“Industrial Society and Its Future” and “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”
For those of us horrified by the technocratic,
techno-obsessed culture we live within (and criticizing it while typing into
our laptops), here’s a couple of longish readings for consumption. For those of
you of substantial years who say tl;dr, consider if you would have said that a
quarter century ago. Yes, the Internet is messing with all our attention spans.
Resist! Resist!
The first article is the so-called Unabomber
Manifesto, entitled <em> </em> by its author, Ted Kaczynski, as
published in <em>The New York Times </em> in 1996.
To refresh your memory, quoting Wikipedia, “Between
1978 and 1995, [Ted Kaczynski] killed three
people and injured 23 others in an attempt to start a revolution by conducting
a nationwide bombing campaign targeting people involved with modern technology.
In conjunction with this effort, he issued a social critique opposing
industrialization while advocating a nature-centered form of anarchism. […] [H]e
argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the
erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies that require
large-scale organization.
The second article is “Why the Future Doesn’t
Need Us” by Bill Joy, billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun
Microsystems. His article was published in <em>Wired</em> in 2000.
Joy was greatly disturbed by the following excerpt
from <em>Industrial Society and Its Future</em>, particularly given
that his Silicon Valley colleagues took Koczynski’s predictions seriously:
First let us postulate
that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that
can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably
all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no
human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines
might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight,
or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are
permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to
the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave.
We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the
machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough
to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that
the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines
would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might
easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the
machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the
machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and
more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let
machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made
decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may
be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be
so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At
that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to
just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that
turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is
possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the
average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as
his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines
will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two
differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control
over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses
will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless
they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane
they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to
reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the
world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they
may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race.
They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all
children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone
has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become
dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem."
Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically
or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process
or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless
hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they
will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of
domestic animals.
Joy’s article describes what he sees as
possible unintended consequences of various technological developments, noting
that these are “a well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and
one that is clearly related to Murphy's law—‘Anything that can go wrong, will.’
(Actually, this is Finagle's law, which in itself shows that Finagle was
right.)”
Warning to easily offended leftists: Koczynski
has some harsh pronouncements regarding what he calls the left.
Have at it.
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