Incremental, Exponential, Existential
Move Fast and Break Everything?
In earlier times, existential threats weren’t part of the progression. Discoveries that changed our lives started small and grew incrementally. Things like fire, the wheel, tools, agriculture, irrigation, and the printing press, developed over time and were slowly adopted into tribes and cultures. More recently, things like electricity, the lightbulb, vaccines, the Beatles, and computers enjoyed more rapid adoption and growth. But life-changing inventions and ideas still grew at safe and manageable speeds; they were allowed to marinate, stew and cure. The Internet changed everything. Duh. But seriously, the speed at which ideas become products, and products change lives happens in a nanosecond. Which can be good or not.
Inventions are a result of human ingenuity and inventiveness. They are responses to problems and fill evolving needs. Developed sometimes by chance and other times after decades of hard work, holy shit ideas change how we all live. And while not every idea turns out to be life-altering, Crocs and New Coke come to mind; new ideas and inventions didn’t pose existential threats. But those days are over. So the question we face today is: will our new technologies make our lives better or be the end of us?
Four Deadly Cliches
For centuries, we’ve been moving toward life-threatening tech, urged on by philosophers, scientists, scholars, clerics, politicians, and business people seeking answers to life’s thorniest questions. And most of those have to do with making our lives easier. Our pursuit of “truth” has never really been about creating a more enlightened human; it’s been about creating a more comfortable and prosperous human. But those efforts have been woefully inadequate. We’ve been misled in a big way, so much so that our collective drive and ambition are more likely to get us killed and less likely to make life better. Four critical ideas illustrate how dangerous our pursuits have become.
The Econo Me
Given that it is the foundation upon which our economy is built, Adam Smith’s theory of capitalism might be the most dangerous. Smith believed that “humans were self-serving by nature but that as long as every individual were to seek the fulfillment of their self-interest, the material needs of the whole society would be met.” So by that logic, if a business person engaged in the pursuit of creating a successful business is happy, they will make society happy. Happy business people make happy societies. Let’s just let that sit there and stew for a minute and move on to a couple more theories.
Survival of the Fittest
A friend gave me a Halloween card that read, “You’re the kind of person I want with me during a Zombie Apocalypse. Someone who runs a little slower than I do.” This is a clever interpretation of the survival strategy presented in Sir Charles Darwin’s 1858 paper entitled, On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties of species by natural selection. Darwin hypothesized, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the most adaptable to change.” In a Zombie Apocolypse, speed counts, and the faster runner lives. IRL, you have to keep evolving and innovating in life, or you’re toast.
Innovate or Die
“Innovate or Die” is the next on our list of theories to create better humans, bigger businesses, and a more beautiful society. In the 1980s, business guru Peter Drucker amalgamated the term from the writings of like-minded business professionals. Since then, innovation has been a critical component and secret sauce of successful corporations. Every business is like a living organism, concerned with two things: survival and replication. The line between the two is fuzzy, but adaptation through innovation is essential to both.
OK, we’re finished with the philosophy. You still with me?
You Shop or Companies Drop
Ah, Conspicuous Consumption; the dawn of a new age. The term was coined by American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his 1889 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. The Industrial Revolution began in the 1850s. It took another thirty years before everyone got the shopping virus. Now, it’s part of our DNA, and except for a couple of economic downturns, a depression, and a few recessions, the shopping hasn’t stopped because companies won’t survive if it does.
For the last two hundred years, corporations have created and fed our manic need for acquiring stuff. They drove us to the malls using clever advertising strategies that create the fear of missing out. We don’t need most of the things we buy, but companies need us to buy them, or they will fail. And to keep us going to the malls or hitting the Add to Cart button, companies innovate. They make new products, craft new messages, utilize new marketing platforms, and devise new strategies to get us to buy. Companies adapt and innovate to evolve and thrive. And new tech has allowed them to grow even faster, but is that a good thing?
From Atoms Comes a Bomb
For centuries, our threats were personal, tribal, and then regional. The way we met them was mostly benign. Individuals protected themselves by acquiring food, clothing, and shelter — the basics. Meat protein grew our brains; our evolving intellect fostered innovative behavior that led to the development of tools and weapons. Fear and instinct drove us to innovate. Tribes functioned like humans and behaved the same way when threatened. But as science replaced religion and as technology sidelined faith, humans moved away from the Gods they imagined and created new ones as needed. Some of which have led us horribly astray.
Innovation is how we dealt with epochal threats and survived a war of epic and unimaginable consequences. That was what we looked to as WWII moved into its fourth year. The death, the anger, the futility, and the outrageousness of a madman let loose on the world made any solution seem reasonable. So the greatest physicists on the planet were gathered in Los Alamos in 1945 and together opened Pandora’s Box.
To mitigate one extreme evil, they created another. Little Boy and Fat Man were the names of the first two atomic bombs developed by Robert Oppenheimer et al. in the hills above Santa Fe, NM. There, they created these benignly-named weapons of mass destruction to stop the evil that Hilter had wrought on humanity. It seemed like a good idea, mainly because nothing else was working. After seeing the first test blast, Oppenheimer thought, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It is, perhaps, the most famous line from the Bhagavad-Gita, and it revealed how dangerous Oppenheimer knew his bomb would be. He knew that it posed an existential threat to humans. And he knew that the genie would never be put bak in the bottle.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
In 2006, Mark Zuckerberg told NBC’s “The Today Show” that he started Facebook because he “just figured it would be really cool if there was (sic) some website that I could go to that would tell me a bunch of information about my friends and the people around me.” Hmmm? OK.
Such a classic case of unintended consequences, otherwise known as the things you can’t see until it’s too late. Zuckerberg’s business mantra as Facebook was exploding was “Move fast and break things.” That’s what he implored his people to do and what they are still doing no matter what he says. Facebook doesn’t know how to do anything else.
When all a company wants to do is drive Internet traffic, discipline is lost. Businesses are not good at caution, moderation, or self-regulation. Nor are businesses inclined to consider the negative impacts of their products.
We need spirited discussion between corporations and scientists, consumers and creators, friends and foes of technology at whatever it costs and regardless of consequence. We need to consider the worst-case scenarios and game-plan for them.
These issues can’t be left to organizations that make decisions solely on balance sheets, quarterly P&Ls, or shareholder value. I’m not sure how to do it, but I know it has to happen. There is no box in the corporate ledger for “doing the right thing.” Companies do the profitable thing. And that doesn’t bother me; it’s the system we have. But things are getting dicey now. This unfettered effort to innovate, survive, and grow — at all cost — was never so deadly.
Future Tech Poses an Existential Threat
What happens when you combine unbridled Self_Interest, Survival of the Fittest, and Innovate or Die with Artificial Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, Virtual Reality, Big Data, Crypto, Fake News, and Subjective Truth? I have no fucking idea, but my guess is that it’s not going to be great.
Toss in the threats like Putin, climate change, the pandemic, hegemonic tribalism, and vanishing natural resources. It’s tough to see us navigating our way to a bigger, brighter, tech-driven future. I don’t mean to be a downer because I’m not. But we need to stop and take a breath. We need to look at the technology we’re developing now and make sure that we can manage it. That we know how to control it and that it won’t be the end of us.
