The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (33 page)

To at last make real the dream of human freedom via machine labor, we’re using silicon, metal, and plastic. These are the key physical ingredients of the second machine age, at the heart of the digital computers, cables, and sensors being built and deployed with such speed all around the world.

What they’re enabling is something without precedent. For all previous generations, when people thought of the best minds of their time working with available materials to make artificial helpers, all they could come up with were stories.

Our generation is different.

Now when we imagine a machine doing a human task, we can be confident that if the automaton doesn’t already exist there’s at least a good chance that someone in a lab or garage somewhere is tinkering with version 0.1. Over the past three years, the two of us have visited a lot of these innovators and their workshops, and we’ve been astonished by the brilliant technologies of the second machine age.

After surveying the landscape, we are convinced that we are at an inflection point—the early stages of a shift as profound as that brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Not only are the new technologies exponential, digital, and combinatorial, but most of the gains are still ahead of us. In the next twenty-four months, the planet will add more computer power than it did in all previous history. Over the next twenty-four years, the increase will likely be over a thousand-fold. We’ve already digitized exabytes of information, but the amount of data that’s being digitized is growing even faster than Moore’s Law.

Our generation will likely have the good fortune to experience two of the most amazing events in history: the creation of true machine intelligence and the connection of all humans via a common digital network, transforming the planet’s economics. Innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, tinkerers, and many other types of geeks will take advantage of this cornucopia to build technologies that astonish us, delight us, and work for us. Over and over again, they’ll show how right Arthur C. Clarke was when he observed that a sufficiently advanced technology can be indistinguishable from magic.

The Risks We’ll Run

As we’ve seen, however, not all the news is good. The middle chapters of this book have shown that while the bounty brought by technology is increasing, so is the spread. And greater spread is not the only possible negative consequence of the coming era of brilliant technology. Our era will face other challenges, ones that are not rooted in economics.

As we move deeper into the second machine age these perils, from both accident and malice, will become greater while material wants and needs are likely to be relatively less important. We will be increasingly concerned with questions about catastrophic events, genuine existential risks, freedom versus tyranny, and other ways that technology can have unintended or unexpected side effects.

The sheer density and complexity of our digital world brings risk with it. Our technological infrastructure is becoming ever more complicated and interlinked. The Internet and intranets, for example, now connect not just people and computers but also televisions, thermostats, burglar alarms, industrial sensors and controls, locomotives, automobiles, and an uncountable multitude of other devices. Many of these provide feedback to one another, and most rely on a few common subsystems like the routers that direct Internet traffic.

Any system this complex and tightly coupled has two related weaknesses. First, it’s subject to seeing minor initial flaws cascade via an unpredictable sequence into something much larger and more damaging. Such a cascade, which sociologist Charles Perrow labeled a ‘system accident’ or ‘normal accident,’ characterized the 1979 meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the August 2003 electrical blackout that affected forty-five million people throughout the U.S. Northeast, and many other incidents.
¹

Second, complex, tightly coupled systems make tempting targets for spies, criminals, and those who seek to wreak havoc. A recent example here is the Stuxnet computer worm, which may have been incubated in government labs. In 2010 Stuxnet hobbled at least one Iranian nuclear facility by perverting the control systems of its Siemens industrial equipment. The worm entered its target sites and spread through them by jumping harmlessly from PC to PC; when it spotted an opportunity, it crossed over to the Siemens machines and did its damage there.
²

Until recently, our species did not have the ability to destroy itself. Today it does. What’s more, that power will reach the hands of more and more individuals as technologies become both more powerful and cheaper—and thus more ubiquitous. Not all of those individuals will be both sane and well intentioned. As Bill Joy and others have noted, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence can create self-replicating entities.
³
That means that someone working in a basement laboratory might someday use one of these technologies to unleash destructive forces that affect the entire planet. The same scientific breakthroughs in genome sequencing that can be used to cure disease can also be used to create a weaponized version of the smallpox virus.
⁴
Computer programs can also self-replicate, becoming digital viruses, so the same global network that spreads ideas and innovations can also spread destruction. The physical limits on how much damage any individual or small group could do are becoming less and less constrained. Will our ability to detect and counteract destructive uses of technology advance rapidly enough to keep us safe? That will be an increasingly important question to answer.

George Orwell, William Gibson, and others have described dystopian scenarios involving the loss of freedom and the use of technology to empower despotic rulers and control information flows. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen describe some of these technologies, as well as countermeasures, in their book,
The New Digital Age
. The same tools that make it possible to monitor the world in greater detail also give governments and their adversaries the ability to monitor what people are doing and who they are communicating with. There’s a genuine tension between our ability to know more and our ability to prevent others from knowing about us. When information was mostly analog and local, the laws of physics created an automatic zone of privacy. In a digital world, privacy requires explicitly designed institutions, incentives, laws, technologies, or norms about which information flows are permitted or prevented and which are encouraged or discouraged.

There are myriad other ways that technology can have unexpected side effects, from addictive gaming and digital distractions to the cyberbalkanization of interest groups, from social isolation to environmental degradation.
⁵
Even seemingly benevolent inventions, like a technology that dramatically increased longevity, would create enormous social upheaval.
*

Is the Singularity Near?

The final, and most far-out, possibility is another sci-fi staple: the development of fully conscious machines. There are two main strands of thinking—one dystopian, one utopian—about what will happen when computers and robots get ‘real’ minds. The dystopian one finds expression in the
Terminator
and
Matrix
movies and countless other pieces of science fiction. It makes for compelling entertainment, and it seems more and more plausible as technology continues to advance and demonstrate human-like capabilities. Teamwork, after all, is another of these capabilities, so why wouldn’t future versions of Watson, the Google autonomous car, the BigDog robot from Boston Dynamics, drone aircraft, and lots of other smart machines decide to work together? And if they did, wouldn’t they soon realize that we humans treat our technologies pretty poorly, scrapping them without a second thought? Self-preservation alone would plausibly motivate this digital army to fight against us (perhaps using Siri as an interpreter for the enemy).

In utopian versions of digital consciousness, we humans don’t fight with machines; we join with them, uploading our brains into the cloud and otherwise becoming part of a “technological singularity.” This is a term coined in 1983 by science-fiction author Vernor Vinge, who predicted that, “We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. . . . When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”
⁶

Progress toward such a singularity, Vinge and others have argued, is driven by Moore’s Law. Its accumulated doubling will eventually yield a computer with more processing and storage capacity than the human brain. Once this happens, things become highly unpredictable. Machines could become self-aware, humans and computers could merge seamlessly, or other fundamental transitions could occur. Ray Kurzweil, who has done more than anyone else to explain the power of exponential improvement, wrote in his 2005 book
The Singularity Is Near
that at current rates of progress these transitions will occur by about 2045.
⁷
How plausible is singularity or the Terminator? We honestly don’t know. As with all things digital it’s wise never to say never, but we still have a long way to go.

The science-fiction capabilities of
Jeopardy!
-champion supercomputers and autonomous cars can be misleading. Because they’re examples of digital technologies doing human-like things, they can lead us to conclude that the technologies themselves are becoming human-like. But they’re not—yet. We humans build machines to do things that we see being done in the world by animals and people, but we typically don’t build them the same way that nature built us. As AI trailblazer Frederick Jelinek put it beautifully, “Airplanes don’t flap their wings.”
⁸

It’s true that scientists, engineers, and other innovators often take cues from biology as they’re working, but it would be a mistake to think that this is always the case, or that major recent AI advances have come about because we’re getting better at mimicking human thought. Journalist Stephen Baker spent a year with the Watson team to research his book
Final Jeopardy!
. He found that, “The IBM team paid little attention to the human brain while programming Watson. Any parallels to the brain are superficial, and only the result of chance.”
⁹

As we were researching this book we heard similar sentiments from most of the innovators we talked to. Most of them weren’t trying to unravel the mysteries of human consciousness or understand exactly how we think; they were trying to solve problems and seize opportunities. As they did so, they sometimes came up with technologies that had human-like skills and abilities. But these tools themselves were not like humans at all. Current AI, in short, looks intelligent, but it’s an artificial resemblance. That might change in the future. We might start to build digital tools that more closely mimic our minds, perhaps even drawing on our rapidly improving capabilities for scanning and mapping brains. And if we do, those digital minds will certainly augment ours and might even eventually merge with them, or become self-aware on their own.

Destined For . . . ?

Even in the face of all these challenges—economic, infrastructural, biological, societal, and existential—we’re still optimistic. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.
¹⁰
We think the data support this. We’ve seen not just vast increases in wealth but also, on the whole, more freedom, more social justice, less violence, and less harsh conditions for the least fortunate and greater opportunities for more and more people.

In Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
, when the Ghost of Christmas Future pointed at Scrooge’s tombstone Scrooge asked, “Is this what must be, or what might be?” For questions of technology and the future state of the world, it’s the latter. Technology creates possibilities and potential, but ultimately, the future we get will depend on the choices we make. We can reap unprecedented bounty and freedom, or greater disaster than humanity has ever seen before.

The technologies we are creating provide vastly more power to change the world, but with that power comes greater responsibility. That’s why we aren’t technological determinists, and that’s why we devoted three chapters in this book to a set of recommendations that we think will improve the odds of achieving a society with shared prosperity.

But in the long run, the real questions will go beyond economic growth. As more and more work is done by machines, people can spend more time on other activities. Not just leisure and amusements, but also the deeper satisfactions that come from invention and exploration, from creativity and building, and from love, friendship, and community. We don’t have a lot of formal metrics for those kinds of value, and perhaps we never will, but they will nonetheless grow in importance as we satisfy our more basic economic needs. If the first machine age helped unlock the forces of energy trapped in chemical bonds to reshape the physical world, the real promise of the second machine age is to help unleash the power of human ingenuity.

Our success will depend not just on our technological choices, or even on the coinvention of new organizations and institutions. As we have fewer constraints on what we can do, it is then inevitable that our
values
will matter more than ever. Will we choose to have information widely disseminated or tightly controlled? Will our prosperity be broadly shared? What will be the nature and magnitude of rewards we give to our innovators? Will we build vibrant relationships and communities? Will everyone have the opportunities to discover, create, and enjoy the best of life?

In the second machine age, we need to think much more deeply about what it is we really want and what we value, both as individuals and as a society. Our generation has inherited more opportunities to transform the world than any other. That’s a cause for optimism, but only if we’re mindful of our choices.