Technology to the Rescue!

Now that it's not Jesus anymore

Here’s the latest: Artificial Intelligence, Martian colonization, and social networks are going to save us! In the 20’s, the car and mass production with their high wages and the resulting consumerism were going to save us. Before that, it was the telephone and the vast increase in international trade.

The theme of this article is not get-off-my-lawn, “new technology is bad.” I look forward to using the latest things myself, or at least most of them. No, it’s

Human nature is human nature. No matter what gizmos you put in our hands or rules you set in place, we’re always going to be tribal, nasty people who hate each other, some or all of the time. Social engineering should consist of giving us only the connectivity we can handle, and no more: to be neighbors, not roommates.

Before technology was the answer, religion was the answer. Nowadays, saying that would get you laughed out of high tech (Note: I’m an atheist myself and don’t go to church, so if that describes you, too: keep reading). However, it’s always seemed to me that a lot of technologists are responding to the same religious impulses that drive Christians, except they won’t admit it, even to themselves. This was also elaborated on in Vox, of all places.

In a recent book, David Noble said,

It is the aim of this book to demonstrate that the present enchantment with things technological—the very measure of modern enlightenment—is rooted in religious myths and ancient imaginings. Although today's technologists, in their sober pursuit of utility, power, and profit, seem to set society's standard for rationality, they are driven also by distant dreams, spiritual yearnings for super-natural redemption. However dazzling and daunting their display of worldly wisdom, their true inspiration lies elsewhere, in an enduring, other-worldly quest for transcendence and salvation.

Before high tech was going to save us, the Bible told us that since Adam and Eve, mankind is fallen and only God can save us. If we look beneath what all the cheerleaders of “progress” are telling us, we see the same theme, except that now it’s technology.

Mark Twain may not have actually said, “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.” But he should have.

The Telephone is Going to Save Us

R.M. McIver wrote, in the International Journal of Ethics (1912)

The civilized world is becoming more and more rapidly an effective society. Each country is becoming more and more bound up in the welfare of each. Every recent advance of science has been a means for the widening of the area of community, uniting men in ways impossible before. Railway, telegraph, telephone, Marconi apparatus, even camera, cinematograph, and electric theatre, are they not all bridging the gulfs of isolation, bringing the peoples nearer to one another, and enabling them to realize the common factors of all civilized life? The will for peace grows with the means of community.

International Trade is Going to Save Us

Prior to the first World War, many influential people argued that war had become obsolete, because modern communications (see above) and increasing trade made nations more interdependent.

Norman Angell wrote a bestselling book in 1909, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage which argued that war could not bring any commercial advantages to its “victors,” and therefore it was very unlikely.

What are the fundamental motives that explain the present rivalry of armaments in Europe, notably the Anglo-German? Each nation pleads the need for defence; but this implies that someone is likely to attack, and has therefore a presumed interest in so doing. What are the motives which each State thus fears its neighbors may obey?

They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others (German naval competition is assumed to be the expression of the growing need of an expanding population for a larger place in the world, a need which will find a realization in the conquest of English Colonies or trade, unless these are defended); it is assumed, therefore, that a nation's relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being competing units, advantage, in the last resort, goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker going to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.

The author challenges this whole doctrine. He attempts to show that it belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed; that the commerce and industry of a people no longer depend upon the expansion of its political frontiers; that a nation's political and economic frontiers do not now necessarily coincide; that military power is socially and economically futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity of the people exercising it; that it is impossible for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of another—to enrich itself by subjugating, or imposing its will by force on another; that, in short, war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which peoples strive. [emphasis added]

Apparently not chastened at all by World War I, which, one would think, proved him wrong, he reissued the book in 1933 and added the theme of “collective defense.” He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933, which shows that if you think that prize is meaningless now: it always was.

NATO manages to whitewash him here.

Norman Angell may forever be remembered for something he never actually said: that war had become impossible. Yet, just as scholars are now considering him an early pioneer of international relations theory, Angell should also be remembered as a man who managed to acknowledge that preserving peace in a changing world means leaving outdated dogmas behind.

So, they’re saying he was wrong? Just checking.

The Automobile is Going to Save Us

From the book I cited: in the 1910’s, Mexico was going through a revolution, and Pancho Villa was terrorizing the Southwest. Ford said, about that:

It was technology, production, and commerce that made history, and it would be not gunboats or marines that would tame the world but his car. “In Mexico villages fight one another.” Ford said, but “if we could give every man in those villages an automobile, let him travel from his home town to the other town, and permit him to find out that his neighbors at heart were his friends, rather than his enemies, Mexico would be pacified for all time.” [emphasis added]

The Internet and AI are Going to Save Us

The Singularity is Near!

Ray Kurzweil is probably the foremost advocate of “the singularity” where our brains will merge with computers. In other words, all of our “intelligence” will be sucked out of our brains and into the computer. In fact, we will BE a computer.

Here he is at South by Southwest in 2024:

(I’ve done some minor editing for coherence and fairness, since this is speech, not written and edited text.)

Futzing with the audio as the talk starts:

1:17 [Interviewer] Can you hear me?

(audience answers indistinctly) - You can't hear, Ray?

(audience answers indistinctly) Well, this will be recorded. You guys are gonna all live forever. There'll be plenty of time. It will be fine. I'm just gonna get started.

30:07 [Kurzweil] I mean we're gonna have a lot more power, if we can actually with our own brain control computers. Is it going to give people too much power? Also, I mean right now we talk about having a certain amount of value based on your talent. This will give talent to people who otherwise don't have talent.

And talent won't be as important, because you'll be able to gain talent, just by merging with the right kind of large language model, or whatever we call them. And it also seemed kind of arbitrary why we would give more power to somebody who has more talent,'cause they didn't create that talent, they just happened to have it.

Is that fair or unfair? I mean I think that would fall into the ethical challenge area. And it's not like we get to the end of this and say, okay, this is finally what the singularity is all about and people can do certain things and they can't do other things, but it's over. We will never get to that point. I mean this curve is gonna continue. The other curve, it's gonna continue indefinitely.

And we've actually shown, for example, with nanotechnology we can create a computer where one liter computer would actually match the amount of power that all human beings today have. Like 10th to the 10th persons would all fit into one liter computer. Does that create ethical problems? So, I mean a lot of the implications kind of run against what we've been assuming about human beings. -

[Question] Wait, on the talent question, which is super interesting. Do you feel like everybody, when we get to 2040 will have equal capacities?

[Kurzweil] I think we'll be more different, because we'll have different interests and you might be into some fantastic type of music and I might be into some kind of literature or something else. I mean we're gonna have different interests and so, we'll excel at certain things depending on what your interests are. So, it's not like we all have the same amount of power, but we all have fantastic power compared to what we have today.

So anyone can become a helicopter pilot, just by downloading the correct module! And you won’t need to “have” musical talent anymore; you’ll just install it. Can’t wait.

Later on, the general question of whether this will actually make things better:

47:49 [Kurzweil] Nonetheless, I believe that things will get better, because we wipe out jobs, but we create other ways of having an income. And if you actually point to something, let's say this machine and this is being worked on, can wash dishes. You just have a bunch of dishes that'll pick the ones that have to go in the dishwasher and clean everything else up, and that will wash dishes for you.

Would we want that not to happen? Would we say, well, this is kind of upsetting things, let's get rid of it. It's not gonna happen. And no one would would advocate that. So, we'll find things to do. We'll have other methods of distributing money and it'll continue these kinds of curves that we've seen already.

Other Experts

The Pew Research Center surveyed experts on effects of the Internet and AI.

Andrew Odlyzko, professor at the University of Minnesota and former head of its Digital Technology Center and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, said, “Assuming we avoid giant disasters, such as runaway climate change or huge pandemics, we should be able to overcome many of the problems that plague humanity, in health and freedom from physical wants, and from backbreaking or utterly boring jobs. This will bring in other problems, of course.”

Of course.

Joaquin Vanschoren, assistant professor of machine learning at Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, responded, “We will be able to interact with each other and the world’s information more directly, without going through web interfaces, maybe using a brain-internet interface. A lot more content will be generated automatically, by AI systems that help us fill in the holes in our knowledge and make it more easily accessible.”

AI content: can’t wait! Actually, we already have that. Maybe it will get better.

Ray Schroeder, an associate vice chancellor at the University of Illinois, Springfield, wrote, “Connected technologies and applications will become much more seamlessly integrated into people’s lives. Technologies are emerging, such as MIT’s AlterEgo, that point to practical telepathy in which human thought will directly connect with supercomputers – and through those computers with other people. This kind of thought-based communication will become ubiquitous through always-on, omnipresent networks. Personal devices will fade away as direct connectivity becomes ubiquitous. These advances will enable instant virtual ‘learning’ of new ideas and the whole range of literature. One will be able to ‘recall’ a novel or a treatise as if one had studied it for years. Such will be the state of augmented memory. There will be attempts to apply new rules/laws, but technological capability will most often trump artificial restrictions. This will further empower people, by the power of their purchases and choice-to-use to set standards of acceptability and preference.”

Social Media is Going to Save Us

Facebook / Meta also appears to believe, to its core, that connecting people will, all by itself, be a Good Thing.

Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth said, in 2016,

“The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good,” Andrew Bosworth, an outspoken Facebook executive, explained in a 2016 memo circulated within the company that only leaked out this year. [emphasis added]

“That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified,” the memo continued. “All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.” Once the memo was published by BuzzFeed News, Bosworth backtracked and declared that his forceful words were merely meant to provoke disagreement and thus help the company come up with reasonable limits to rapid growth. Um, OK.

Zuckerberg himself said (in fairness, he also distanced himself from Bosworth’s comments):

We’re an idealistic and optimistic company. For the first decade, we really focused on all the good that connecting people brings. And as we rolled Facebook out across the world, people everywhere got a powerful new tool for staying connected, for sharing their opinions, for building businesses. Families have been reconnected, people have gotten married because of these tools. Social movements and marches have been organized, including just in the last couple of weeks. And tens of millions of small business now have better tools to grow that previously only big companies would have had access to. [emphasis added]

CNN Business said:

"We used to have a sense that if we could just do those things, then that would make a lot of the things in the world better by themselves," Zuckerberg told CNN Tech. "But now we realize that we need to do more too. It's important to give people a voice, to get a diversity of opinions out there, but on top of that, you also need to do this work of building common ground so that way we can all move forward together."

The company even has a new mission statement: "To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." [emphasis added]

Actually, Mark: when people are connected, they don’t only discover new friends; they often realize they hate each other. Just go on Twitter or Reddit if you doubt that.

So is it All Just Recycled Religion?

I’ve shown with quotations from before it all went wrong, how every technological breakthrough was going to free us from some or all of the downsides of being human: we won’t have wars anymore because the diplomats can call each other; we’ll love everyone because we can just drive to their town; we’ll transcend death; and we will be connected to everyone so we won’t hate them anymore.

Techies don’t go to church, as a rule, so this Bible verse probably escapes them:

Genesis 3:22:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”

Look again at Kurzweil’s dreams, and then consider this: the great theologian Teilhard du Chardin said in 1959 (he died in 1955, but the Catholic Church refused to permit publication during his life):

Despite the wave of skepticism which seems to have swept away the hopes (too ingenuous, no doubt, and too materialistic) on which the nineteenth century lived, faith in the future is not dead in our hearts. Indeed, it is this faith, deepened and purified, which must save us. Not only does the idea of a possible raising of our consciousness to a state of super-consciousness show itself daily, in the light of scientific experience, to be better founded and psychologically more necessary for preserving in Man his will to act; but furthermore this idea, carried to its logical extreme, appears to be the only one capable of paving the way for the great event we look for -- the manifestation of a unified impulse of worship in which will be joined and mutually exalted both a passionate desire to conquer the World and a passionate longing to be united with God: the vital act, specifically new, corresponding to a new age in the history of Earth.

It’s impossible to read the techno-optimists and not think that they’ve reinvented religion without realizing it. Especially the part about living forever. I’m not the first one to notice this; Vox said,

Suppose I told you that in 10 years, the world as you know it will be over. You will live in a sort of paradise. You won’t get sick, or age, or die. Eternal life will be yours! Even better, your mind will be blissfully free of uncertainty — you’ll have access to perfect knowledge. Oh, and you’ll no longer be stuck on Earth. Instead, you can live up in the heavens.

If I told you all this, would you assume that I was a religious preacher or an AI researcher?

Either one would be a pretty solid guess.

The more you listen to Silicon Valley’s discourse around AI, the more you hear echoes of religion. That’s because a lot of the excitement about building a superintelligent machine comes down to recycled religious ideas. Most secular technologists who are building AI just don’t recognize that.

Amen. The problem is not that we lack the technology to transcend our limitations. There is nothing that will do that. We’re stuck with being humans.