Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity
How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
Douglas Rushkoff for Medium, The Guardian, Tue 24 Jul 2018
Silicon Valley’s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster – and when
it comes, they’ll leave the rest of us behind
Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a
keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment
bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a
talk – about half my annual professor’s salary – all to deliver some
insight on the subject of “the future of technology”.
I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end
up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest
technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential
investments: blockchain, 3D printing, Crispr. The audiences are rarely
interested in learning about these technologies or their potential
impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them.
But money talks, so I took the gig.
After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room.
But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just
sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five
super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the hedge
fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest
in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They
had come with questions of their own.
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They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum
computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into
their real topics of concern.
Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New
Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his
brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will
it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage
house explained that he had nearly completed building his own
underground bunker system and asked: “How do I maintain authority over
my security force after the Event?”
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse,
social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack
that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew
armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry
mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What
would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires
considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only
they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in
return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards
and workers – if that technology could be developed in time.
That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were
concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their
cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing
process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into
supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a
whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did
with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating
themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising
sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and
resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about
just one thing: escape.
There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology
might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human
utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration
of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that
is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and
complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years,
now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data,
concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects”.
It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by
finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along
for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel … Zuckerberg? These
billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the
same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of
this speculation to begin with.
Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the
early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our
invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture,
who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed,
and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new
potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were
seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like
stock futures or cotton futures – something to predict and make bets on.
So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was
seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The
future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or
hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our
venture capital but arrive at passively.
This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities.
Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing
than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of
this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an
anti-technology curmudgeon.
So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and
exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists,
and science fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and
fanciful conundrums: is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs?
Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want
autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of
its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies?
Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?
Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is
a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries
associated with unbridled technological development in the name of
corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already
exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even
more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of
these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the
demise of local retail.
But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital
capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of
some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave
labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called
Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones,
learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to
their products as “fairer” phones.)
Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly
digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic
waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their
families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.
This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison
doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and
immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we
ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more
of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal,
more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy – and more desperately
concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.
The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to
see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very
essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than a
bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral.
Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own
corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for
our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be
“solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing
inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or
genetic upgrade.
Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human
future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps
better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor.
Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent
phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind,
along with our sins and troubles.
Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie
shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the
undead – and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to
imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans,
where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even
Westworld – based on a science fiction novel in which robots run amok –
ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: human beings are
simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we
create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few
lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices.
Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their
bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.
The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between
humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans
suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.
Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space – as
if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for
corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and
somehow survive in a bubble on Mars – despite our inability to maintain
such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar
biosphere trials – the result will be less a continuation of the human
diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.
This piece was originally published in Medium.
Douglas Rushkoff is the author of the forthcoming book Team Human (WW
Norton, January 2019) and host of the TeamHuman.fm podcast. He also
wrote Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of
Prosperity, as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media,
technology and culture.
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