ENDEAVOR
“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” notes Professor Damon Acemoglu, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” In an interview with BBC News’ Stephen Sackur, he questioned the proposition that technology equates with progress that is truly beneficial to human-kind. This issue is discussed extensively by him and co-author and fellow MIT Professor Simon Johnson in Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity.
In a book review, John Naughton, who chairs the advisory board of the Minderoo Center for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge, applauds the “demolition of the tech narrative’s comforting equation of technology with “progress.”
He cites the authors’ declaration: “(T)he broad-based prosperity of the past was not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress… Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in earlier industrial societies organized, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.”
This is a clarion call for mindfulness and vigilance on the dark side of technology. In 2019, Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff came out with The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Her thesis is summed up in her definition of Surveillance Capitalism that precedes the Table of Contents of her 691-page book. Excerpts:
“Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-talism, n.
1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of ex-traction, prediction and sales;
2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification;
3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentration of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in hu-man history.”
She traced how the tracking of human interface with touchpoints of digital products enabled the pinpoint forecasting of consumer preferences and the likely volume of demand for specific goods and services. The accumulation of vast amounts of knowledge about customers made it possible for giant tech companies to predict behavior that defined and influenced their propensity to consume.
She does not use sugar-coated language. Merriam-Webster defines a rogue as “a dishonest and unprincipled person.” Some synonyms for rogue plumb the depths of derogatory language: “scoundrel, villain, rascal, crook, dastard.”
Professor Zuboff commended Acemoglu and Johnson’s work: “In this brilliant, sweeping review of techno-logical change past and present, Acemoglu and Johnson mean to grab us by the shoulders and shake us awake before today’s winner-take-all technologies impose more violence on global society and the democratic prospect. This vital book is a necessary antidote to the poisonous rhetoric of tech inevitability. It reveals the real-politik of technology as a persistent Trojan horse for economic powers that favor the profit-seeking aims of the few over the many. Power and Progress is the blueprint we need for the challenges ahead: technology only con-tributes to shared prosperity when it is tamed by democratic rights, values, principles, and the laws that sus-tain them in our daily lives.”
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, 2019 Nobel laureates in economics and authors of Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times share their views on the Acemoglu-Johnson opus:
“Technology is not destiny, nothing is pre-ordained. Humans, despite their imperfect institutions and of-ten-contradictory impulses, remain in the driver’s seat. It is still our job to determine whether the vehicles we build are heading toward justice or down the cliff. In this age of relentless automation and seemingly unstoppable consolidation of power and wealth, Power and Progress is an essential reminder that we can, and must, take back control.”
The European Parliament has already adopted the final recommendations of its Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in the Digital Age (AIDA). It has opted to focus public debate on AI focus on “technology’s enormous potential to complement human labor” especially in terms of increasing capital and labor productivity, innovation and job creation.
Europe’s AI Act is on-point in terms of addressing the perils of mass surveillance: ”Certain AI technologies enable the automation of information processing at an unprecedented scale, paving the way for potential mass surveillance and other unlawful interference in fundamental rights. Members of the European Parliament warn that authoritarian regimes can apply AI systems to control, exert mass surveillance and rank their citizens or restrict freedom of movement, while dominant tech platforms use AI to obtain more personal information.”
For members of the European Parliament, this profiling poses risks to democratic systems. Thus they urge international cooperation on safeguarding fundamental rights. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he favors the idea of creating an artificial intelligence agency inspired by the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency that is “a very solid, knowledge-based institution,” with limited regulatory functions.
These latest developments follow the Acemoglu-Johnson trajectory on future directions that are premised on valuable lessons from history. The closing chapter of their new book lists three imperatives for present-day progressive movement advocates: first, expose the fallacy of the technology-equals-progress narrative; assert the countervailing power of civil society organizations and humanitarian movements; and establish thinktanks dedicated to ensuring that “digital technology be repurposed for human flourishing rather than exclusively for private profit.”