In his latest book, the American Adam Greenfield, an expert in the design and development of digital networks, makes a critical examination of what he calls Radical Technologies (Verso Books) – all those innovations that amaze us, from the ubiquitous smartphone to the internet of things, 3D printing, cryptocurrencies or artificial intelligence, all of which have a potential dark side.
In his book, Greenfield warns about the growing dominance of a new power class that is dictating the shape of the future, but whose principles and goals aren’t always in line with the common good.
Adam Greenfield: One question that I’m asked pretty often at the end of my talks is ‘Is there a coherent ideology at the core of technical development at this point in time? Is there a Silicon Valley consensus? Is that a reality?’ And you don’t want to make too much of this, but I think it’s inescapable that most of the actors that determine the shape of our choices when engaging with information technology are physically and culturally located in a very, very small region. Apple and Facebook and Google are within a stone’s throw of each other, and even though all of these parties recruit from all over the world, there is an astonishing psychic self-similarity among the people who work there, whatever their national or cultural origin. The way in which they live is actually fairly peculiar by global standards. They literally have apps for people to come and pick up their laundry, or to walk their dog. They are now focused more and more on satisfying a set of desires and aspirations that resembles their own.
THE TIPPING POINT
According to Greenfield, we are living an epochal transformation in how we value ourselves as productive members of society. Not only do we feel we are under surveillance by governments and corporations, or that algorithms may know our deepest desires better than we do, but that such technologies are changing the very fabric of our social relations.
For Greenfield, the world doesn’t need to be divided into techno-utopians and Luddites, but we must address the creative destruction that the so-called ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ will bring. Will all this wealth of information and technology remain in the hands of a chosen few or will all of us benefit from it? When robots do all the hard work, will we live a life of abundance or will most humans be deemed irrelevant?
Adam Greenfield: More and more of us are actually unnecessary to the operations of the economy as we understand it. And as a matter of fact, the economy itself begins to decouple from anything that we would understand as human need, human desire or human accounting of value. We begin to enter a time in which notions like jobs, the idea that labor is something which is coupled directly to the generation of value and meaningful participation in the economy, this is an idea that we’ve sort of absorbed and internalized over the last 150 years or so. But I think that the technical circumstances that we’re about to contend with will explode that assumption.
PATTERN RECOGNITION
Also, he argues, automation and artificial intelligence will not only mean a rise in unemployment in low-skilled jobs, but will pose an existential threat to humanity. Greenfield uses the telling example of an AI software capable of creating a painting in the manner of one of the greatest masters of all time.
Adam Greenfield: There’s kind of a fatuous project that I talk about a lot called ‘Next Rembrandt’. Not merely is Rembrandt sort of a canonical painter but stands in as a marker for it for absolutely the highest reaches of human creativity in human creative aspiration. They took the entire known corpus of verified Rembrandts and they digitized them and they mined them for metrics. It turns out that the decisive subject of a Rembrandt painting is a lone white male in his early thirties looking over his right shoulder. And they took the measurements of things like distance between the eyes, and from this analysis the algorithms that they developed in the course of this project generated an entirely new Rembrandt. I’m certainly no art historian, but if you shuffled this entirely machine-generated Rembrandt into the corpus of known and verified paintings by him, I would not have been able to identify it. I think there’s a really hard lesson there, which is that if you can generate an infinite series of new Rembrandts in the second decade of the 21st century, without the knowledge or the consent of the historical Rembrandt, and if you can do that for any corpus of work on the part of any creative person by doing an analysis, a trawl through their body of work… what does that suggest for creativity? These are big, big questions and we’re really not wrestling with them.