It’s banal to mention that technology
is a two-edged sword. That it solves practical problems and creates new ones.
That it makes our lives more comfortable and more complex, and stresses and at
the same time sustains our social relationships. Today we’ll go beyond these
commonplaces to explore two lesser-known aspects of tech’s dark side:
Inequality and unhappiness. Will the dark side prevail? Maybe, but we’ll see
glimmers of hope for the team of truth and goodness.
The growing gap
Technology enabled
globalization. Globalization meant investment capital could freely roam the
world, looking for the greatest returns. Investors who could buy information
about the location of the greatest return could invest accordingly. Wealth
built on itself, turning itself into extreme wealth.
Then too, more advanced business
machines require more educated operators. Education is becoming more
expensive, and students are taking on unsustainable debt to get it. Richer
school districts have better teachers and equipment, and the gap in student
test scores between rich and poor districts is growing.
Thus, technology is one cause
of today’s extreme wealth inequality.*
In earlier times,
technological advance equated with new equipment for mining and manufacturing –
what the accountants call capital equipment. By definition, these innovations
were available only to those who had capital, lots of it. And there’s no
question that inventors were bankrolled by capitalists who wanted newer ways to
gain leverage over the laboring masses.
Some exceptions proved this
rule. The mule- or ox-drawn plow was at one time a new technology, and it enriched
small farmers, at an affordable investment cost. Later, the sewing machine
allowed small entrepreneurs to start tailor shops – but also enabled more
ambitious textile entrepreneurs to perpetrate sweatshop manufacture.
It was the recent genius of
Japanese and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to follow the sewing machine example,
making productive equipment (notably, PCs, digital media equipment like mixers
and DVD duplicators, and smartphones) affordable for everyone. The equipment enabled
hundreds of thousands of new small businesses. If not for the ability of
ordinary people to save money and make money using their digital devices, the
near-intolerable income inequality in the US would be ever so much worse.
Not enough attention is
given to this countervailing trend, even though it’s impact on wealth
inequality (as opposed to income inequality) so far appears to be small. See for example iPhone: The Affordably Luxurious Global Accessory. The trend (a light saber wielded against the dark side!) is made
possible by Moore’s Law and related cost trajectories: Transistor density on
integrated circuits continues to double every 20 months or so at constant cost;
the price of DNA sequencing is dropping even faster; and solar power $/kwh
ditto.
Bravo, and let’s see more
of it!
“In the future there’s [sic] potentially two types of jobs:
you tell a machine what to do, programming a computer, or a machine is going to
tell you what to do. You’re either the one that creates the automation or
you’re getting automated.” -Y Combinator's Sam Altman
Economics meet politics
It’s worth remembering that
the science fiction we read as youngsters – even the works of conservative or
libertarian authors like Heinlein and Campbell – presumed some kind of mild
socialism, a basic dole, in the high-tech futures they painted. (Heinlein,
trained as a mathematician, was a better economist than the economists.) After
all, with big economic surpluses from robotic production, why not?
Some technopreneur
millionaires in our own 2014 rail against the taxes that would support this
future, preferring to give to selected charities. Others, suffering under the
delusion that being good at making money automatically means they’re good at
giving it away, only give to charities they own or control. The situation has
become so dangerous that even The Economist, a bastion of conservative thought, is now advocating redistribution.
Big corporations, of
course, offshore their profits in order not to pay US taxes, and sit on piles
of cash that could, in a sensible world, be put to productive or humanitarian
use. Their CEOs gamble that violent social revolution will wait until after
they’re retired or dead.
Are we happy yet?
We’d be silly to expect
those holding the short end of the inequality stick
to be happy campers. But let’s put aside inequality, just for the moment, and
look at other effects of technology on happiness.
We say new technologies
cause social change. This can mean change in the structure of society – change
in its roles and institutions, which I addressed in the journal Foresight (“Meta-measures for Technology and Environment,”
vol.16 no.5)
– or it can mean change in the outcomes of social organization. The most wanted
outcome, naturally, is happiness. As a general, top-level syllogism, we know
people dislike change. Tech advances create change. Therefore, we should expect
tech advance to reduce happiness, not increase it.
Can it be otherwise? There
must be threshold effects. I live in South Korea. At the end of the Korean War
sixty years ago, it was the poorest country in Asia. Now it is the richest, or
nearly so. Its increased wealth came from technology-based industries, as all
Koreans are aware. Poverty, combined with postwar hardships, was not a recipe
for happiness. There was an upward bump in the general happiness when people
had enough to feed their children and themselves. And another when medical technology
reduced infant mortality. There was still another bump, according to one of my
informants, when the country reached the stage where people could feed their
families by doing honest work, without stealing from each other and from
tourists.
That might have been the
end of the upward trend in happiness, though. Today, the pace of tech change
here remains breathtaking, far beyond what’s common in the USA. And the number
of Koreans entering hospital with stress-related illnesses is also growing
proportionally faster than in the US. This is especially striking because
admitting to mental illness has always carried more stigma in Korea than in
America.**
The studies*** purporting
to show a positive relationship between technology and happiness seem
methodologically flawed, either by not defining the two variables precisely, or
by measuring them with sketchy instruments, or by not recognizing the threshold
effect. One study found a positive relationship but admitted there were
“decreasing returns to scale,” i.e., that doubling the technology did not
double the happiness. We knew that already, of course, given that no one has
yet invented Woody Allen’s orgasmatron. (In this regard, though, let’s acknowledge
the new Pew Research report that predicts sexbots will be “commonplace” by
2025.)
Then too, based on a single
question about subjective feelings of well-being,
“The Pennsylvania Amish,
when asked how much they agree with the statement: You are satisfied with your
life (using a scale of 1 to 10), turn out to be as happy as the members of the
Forbes 400.” - James Surowiecki in MIT Technology Review
There is no convincing
evidence that technological innovation moves people upward through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.****
As additional countries emulate Bhutan’s measurement of “gross national
happiness,” we might eventually reach an evidence-based conclusion.
“By monitoring and
analyzing a person’s sleep patterns, exercise and dietary habits, and vital statistics
like body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate, [sensors] can pinpoint
trouble spots in the person’s daily routine and then suggest modifications that
measurably improve that individual’s outlook and well-being.”
Meanwhile, researchers at MIT
and Hitachi
are combining sensor technology with “quantified self” stuff, to directly
interface with the physiological indicators of happiness. What’s that you say?
A machine cannot make me happy, only I can make myself happy? Well, tech is
always a two-edged sword, generating its own abuses, and the sensor researchers
may or may not make us happy. At least, they’ll make us think more deeply about
what happiness is, and where it comes from.
__________
* Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, writing in the Wall Street Journal, lays blame for income inequality on technology. Other authors (for example Colin Gordon,) claim inequality is cyclical, not structural.
A United Nations University study (A. Singh and R.
Dhumale, Globalization, Technology, and Income Inequality: A critical
analysis. UNU 2000) concludes globalization
and technology are not the primary drivers of inequality, though authors admit technology
is a significant contributor. Their paper addresses income inequality, not
wealth inequality.
Tellingly, “San Francisco, the heart of the tech
industry, now has the fastest-growing
income inequality in the country, a gap on par with Rwanda’s.”
http://recode.net/2014/05/31/tech-titans-on-income-inequality-and-their-stingy-stingy-industry/
The poor idiot economists think inequality just means
there’s a bigger gap between the rich and the rest of us. Not true: Extreme
inequality changes everything, including the structure of society and
industries. The new structures create latent demand for still more technological
innovation (see my “The Circle of Innovation”), and the cycle continues.
** “Since the 1950s, reports of major depression [in the US] have
increased tenfold, and while much of that increase undoubtedly represents a new
willingness to diagnose mental illness, theres a general consensus among
mental-health experts that it also reflects a real development.” http://www.technologyreview.com/review/403558/technology-and-happiness/
You will no doubt remind me that there are (Wall)
street thugs in America who still enjoy stealing from us, and you’ll guess
correctly that stealing is not extinct in Korea either. Moreover, new
technologies make newer and more interesting opportunities for stealing, like
identity theft and other Internet cons. However, perpetrators are a smaller
fraction of the population than in decades past, and this is a digression,
anyway.
*** Like http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10108551
and http://readwrite.com/2014/04/22/relationship-technology-happiness-countries
**** Certainly, gadgets can make people smile. My
daughter goes so far as to say, “Maslow forgot to mention consumer electronics!”
Tech entrepreneurs have found limits to selling efficiency. Rishi Mandal,
co-founder of Sosh, says, “The next question is,
how do you accomplish tasks while creating a smile?”
