Peter Cochrane: Technology - threat or promise?
Dispelling fear of new technology is challenging, particularly in today's intellectual landscape
When exposed to any novel technology, people tend to react with a degree of caution, and, in extreme cases, with a bias toward the dystopian. In this respect, Hollywood and the sensationalism of the mainstream media are major contributors, along with social networks. Covid-19 being spread by 5G is a prime example!
Dispelling deep-seated assertions that technology is inherently evil and obviously a direct threat to humanity is difficult. And if rational thinking could put this to bed, it would have done so long ago, based on history and described by just three axioms:
- Without technology we would not have progressed as a species, and we would know and understand almost nothing
- The greatest threat to humanity is humanity
- If technological progress stalls, civilisations collapse
Industrial revolutions have successively improved mankind's lot with better housing, clothing, food, healthcare and education.
There has never been a malevolent technology or machine
And there has never been a malevolent technology or machine, the beneficial upside has always far outweighed any consequential negatives. Further, a continuous stream of advanced technologies have allowed us to see further, understand more, and produce ever more impressive solutions to our problems and condition.
So, how come we have people (in the West) destroying mobile phone towers, refusing to accept proven medicines, and generally reverting to unfounded belief systems promoted by ‘Mary on Facebook'? It seems that the deterioration in the general level of Western educational attainment, compounded by a growing distrust of politics and capitalism, are three key elements.
But this has also been amplified by a falling interest in science, technology, and engineering, with a growing inability to rationalise situations and a general bias toward panic and hysteria.
Recently, robotics has been cited as the future creator of mass unemployment, whilst AI has been identified as the biggest existential threat to mankind. By whom, you might ask? Well, how about several well known celebrities who never built a robot or designed an AI system! Sadly, it would appear that rational public debate is a distant memory, and these prognostications lit up Twitter, WhatsApp et al. as ill-informed focus groups got to work, and all orchestrated by self-appointed gurus on all things technical and philosophical.
There appears to be no limit to the craziness, and it is costing lives as the blue light services now depend upon mobile networks, and those refusing modern medicine congest the health system in their dying, or extended ailing, days.
No matter what evidence you present, people appear unable to rationalise the known facts. They seem to inhabit wells of ignorance, continually reinforced by thousands of like-minded social media souls.
Paradoxically, they all communicate over the internet using mobile devices that are, at once, miracles of modernity whilst allegedly cooking your brains!
What these people have failed to realise is that robots and AI are not technologies of the future, they are the here and now, and we are wholly dependent on them for our heat, light, power, water, gas, communication, logistics and the supply of our food, products, and artefacts!
Sadly, it is also apparent from the many public debates between politicians, scholars and philosophers outside the sphere of technology that they don't get it either!
Reality strikes: humans can no longer cope with the degree of complexity and non-linearity inherent in the problem sets that confront them, but machines can. In design, industrial production, supply, materials and energy management, medicine and services, machines are now largely in control.
And there is no going back!
Peter Cochrane OBE is professor of sentient systems at the University of Suffolk, UK