While our politics seems more divided than we can remember, when it comes to technology there doesn’t seem much scope for individuality. iPhones and Androids are becoming indistinguishable, just like the way we cradle them, study them, let them inform us, entertain us, and intrude into social and business situations. It’s quite an irony: the vast power these little devices have put in our hands has led us to unmatched levels of conformity.
At the back of that, there’s an insidious, creeping uniformity in how we think – both about technology and about what it means to us. The startlingly candid motto of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, one of the 20th century’s great expositions of human achievement, sums it up. ‘Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.’1 Is this really what’s going on? First the lab makes the discovery; then the corporation comes up with the product; and then ‘man’ – all of us – do our duty and ‘conform’ by buying the product. If this seems like an exaggeration, just remember that there are now two billion people using Facebook at least once a month. That’s a number more than six times the population of the United States; 30 times that of the UK. It’s close to half the adults on the planet outside China (where it’s banned).2
Conformity?
The vision set out in the World’s Fair motto is, frankly, chilling. And the tendency of the digital revolution to encourage conformity, not least through the growth of vast corporations with a narrow product focus and enormous – sometimes monopolistic – profitability, both captures the World’s Fair vision and actually makes it creepier. Because the two billion who are ‘conforming’ to the Facebook product would never dream of thinking of themselves as naïve conformists. They are making personal choices, and they have chosen the product because they like it. Just as they do when they check their mobile phones during family dinners, or business meetings, or first dates.
Though it’s worth noting that since they don’t pay cash to get it, few Facebook users think of it in quite those terms. The largely invisible barter system by which they trade data for service makes everyone’s thinking a little foggy.
Machines ‘r’ us?
Behind our consumer engagement with digital technology another debate is in progress. It’s many years since inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil came up with his model of the ‘singularity’ – that future point when machines become smarter than we are and rapidly ascend an exponential curve of smartness that will leave us humans in the dust. Kurzweil has proposed various dates for this extraordinary event, though 2045 is the most recent.3
More important than his prediction, though, lies the fundamental idea that machine intelligence is superior to human intelligence, and that humans should be looking forward to living digital lives. Years back the term ‘wetware’ was coined to describe brain matter – by analogy with software and hardware. Of course, as we know, the human brain is not only smart, it is extraordinarily complicated. But machines have beaten us at chess, and at the even more complex game Go. Should we accept the superiority of the machine and aspire to a digital future? Or, to rephrase that, while the machine is plainly better at some things than we are (that’s why we have machines, from the adze and the plough onwards!), does this mean that we should all aspire to be like machines?
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