The Bleeding Edge. Bob Hughes
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is neutral. It is the adaptation of knowledge to practical purpose. How we use technology and what technologies we develop is up to us. The machine is not in control, corporations and politicians are.
Artificial intelligence is again all the rage. But it has not been artificial intelligence that has made our world more unequal. It has been us, and only in those countries which chose the road to greater inequality, to a new serfdom, from the 1970s onwards.
Less able economists list ‘technology’ as one excuse for growing economic inequality. They are unaware that the most technologically advanced country in the 1980s, Japan, was (and is) also one of the world’s most economically equal countries – and it still produces the highest number of inventions (patents) per head today. Those economists are also unaware that equitable Scandinavian countries are responsible for the greatest production of scientific papers per head. A few don’t even know the origins of the word entrepreneurial, or just how equitable France is compared with the UK and US, and how much better off the average French family is as a result, and how early and widely the French adopted Minitel, the precursor to the World Wide Web. What the most unequal countries of the world are best at is advertising, which creates the impression of being innovative.
Bob Hughes blows all the hype out of the water. He understands both the history and the technology. In this wonderful book he explains how inequality turns humanity into a destructive force that then uses technologies to cause harm.
More egalitarian societies, on the other hand, tend to use it for better ends. It is in more egalitarian societies that technologies are used to preserve and increase biodiversity. In these societies most children since the 1990s have been taught on the assumption that they had great ability and then grew up to be able to use technology well. I recently gave a talk to several hundred civil servants in London, many of whom will have gained top-level degrees from prestigious universities and passed fast-track examinations. None of them could fix their bespoke computer system when the slides would not show. A young man in a ‘service role’ had to be summoned to do that. He appeared to be the only black person in the room. Inequality also creates and sustains racial inequalities. It is neither technology nor ability that makes us become more unequal.
Economic inequality has no ‘safe level’, but high inequality is far more harmful than low inequality. Bob Hughes suggests that we should treat high economic inequality as we treat a banned substance that we know to be harmful. He concludes that encouraging inequality, or tolerating it, when you have the power to do something about it, should be seen as a crime against humanity – given the harm that results. Once you consider the harm that is being caused by the misuse of technology, from drone strikes killing people to subversive marketing destroying the meaning of lives and reducing humans to consumers, it is hard not to have great sympathy with his position.
Equality, not competition or hierarchy, is ‘the mother of invention’. Progress slows or goes into reverse as soon as new ideas are appropriated by hierarchical organizations. Inequality is sustained when a few people persuade the majority that there is no alternative. But there are always huge numbers of alternatives – the computer’s history is littered with them, and the ‘next big thing’ always comes out of one of the alternatives. It is then that corporations in the world’s most unequal rich countries seek to appropriate the new idea and deter further real innovation, as they did to great effect in the 1990s. They will seek instead to sell you a phone where the battery life will rapidly decrease, the operating system updates will overpower its resources, and you will, before you know it, be forced to buy their next product – which does little more than the last. Profit maximization is the anathema of true innovation.
An unequal society can only stay unequal by systematically and continuously preventing people from working together and helping each other – and often criminalizing their attempts to do so. In the UK and the US our imaginations in the 2000s became cramped by generations of rising inequality and the propaganda justifying it. What we need now is to start understanding how different, more exciting and richer our lives will be once great inequality has ceased to be seen as a legitimate state of affairs.
All societies that become greatly unequal eventually fail to adapt technologically and become unsustainable. The water stops flowing so well in the aqueducts. The crops fail because the soil becomes exhausted. The roads and bridges wear away and you don’t create new technologies to replace them. People in far-flung places start to ask ‘what did the Romans ever do for us?’ and begin to realize that what they did, they did a long time ago, often through appropriating and monopolizing technologies that others invented. When inequality rises, you pour more and more resources into your armies and into new technology for them – not into truly productive and co-operative purposes. Slaves and scribes are left to do the hard work. Eventually the empire falls – because high and rising inequality and a consequent lack of real innovation and adaptation is how it so often ends.
We can now see this end coming. It is not too late to learn and change. And technology can help us do this if we better understand it – and ourselves.
Danny Dorling
Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, Oxford University
In northern California in 1974, it was hobbyists, draft-dodgers and political activists who cobbled together what they impiously called ‘personal computers’ from mail-order, bootleg and ‘liberated’ components. Few of them had any intention of founding a new capitalist industry and many of them explicitly opposed any such idea. Some of them wanted a political revolution, and a few recognized the danger that a counter-revolution would sneak into the new movement before it had fairly got started, and end up making the world worse instead of better.
Two events of that period are iconic. First, in 1974, Ted Nelson, a social scientist and literary scholar, self-published a book called Computer Lib, with a clenched fist on its cover, and the slogan ‘You can and must understand computers, NOW!’ It was never a big seller (thanks to Nelson’s eccentric approach to publishing) but it became a sort of foundational text for what would become the ‘hacker’ movement, which subsequently produced such things as the famous GNU/Linux computer operating system. Computer Lib explained basically how computers worked, some of the different things they were capable of, and how they can either confuse, stupefy and oppress, or enlighten, empower and liberate. The book is peppered with memorable insights and slogans; for example: ‘The purpose of computers is human freedom’ and (in an updated 1987 edition): ‘In 1974, computers were oppressive devices in far-off air-conditioned places. Now you can be oppressed by computers in your own living room.’ And this (from one of Nelson’s websites) about the myth of ‘Technology’:
A frying-pan is technology. All human artifacts are technology. But beware anybody who uses this term. Like ‘maturity’ and ‘reality’ and ‘progress’, the word ‘technology’ has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as ‘technology’ is something that somebody wants you to submit to. ‘Technology’ often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to ‘the guys who understand it’.
Nelson, who became best known as the originator of the concept of ‘hypertext’ (which we all use nowadays, after a fashion, when we use the World Wide Web) has been described as the computer underground’s Tom Paine. The idea that you might ‘understand computers, NOW!’ (rather than just buy one, and watch TV on it) may now sound quaint, but the common belief that we will never be able to understand them (and a dominant culture that discourages you from trying) has certainly not helped the cause of human freedom. It has also helped to build the myth that what we have now got is the best of all possible worlds and we shouldn’t even try to imagine anything better.
The second iconic event, in 1975, was the 20-year-old Bill Gates’s angry challenge to the ‘thieves’ at San Francisco’s Homebrew Computer Club who had copied and distributed his version of the BASIC computer language without paying for it, and their own outrage that Gates expected them to pay. Club members and their friends had, after all, just created a less comprehensive