Forget ideology, liberal democracy’s newest threats come from technology and bioscience

[rug]

A groundbreaking book by historian Yuval Harari claims that artificial intelligence and genetic enhancements will usher in a world of inequality and powerful elites. How real is the threat?

Sunday 28 August 2016 00.15 EDT
John Naughton

The BBC Reith Lectures in 1967 were given by Edmund Leach, a Cambridge social anthropologist. “Men have become like gods,” Leach began. “Isn’t it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid.”

That was nearly half a century ago, and yet Leach’s opening lines could easily apply to today. He was speaking before the internet had been built and long before the human genome had been decoded, and so his claim about men becoming “like gods” seems relatively modest compared with the capabilities that molecular biology and computing have subsequently bestowed upon us. Our science-based culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, exploring, developing and growing. But in recent times it seems to have also become plagued with existential angst as the implications of human ingenuity begin to be (dimly) glimpsed.

The title that Leach chose for his Reith Lecture – A Runaway World – captures our zeitgeist too. At any rate, we are also increasingly fretful about a world that seems to be running out of control, largely (but not solely) because of information technology and what the life sciences are making possible. But we seek consolation in the thought that “it was always thus”: people felt alarmed about steam in George Eliot’s time and got worked up about electricity, the telegraph and the telephone as they arrived on the scene. The reassuring implication is that we weathered those technological storms, and so we will weather this one too. Humankind will muddle through.

But in the last five years or so even that cautious, pragmatic optimism has begun to erode. There are several reasons for this loss of confidence. One is the sheer vertiginous pace of technological change. Another is that the new forces at loose in our society – particularly information technology and the life sciences – are potentially more far-reaching in their implications than steam or electricity ever were. And, thirdly, we have begun to see startling advances in these fields that have forced us to recalibrate our expectations.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/28/ideology-liberal-democracy-technology-bioscience-yuval-harari-artificial-intelligence

Zoltan Istvan is in ecstasy.

[Jim__]

1. This happens as our universities eliminate courses in the humanities.

Solutions to the dilemma as posed in the article might be found through the humanities. If people were to take a look at the possible future as described, most would probably want to avoid that. Using the machines to alleviate the daily grind, to perform the tasks we all hate to perform, freeing us to choose the type of life we live would be embraced my most people. We should be able to design political and social systems that allow us to do utilize these machines to achieve these goals. The current problem is that, as we come up with new,powerful technologies, they are implemented without any form of planning, and if people are thrown out of work and cast aside, we just accept that.

The article didn't address possible opposition to the implementation of these technologies and their effect of impoverishing vast numbers of people. It is possible that people would resist being pushed aside by a small clique of the privileged. We may already be seeing the early growth of such resistance.

[rug]

2. Good point. There's no reason to think technology must result in the mechanization of humanity.