Getty Images/iStockphoto
Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of the Species
By Peter Nowak, Goose Lane Editions, 248 pages, $19.95
The Internet Is Not the Answer
By Andrew Keen, Atlantic Monthly Press, 288 pages, $32.50
Will digital technology make our lives substantially better in the long run? Will it make us happier, healthier and more productive? Or does the tech revolution create as many problems as it solves? The question may be unanswerable, but that doesn't stop writers from trying. Personally, I'm open to all perspectives – those of the optimists, the naysayers and the people who stake out a place in between – but I don't trust idle speculation. An intellectually honest book about the future must be based in a reliable assessment of the present.
In his new book, Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of the Species, Canadian journalist and blogger Peter Nowak begins with a bunch of sweeping predictions. He says that digital technology will eradicate extreme poverty and privation, and that, due to the ascendance of artificial intelligence, "humanity has the potential to arrive at … total understanding of the universe."
This is wild stuff, and most of it is, if not unsubstantiated, then at least under-substantiated. Nowak denies that he's a tech utopian, but I'm not convinced. Sure, he comments on some unsettling trends in digital culture – the decline of privacy, the polarization of wealth – but reassures us that computing and human ingenuity will (probably) set things right in the long run. His cheeriness strikes me as glib. The rise of the digital economy has been accompanied by some frightening developments; a responsible book about technology, even an optimistic one, should take them seriously.
To justify his many confident prognostications, Nowak repeatedly cites Moore's law: a prediction, made with surprising accuracy in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, that every two years scientists will find a way to double the number of transistors that can fit onto a chip – thereby doubling the computational power of our machines. Nowak takes Moore's law as an allegory for the exponential pace of change. It may take us a long time to invent new technologies, he argues, but once we do, we refine and augment them incredibly quickly.
This is a strained analogy. Moore's predictions probably won't prevail forever: There's a limit to how small we can make our transistors, and when we hit that limit, the pace of change may slow down significantly. Plus while Moore's law forecasts the advent of smaller, faster computers – at least for the time being – it doesn't predict a qualitative shift in what computers can do. It doesn't demonstrate, as Nowak implies, that we'll find a way to feed the burgeoning global population in 2050, or that robots will one day become competent novelists, or that the singularity – the moment when computers develop conscious minds of their own – is coming soon.
In spite of the phenomenal range of Nowak's predictions, many of the chapters in Humans 3.0 feel repetitive. If you know nothing about tech, for instance, you may find it helpful to be told that digital platforms enable independent musicians or filmmakers to reach new audiences. But if you care enough about new media to pick up Nowak's book in the first place, then you don't need a lesson in the fundamentals of YouTube. Nowak moves back and forth between banal observations and radical predictions – between yeah, no shit and holy shit – making his book both outlandish and boring.
In his new polemic The Internet Is Not the Answer, author, CNN columnist and failed tech entrepreneur Andrew Keen rebuts the breathless optimism of writers such as Nowak. He argues that tech utopians focus too much on the exciting possibilities of the digital revolution and not enough on the dismal economic realities. His book may seem unduly pessimistic at times, but, with its grounding in complex present-day situations, it has a measure of authority that Nowak's work lacks. "The error [tech] evangelists make," Keen says, "is to assume that the Internet's open, decentered technology naturally translates into a less hierarchical or unequal society."
It's tempting, for instance, to see Amazon as a radical, deconstructed take on traditional retail: It's an everything shop that exists not in brick-and-mortar stores but in the mythic ether of cyberspace. Take a closer look, however, and much of Amazon's business model is depressingly familiar: It operates out of warehouses where low-paid, non-unionized workers toil in conditions that some critics liken to those of a sweatshop.
Keen travels to places where few tech reporters go. In an effort to understand the rise of Instagram, he spends time not only in San Francisco but visiting Rochester, N.Y., the city of Kodak, a once-prosperous city that has been decimated by the demise of analog photography. It's tempting to brush off the Kodak-to-Instagram transition as an example of healthy, regenerative capitalism: An industry in New York State sputters and another in the Bay Area pops up – for every death, a birth, and so the circle of economic life continues.
But Kodak once had more than 145,000 employees, whereas when Facebook bought out Instagram for $1-billion, the ascendant photography start-up had a full-time staff of just 13 people. New tech companies may generate phenomenal amounts of money, says Keen, but they don't always create as many jobs as they kill.
The tech industry has workers too, but Keen argues that most of them are not only unpaid but unaware of their status as labourers. This shadow workforce includes you and me. After all, when Facebook paid $1-billion to Instagram, what was it really buying? The services of a 13-person staff? A set of good but hardly revolutionary source code? Of course not. It was buying a network.
Keen points out that Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google all derive their value from the hundreds of millions, even billions, of people who use their applications. Whenever you tweet, post or pin, whenever you read an ad on a social-networking site or share a piece of data that might be used by advertisers (or handed over to state security agencies), you endow tech companies with the resources they need to stay dominant. In return, you get the privilege of using their services for free, but you don't see any of their revenue. To be sure, there are some good paid jobs to be had in tech, but Keen worries that there aren't enough to balance out the damage that tech does to once-vibrant industrial sectors. And so our economy is productive and entrepreneurial but increasingly inequitable.
Nowak also touches, albeit more briefly, on this conundrum, but he sees a simple solution: It's time to stop working and start making. Other people have earned a living in the business of apps, games, online videos or self-published e-books. There's no reason the rest of us can't do the same. "Everyone is enterprising in some way," Nowak writes, "and therefore has the potential to become an entrepreneur."
This is his most facile argument. Can a mass entrepreneurial economy really provide stability to billions of people? Is market demand really so voracious that it can absorb a seemingly unlimited supply of apps, indie games and gadgets? And anyway, where does Nowak, a journalist, get the expertise to make such claims? (This isn't a dig at my and Nowak's profession, just an acknowledgment of its limits.)
Keen's solution is less simplistic. For him, we need developments that are broadly analogous to the Progressive Era or the New Deal, only tailored to the digital age. Keen doesn't flesh out his vision in detail – his book is diagnostic, not curative – but he argues that we'll probably need trust-busting mechanisms so that companies such as Amazon and Google don't have undue influence over the global economy; perhaps we'll need a Piketty-esque tax on wealth to combat the polarizing forces of the tech industry; and we'll definitely need buffers between social networks and big data to ensure that the information we share isn't aggregated or sold without our knowledge. (The "terms and conditions" that we regularly consent to without reading don't count as sufficient buffers.)
You can debate the relative merits of each proposal, but Keen's larger point stands: The tech world, like industrial capitalism before it, will not become sufficiently equitable unless we legislate it to be that way. Social welfare doesn't just come about – it's not inevitable, like Moore's law. So instead of waiting for technology to sort us out, Keen argues that it's time to intervene – to manage digital developments in ways that increase rather than undermine human welfare. In this respect at least, the challenges of the new industrial age aren't that different from those of the old one.
Simon Lewsen is a writing instructor at the University of Toronto and a contributor to Canadian Art, Hazlitt, Toronto Life and The Walrus. You can follow him on Twitter, where he gives away content for free, @SimonLewsen.