One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn’t have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It’s as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world!
Meanwhile, you can’t put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can’t stop, or look back, or think straight. But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. Things could have turned out differently.
And if you look back, one thing you’ll see is that a lot of people saw this all coming. They foresaw our present when it was still the future. They thought it might turn out fabulously, a computer utopia.
And they worried it might turn out disastrously. Above all, they issued warning after warning about the rise of what I call the artificial state, the replacement of the liberal democratic nation-state, the consent of the governed, with the rule of people by machines. They warned of a future in which democratic deliberation would be replaced by prediction by calculation, the public sphere would be supplanted by data-driven commerce, and drones would take the place of the demos.
Why didn’t anyone listen? Between the 1950s and the 1980s, computers got smaller, faster, cheaper and more powerful; computer languages became more sophisticated; and electronic data, once a molehill, became a mountain. As data processing and general-purpose computers moved from the military to industry, business and medicine, sizeable chunks of public life became automated, driven by computers, calculations, networks and algorithms that did the political work of rallying support, running campaigns, communicating with constituents and crafting policy, especially in the world’s wealthiest nations.
The adoption and diffusion of such technologies led to wild-eyed speculation about their possible social and political consequences, a discussion that, characteristically, ricocheted between dreams of a technological utopia and fears of an artificial state. In 1981, for instance, the Japanese sociologist Yoneji Masuda, a theorist of what he called “information society”, predicted the arrival of either a computopia that would bring about the eradication of all distinctions of class and nation and “a symbiosis in which man and nature can live together in harmony”, or a compudystopia that he called an “automated state”: government by machine. Yet the two possible futures had much in common, since the path toward either had already led humans “to neglect the need for coexistence with nature, while our impact on nature has grown immeasurably”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
