The Next Leg of Human Progress Should Not Be Technological.
We have answered the question of 'how.' Now we need to focus on the 'why.'
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” Henry David Thoreau.
I often think about this quote when I come across discussions revolving around the merits of STEM vs humanities education. The STEM side usually mocks the humanities as an indulgent and useless pastime; the English/philosophy majors retort that while a good engineer can solve any technical problem, he will struggle to explain why Nazis are bad. As a lowly business/finance major myself, I’ll venture to serve as a fair arbiter between the two. The crux of Thoreau’s quote is the observation that there is a mismatch between a breakthrough and revolutionary new medium (telegraph), and its banal applications (transmitting the news of Princess Adelaide whooping cough). He detected a nascent tug of war between the ‘hows’ and the ‘whys.’
The STEM disciplines are the realm of ‘hows’; the humanities – of ‘whys’. Over the course of the past century the ‘hows’ won. Today we carry tiny computers in our pockets that can instantaneously connect us with people across the world; there are straight-faced discussions among influential, intelligent people about the possibility of colonizing Mars; and people who have nothing to say but know how to say it with confidence have the tools to reach millions. None of those inventions and technologies really invite us to assess their end use. These technological breakthroughs brought about an imperative structure – along with its investments, accolades, and awards – that is built around the ideas of disruption and innovation that don’t ask whether such disruptions are needed. Disruption presupposes an action even when no action is warranted.
Action, which struggles to answer the question of ‘why’, became desirable for its own sake. The main result of that is that modern innovations, even of non-grifter variety, don’t really break any new ground. Inventions like telephones, airplanes, vaccines, and even social media were real game-changers. Recent innovations, however, tend to exploit the already existing structures without creating any additional value. In a saturated market, where we’re awash in products and services, opportunities for a new business are scarce, so an action-oriented player (and these days everyone is conditioned to be action-oriented) has to invent one for himself. He or she observes the already existing landscape in, say, blood-testing, office space, taxi services that functions just fine, declares it inefficient and offers a solution. That solution is often a surface, pretend fix, wrapped for greater effect in high-minded babble about ‘elevating consciousness’ and such, and propped by VCs, massive spending on PR, and celebrity board members.
Thus there exists a powerful imperative to ‘do something.’ When you ‘not’ do something, no one will notice, no one will say thank you. If Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t commingle the customers’ funds with his hedge fund, no one would pat him on the back and said ‘That a boy. Good job for not commingling. What a nice guy, that SBF.’ No one will know about the thing you didn’t do. Michael Lewis will not write a book about it, no movie will be made. Inevitably, when given the choice, you go ahead and do it, whatever that is, and attach the reasoning later. “Let’s do it and be legends,” the saying goes.
So a modern-day innovator is nibbling at the edges of an existing idea or product without improving it, or engages in a zero-sum schemes where some group of stakeholders must lose so that another could win. He conjures up a business that he thinks should exist, and then bends reality to justify its existence. If Uber drivers were designated as employees, just like the employees of any old-fashioned taxi service that they aimed to replace, then Uber business model would be unsustainable. But such unsustainability was viewed by the company’s tech founder as a challenge to be overcome with some clever solution, not a reason to cease to do business. Instead of asking the question of ‘why?’, he focused on the ‘how?’ and proceeded to look for a way to circumvent the inconvenient fact that drivers are people who need some basic rights and protections. Sure enough, he found a solution: he lobbied politicians to tweak the regulations to allow the exploitation of drivers. From a business perspective his actions were rational and logical; but a humanities major would question the non-dollar value of it and would note that tech solutionism, while fancy on the surface, often breaks down against the simple fact of physical existence. No fancy app, no fancy code, by itself, will do the required job. It will not deliver the food to your door; a live person still has to be involved for that code to deliver its benefits. Live workers are the bottleneck, the weakest part of any tech business model. People – that crucial flesh-and-blood link between the code and the customer – get sick, they have families, they need to sleep, they need to get raises and treated well, and techies are annoyed by that. If only there was a method to optimize a man to work more for less to deliver a marginally cheaper Uber ride.
This is the point where one comes face to face with having to make a value judgment and lacking the tools to do so. (Making a value judgment is my recurring theme). Yes, wishing for a moral progress, as opposed for a technological one, can be a delusional dream. But is it more delusional than, say, wishing for the colonization of Mars? Is improving our lives, here and now on Earth, a childish fantasy, more so than sending people to build a colony on a planet with no oxygen, no atmosphere, and extreme temperatures? American lefties are mocked for advocating for things like universal health care and other basics protections of a modern civilized state, but then are asked, by the same people who are mocking us, to take mass space travel seriously. Who is more delusional?
Silicon Valley disruptors are all very smart guys, and I don’t think they’re completely unaware of this tension between their business mode of exploitation, extraction of value, manipulation of data, conjuring up of grievances for profit, and their public image and self-concept. After earning billions of dollars, a disruptor’s next quest is to be seen as a good guy. But he can’t just wind down the businesses and return money to investors. Instead, he cures his mental discomfort by funding and promoting an adjacent philosophy that airbrushes the rough edges of his predatory business model. That philosophy, Effective Altruism (EA), proclaims that even the money made via less than stellar practices could be used for good. The leading EA thinkers believe that it is more efficient to go to work for private equity and then donate a percentage of your earnings to a philanthropic cause, than to work for a non-profit. It’s no wonder then that the Silicon Valley disruptors rushed to embrace this philosophy. Effective Altruism is a convenient get-out-of-jail-free card for those who are aware of the damages their businesses inflict on society, and seek for ways to ease their conscience. They squeeze their employees and stiff their contactors but, look, they donate money most efficiently to feed the hungry in Africa, and thus they should be absolved.
One can argue that feeding the hungry in Africa is worthy even if it comes at the expense of shortchanging workers in America, and win that argument. But it is a wrongly-framed argument. The tradeoff is not between the American workers and the hungry Africans. The tradeoff is between the private solutions and the collective solutions, and the latter is more preferrable than the former. The court philosophers of Silicon Valley are strangely silent on the most effective way to improve the lives of millions: a functioning, competent, accountable, transparent, people-oriented government. The blueprint is already there even though there’s currently a lot of room for improvement. A democratic government is a force capable of doing many things at once: it can ensure employment protections, strong unions, a generous welfare for its citizens, and still have money to disburse to poor countries. If the Silicon Valley disruptors and their philosophers have concerns that the government is too inept and too slow, then they can work to improve it, not seek to dismantle it. Collective action and democratic process, while messy and slow, is a better medium for progress than reliance on favors and funding from moody and, as we’ve learned recently, quite inept (one might even say inefficient) billionaires.
In general, I’m actually sympathetic towards Effective Altruists. I believe their heart is in the right place. Most of them lead monkish lifestyles and practice what they preach. But their entire philosophy was built on a fundamental error – that is trying to combine the incompatible, morality and efficiency, and now the EAs find themselves in a contorted posture where they’re claiming a higher moral ground while being utilitarian in practice. They’re finding out that you can’t really quantify a moral decision. Their aspirations are liberal, but their primary funders lean libertarian and/or right-wing. Perhaps this is the underlying reason why the EAs dance around politics: they don’t want to upset their benefactors.
Philosophers by training and disposition, the EAs tried to answer the question of ‘why’ and it led them to a very strange place. They now devote a lot of their mental resources to a project called Longtermism, an idea that we should make sacrifices today to ensure the survival of humankind thousands of years from now. It’s an ambitious proposition, but conveniently unfalsifiable (to use Karl Popper term). Its merits are impossible to assess in the present, with any existing measures. The EAs have no track record and no special qualifications to claim to know how the world’s events will unfold centuries from now. In fact, the EAs couldn’t even predict, a few months ago, that their mega-donor, Sam Bankman-Fried, was running a scheme that was going to collapse by the year’s end. They have nothing to say, for example, on Russian invasion of Ukraine, a major geopolitical event that will shape the course of the humankind for decades to come. If they have a model that they use for their forecasts, and if that model doesn’t include these two major events just from this year, how do they expect us to trust them to know what happens that far in the future?
So what now? I can’t speculate about what will happen, but I do have an idea of what should happen. We should strive to get ourselves to a place where there’s no need for brilliance and heroism of a handful of men. We should be skeptical towards wealthy iconoclasts and ponder what working processes they disrupted or whose trust they violated to gain their wealth.
I’d like to see more innovations with a humanistic approach that eliminate the need for hustle, that allow a man who is not savvy to lead a normal life and not to constantly be on the lookout for predators and scammers. A worthy innovation would protect a layman from scams without asking him to understand how the scam works and not blaming him if he doesn’t. It would not ask him to buy a product or click on a link. It would protect his personal data, and it would do so without the layman even knowing about it. It would allow us to let our guard down and focus on our personal projects.
Further, we already have the tools and the technology to live good lives. Already today, we can provide $10 insulin to diabetics and free lunches to all schoolchildren (a reality in California). We can produce enough food, shelter and medical care to ensure everyone has a decent living standard, if only we collectively decided to do it. We are not constrained by physical barriers, only by organizational ones.
These are not the kind of innovations that can be delivered by a private company or by a wealthy individual, no matter how high-minded. The value they create can’t be put down on a spreadsheet and can’t be monetized. The projects devoted to general welfare, because they’re lacking in excitement and a chance for instant riches, would attract unremarkable, average-intelligence bureaucrats, instead of ambitious, rule-breaking young men. But so what? That’s what we need now – maintenance and care of existing structures, not space travel and speculative tokens.
Advocating for any of the above is an unglamorous occupation. Wanting a functioning state that aims for well-being of its citizens is not a novel, revolutionary idea. Maintenance and care are boring, feminine notions. But our technological potential is now exhausted to the point where the supposed improvements are exponentially trivial and the expenses are exponentially limitless.
All the mediums are already available, we don’t need to invent new ones; what we need is to fine tune the applications. We should stop trying to invent another telegraph, and think about what is the purpose of the existing one.