“The 2016 election cycle will be remembered for many things, but for those who work in politics, it may be best remembered as the year that political data reached maturity.”
— Andrew Therriault

In 2004, 22-year old Andrew Therriault wanted to get a Democrat president elected. “I got in my car and drove to Ohio,” he told me. “I walked around college campuses, signing students up to vote and all that.” But John Kerry did not get elected, and Therriault “wound up after the election, back at my parents’ house, broke, depressed and unemployed”. Talking to strangers about politics, he concluded, was not his forte.

Ten years later, Therriault found a job that did feel right: Director of Data Science for the DNC, the organising body of the US Democratic Party. By 2016, he was editing the O’Reilly publication Data And Democracy, from which the above quote is taken, describing in detail exactly how data can be used for political campaigning.

With hindsight, the 2016 election cycle was probably not best remembered as “the year that political data reached maturity”. It was, however, the year that many journalists and researchers discovered for the first time how data-driven, personalised political campaigning works, when they sought explanations for the political shocks of Britain voting Leave and the US voting Trump.

But Barack Obama had already won two Presidential elections using those techniques with increasing sophistication. A Guardian article in 2012 spared a single paragraph to privacy concerns between gushing about “a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before”, and the way, probably unconsciously, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page — home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends — directly into the central Obama database”.

Despite the furore over Cambridge Analytica, and the supposed (but implausible) psychological manipulation of 2016 voters via social media, digital political campaigning remains the norm. Hardly surprising, in a world where we increasingly turn to personalised channels, and especially social media, for our news and commentary. How else could campaigners reach potential voters?

In the recent UK local and mayoral elections, the Labour Party spent over half a million pounds (£570,160) on advertising via Meta alone — that’s Facebook and Instagram. The Conservatives lagged behind with a mere £336,668, perhaps because their adverts tended to target pensioners who spend less time on social media: one with the headline “Tax the Codgers” was shown only to over 55s. Thanks to WhoTargetsMe you can now dig into the broad strategies of digital political campaigners, though not the details of how specific ads are targeted.

I asked Andrew Therriault how many data points he would have on a typical voter — dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? “Thousands,” he says, as if that’s obvious. But to think of that as a list of thousands of things he’d know about an individual voter would be misleading. Yes, it would include voter registration details — name, address, age — and perhaps answers previously given to surveys. But to that basic voter database Therriault’s team would add census data for the neighbourhood. Political campaigns also regularly use commercial data from data brokers such as Experian and Acxiom, collected from our interactions with businesses. Even though it’s hard to match data from those sources to individual voters, they can be used to build models, so what they do know about you can be used to predict things that they don’t know.

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Being able to profile individual voters helps a campaigner decide who to target, and tailor the message to them. There are two kinds of people worth targeting: those who might be persuaded to support your side, and those who need a push to get out and vote. “Persuade or mobilise,” as Andrew Therriault puts it.

Like other kinds of personalised advertising, political campaigns aim to show the most effective message to the right person, at the right time. And, also like other adverts, digital media allow the advertiser to monitor which ads are the most effective for this kind of person, by running trials of different variants to see which gets the best response. It is, in short, a huge feat of digital technology. It would be a mistake, however, to see the technology itself as driving this political change. Rather, the change from mass movements to “The Personal Is Political” predates the capacity to deliver a tailored message to an individual on a device that accompanies them everywhere.

The era of mass politics is not very old. In 1848, “the springtime of the peoples”, a huge Chartist demonstration in London tried to deliver a petition calling for universal male suffrage, secret ballots, and other reforms to parliament. According to the Illustrated London News, it took a cart drawn by four farm horses to carry the signatures in “five huge bales or bundles”. The government fortified all the bridges in London to prevent the assembled masses reaching Westminster, and went on to arrest the leaders and suppress the movement.

The road to every citizen getting a vote would be long and hard. In the US, race was the bar to democratic equality: in the UK, it was property, which excluded some men until 1918, and a third of women until 1928. In France, where all men did get the vote in 1848, women would wait until 1944.

But the ability to vote a government in — or out — was not the only form of mass politics. By 1874 around 10%  of the adult population of Britain were members of TUC-affiliated unions (mostly men). Organisations pressing for equal rights for women, or for non-whites in America, also demanded equality beyond the vote. However, by the time Martin Luther King made his “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963, the character of those mass movements was changing. Even as King called on the US Government to make good the “promissory note” to all Americans, black and white, guaranteeing “the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, that universalist vision was fragmenting and turning inwards.

Tom Hayden, later Senator Hayden, was in the immense crowd that heard King that day. After being inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to hitchhike across America, Hayden became a Civil Rights activist and spent some time in jail. There he drafted what would become the 1962 Port Huron Statement, a manifesto for Students for a Democratic Society:

“We oppose the depersonalisation that reduces human beings to the status of things,” it declares. “The goal of man and society should be human independence; a concern not with image or popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.” Politics, he said, should be a “means of finding meaning in personal life”, imbuing it with a therapeutic sensibility. The Port Huron Statement captures a moment at the beginning of a new political age. It talks of “loneliness, estrangement, isolation”, and “the felt powerlessness of ordinary people.” It matters not only that people lack power, but that they feel powerless.

The distinction between politics and personal feelings was fraying, and as the Sixties drew to a close, a slogan emerged to capture this new kind of politics. “The Personal is Political” is the title of a short 1969 article written by Carol Hanisch, an activist in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, and a founder of New York Radical Women, the group that protested at the Miss America contest in 1968. They were all women who were active in other movements — Civil Rights, Anti-War or the New Left — who wanted to discuss politics without men present. After the meeting ended, they kept arguing into the small hours at a nearby restaurant over apple pie a la mode.

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I asked Hanisch what she thought of the shift towards seeing the world in terms of identity. “It cannot be a positive change,” she told me. “We lose all sense of a need for unity to take on the source(s) of our oppression. Instead it invites us to escape the real world by “living in our heads”. It allows us to believe that if we can change ourselves and/or just a few people, everything will be fine, which is, of course, nonsense. We’re talking society-wide oppression here, not just individual attitudes. You can’t ‘identify’ yourself out of oppression, though over the centuries people sure have tried!”

Today, we take disagreement very personally. Not only issues that are entangled with our everyday lives, our feelings or how we see ourselves: even geopolitical issues or which political party we vote for are taken much more personally. People are less open to social connection with those who disagree with them politically. Survey after survey has shown that, increasingly, we are more likely to see those who disagree with us politically as closed-minded, selfish, hypocritical, immoral or lazy, and less likely to call them intelligent or honest. Negative feeling towards the other side, politically, has been steadily increasing since the Eighties.

I asked Andrew Therriault if he thought politics in general had become more personal.  “Yeah, from both the voters and the candidate side it’s become more individualised, in terms of even the basic facts we’re working with,” he says. “This idea that your political reality can be whatever you want it to be, and whatever someone else wants to tell you it should be. And there does not seem to be that sort of common grounding we once had when things were less personalised.”

Politics, in other words, is turning into a form of self-expression. It is no longer an arena to which we all bring our conflicting visions of how the world should be, and try to persuade others to join us in working towards ours — or even, in which we might listen to other people’s ideas and change our minds.

***

This article includes material drawn from Technology Is Not The Problem, published by HarperCollins.

After all, knocking technology seems to have been a collective New Year’s resolution for a certain sort of “psychologist”. Over the past month, global superstar Jonathan Haidt has been doing the rounds for his own new book, The Anxious Generation, warning how technology is “rewiring” children’s brains and “causing an epidemic of mental illness”. In a similar vein, author Abigail Shrier has been promoting her latest contribution, Bad Therapy, extolling the benefits of phoneless children. Certainly it’s a view that has found political currency on both sides of the Atlantic. Only last week, Florida’s Ron DeSantis signed one of the US’s most restrictive social media bans for children, while here in the UK the Government wants to ban phones in schools to improve educational standards.

It is into this fearful maelstrom that Etchells’s book enters, throwing down a rather unexpected conclusion into the mix.. Rather than spend page after page outlining how technology is corrupting Western children, he takes a more thoughtful view. Instead, he argues, “collectively, as a society, we have become too apprehensive — and even fearful — about screens”.

To justify this, Etchells explores the evidence for the harm caused by screens, and finds it unconvincing. Has screen time destroyed our attention span? Very unlikely. Does it interfere with adolescents getting enough sleep? Sometimes, depending on how and when the teenager is using the screen. Are smartphones destroying a generation’s mental health? It’s impossible to usefully answer such a sweeping question.

What studies have been done, he explains, are often small and poorly designed. They tend to rely on self-reporting, and elide correlation and causation. Some studies reported positive effects, or different effects for different groups. Building any kind of big picture is hindered by the fact that researchers are measuring different populations, different devices, different purposes, and different aspects of wellbeing or mental health.

Not enough evidence, then, but also no cause for immediate panic. Which raises the question: if no convincing evidence points to the harms of screen time per se, why are we so fearful of it? What does our unhealthy fixation on the power of technology say about us?

It’s true that young people, especially, are less happy, more anxious, and generally less able to cope with life than previous generations. A recent Resolution Foundation report found that a third of 18-24 year olds reported symptoms of poor mental health, and that one in 20 young people was prevented from working by ill-health. It’s also true that this rise in mental distress coincides with the spread of the internet, the smartphone and its seductive apps. But that doesn’t make for a simple, causal relationship.

Successive generations, let’s not forget, also have less independent time outside adult supervision, and fewer opportunities to take risks and initiatives for themselves. Kids first play outside when they’re a couple of years older than the age their parents did, and the kind of informal public spaces where their grandparents hung out together are turning into formal, privatised spaces for prescribed activities like shopping or organised sports. As Etchells points out, it’s fine to “talk about getting kids off their screens and ‘going outside’… but the reality is that, increasingly, there isn’t anywhere ‘outside’ for them to go”.

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With this in mind, the increasingly online lives of young people may not be causing the diminishment of in-person interaction, but they are responding to it. Instead of hanging out in the park, teenagers exchange messages, memes and videos from their respective bedrooms. For some of them, this is a lifeline; for others, it is a well of insecurity and a conduit for bullying. As Etchells notes, “the question is not whether screen time affects mental health or vice versa, but why do some people thrive online and others struggle?” The answer, so far, seems to be that those who struggle offline will struggle online too.

Nevertheless, the form of those online interactions is different from the pre-digital social world, for better and worse. Take poor, unhappy, teenage Pete Etchells, who was dealing with life events — the death of his father — that would make any normal person depressed, In a previous generation, he might have poured out his feelings to a diary that would remain unread by anyone else. Or, a few years later, in that screenless generation, he might have drifted to the college bar, found other lonely souls and formed friendships that might slowly reach the pouring-out-of-feelings stage. Instead, his LiveJournal blog found like-minded people who were going through similar trials, and formed an informal support community across the internet, a community from which he eventually drifted away as his life improved.

Such screen-mediated forms of interaction are not necessarily better or worse than the old forms: for today’s young people, forming identities online, experimenting with projecting different aspects of ourselves to see how others respond, is both more and less controllable. More controllable, because you can edit your words and pictures, select your selfies, and craft your side of a conversation, in ways impossible in person. Awkward flirtations can happen remotely, without the other person reading your body language as you decide what to say or send next. Different versions of yourself can be shown to selected audiences, and adjusted to fit their response.

Less controllable, because Etchells isn’t convinced that we can create our ideal persona online, because we are constantly giving ourselves away in a million tiny interactions. Constant connection is now the social norm: it’s hard to switch off from a wider social environment and devote all your attention to the people sharing your physical space, when that means missing out on the endless flow of interactions. Technology, in other words, has reshaped the division between public and private. Any private space is now, by default, connected to a whole social world at all times, making solitude, or even intimate space, the exception. Conversely, when anything digital can be shared, what was a private conversation may be made public, so privacy becomes a relative and contingent quality.

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It is not enough, then, to say that technology is simply not an issue. It is an inescapable part of our changing social fabric, for better and worse, and evolving with other social changes. But, as Etchells points out, that means we can’t look at our relationship with technology in isolation from those other changes.

Comparing the Screen Time panic with earlier iterations, like with video games in 1981 and even the trash literature panic of 1861, he notes a common assumption: “that we, as users, lack agency. It’s a form of technological determinism.” Like discussing food in isolation from the context in which we eat it — where and when, with whom, and why — talking about technology as an autonomous social phenomenon is perverse. Just like our eating habits, activities mediated by screens are still human activities. If our technology habits are not what we’d like them to be, we have to start with ourselves and our lives, not the objects of our habitual consumption.

This is why the “digital detox” is such an unhelpful approach. It frames our use of technology as inherently negative, something that takes over our lives so destructively that we must wean ourselves off it. But complete abstention, even for children, would be wildly impractical for most of us today. It would also mean losing all the positive aspects of technology: the convenience, the enrichment of our mental environment, and the myriad connections with other human beings that it enables. Etchells also notes the “puritanical undercurrent” of the digital detox, that regards the pleasure we take in much of our screen time as yet another reason to stop it.

Instead of using words like “addicted” or describing our brains being “hijacked”, we should be thinking about the content and context of our screen-mediated activities. When lonely teenagers talk to strangers online, the consequences depend far more on who they’re talking to, and why, and what else is happening in their lives, than on the hours of screen time they clock up.

As Etchells says: “We need to be more critical — not just of our own tech use, but of what we’re told about our tech use.”  It would be much easier to blame all the ills of the world on technology. But that narrative of powerful corporations and weak-willed humans is doing more than any FOMO-driven social media site to corrode our sense of agency, and our ability to change anything in the real world.

Then other people, often sophisticated progressives and libertarians convinced that the internet is a force for progress and liberation, performed triumphant Gotchas!” by reminding the world that “internet addiction” was invented as parody: the joke was on the fretful rubes. This wised-up view was dominant in mainstream (ie centre-left) commentary through much of the 2010s. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump won that big election, allegedly with the help of Russians making Facebook posts, and the elite consensus that the internet is a force for liberation sort of fell apart. Progressives grew more bullish about technology, which freed them to look at the apps on their phones and join everyone else in admitting that, yeah, this internet crap is pretty addictive.

This history says several depressing things about our intellectual class, but at least it has left us at a point where parents in the UK can start a movement against kids having smartphones without being accused of losing their minds to a “moral panic”. This campaign was spurred by a simple Instagram post from Daisy Greenwell, who said she was “terrified” of the idea of her two children getting smartphones before they’re even teenagers. “It feels like we all know this is a bad decision for our kids,” she wrote, but “we still all stumble into it because everyone else is, and it’s too hard not to follow suit.” After only 10 days, her movement was 5,000 strong: “We’re encouraging them to start setting up Smartphone Free Childhood groups in their schools,” she wrote, “which are popping up across the country.”

Her movement has been able to gain such strong momentum, without having its credibility immediately attacked by high-status commentators, because the evidence behind its driving worries has grown stronger in recent years. In the past, people have resisted claims about smartphones and mental health for sound reasons. After all, studies supporting the anti-smartphone case were largely correlational. In her 2017 book iGen, for example, Jean Twenge drew strong conclusions about the dire effects of smartphones largely from the matching of timelines — yearly increases in anxiety, depression, and suicide with yearly increases in teenage smartphone ownership and social media use. Critics noted that other factors could explain those changes in well-being. Some claimed that a closer look at the data showed much smaller, even negligible effects where Twenge had made strong causal claims.

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In the seven years since iGen emerged, however, the correlations between phone use and unwellness have stayed strong, while the holes that other scholars punctured in Twenge’s causal claims turned out to be smaller than they first appeared. At the same time, evidence for the slightly different claims about the distracting and compulsive effects of phone use have grown even harder to refute. These things, combined with the epochal vibe-shift caused by Trump’s election, have altered the balance of rhetorical forces in the tech debate. The rote response from pro-tech side, that people like Twenge were fuelling “moral panic” and anti-tech hysteria, started to sound pretty hysterical itself.

But focusing the debate about tech on mental health, though useful and urgent in obvious respects, is also a distraction from the more fundamental, more philosophical question of freedom, of human agency in the face of inhuman power. It was depressing to watch as influential writers and thinkers — progressives both of the traditional Left and (less surprisingly) of the libertarian Right, along with the professional cheerleaders of tech media — ignored this question in eager defence of this new, indifferent force that now ruled our lives.

Valorising technology, on the empty assumption that the work of corrosion and subversion and redefinition it is doing is emancipatory and progressive, became very hard to distinguish from worshipping power for the sake of how powerful it is. Enthusiasts were keen to read healthy tidings in the rise of the internet, and benefits both spiritual and political from the psychic and social changes it wrought, even though the clearest, the most potent, the only obvious claim that it could make for itself was one of brute ontology. It was an emergent phenomenon of singular scope and reach and gravity. But its spokespeople continued to read its effects as progressive, to insist it was doing humanity’s work. They continued to mock those who publicly worried about its dangers, even as its growing power to remake everything, by its own inner logic, and on behalf of the most profitable companies in the history of capitalism, was growing ever more flagrant.

As I watched this dynamic play out over the second decade of this third millennium, I found myself thinking: wait, aren’t writers and intellectuals and academics supposed to be vigilant and skeptical about power, especially power working on behalf of capital? So why, every time someone goes public with a reasonable worry about the singular and rapidly growing power of digital technology, is that person mocked by sophisticated professionals of the intellectual class for fueling another “moral panic”. This term was so popular it grew, over the history of commentary on the internet, into a sort of authoritative cliché, a peremptory move by with-it pundits that conveyed a regime enforcer’s mix of swagger and dullness.

My favourite version of this comes from a Guardian review of Tim Wu’s 2016 book The Attention Merchants, which waves off Wu’s claims that internet degrades our attention and concentration. “This is an ancient complaint,” the reviewer assures us, “and a rather silly one. Every media innovation since the invention of writing has triggered a moral panic about whether the human experience would be hopelessly corrupted as a result. Socrates agonised about wax tablets; the monks of the late middle ages railed against the printing press.” Anyone who knows anything about what happened after the invention of the printing press might find the blithe tone of this passage somewhat befuddling. And to invoke 15th-century monks bearish about the printing press as your special avatars of irrational fear is, one might say, a counterintuitive use of history. The printing press was a vector of world-breaking power, especially from the monk’s perspective. To the extent that they really were in a moral panic about it, we should treat those monks as models of foresight.

As someone who likes books and wasn’t killed in the Wars of Religion, I have a positive attitude about the printing press myself, but I have to admit it that it did unleash cataclysmic forces that still shape us six centuries after it (understandably) bummed out those monks. The internet hasn’t yet given us its Thirty Years War. For now, it conducts its more salient and systematic upheavals on smaller human scales – society, community, family, individual self, and various subconscious workings and proclivities of that self. Indeed, this power seems to move relentlessly towards smallness, as if some law of subdivision or dissolution secretly guides it. This applies both to the objects it conveys to our awareness and the aspects of our awareness it conveys them to. Using ever smaller packages of experience it teases ever simpler human instincts, reflexes ever further removed the whole selves we present to one another in embodied life. With every advance it reaches deeper into evolutionary time, discovering and exploiting reflexes we share with ever-simpler creatures, our stone-age ancestors, their primate forebears, and then monkeys, and then rats.

A recent post by the American blogger Ted Gioia captures how this logic applies to the objects of culture. Under the influence of Silicon Valley, he argues, culture is getting “faster”, by which he means cultural products are growing shorter and the human capacities they appeal to more reflexive, less human, more pathological. Under the heading “How Silicon Valley Views Culture” he presents the technological history of culture in the style of a food-chain illustration in a child’s science textbook: a fish-shape named “Art” being consumed by the fish-shape “Entertainment”, which is consumed by the fish-shape “Distraction”, which, finally (for now), is consumed by the fish-shape “Addiction”. In another graphic, titled “The Rise of Dopamine Culture”, Gioia captures various cultural enterprises on their downward trajectory towards elemental smallness and crudeness. Here are a few:

Journalism: Newspapers->Multimedia->Clickbait

Music: Albums->Tracks->TikToks

Athletics: Play a Sport->Watch a Sport->Bet on a Sport.

You might take up an easygoing attitude about tech and say “What’s the big deal? Longer entertainments are not inherently better than shorter ones.” But that belief — wrong as it is — gets harder to hold once you reach the one about sports and betting. This example should be a chilling sign of the perverse moral power of technological affordances over our ability to set norms and rules for ourselves and live by them — seeing how quickly the emergence of phone-based betting apps has dissolved longstanding, clearly reasonable, and fundamentally humane scruples about sports gambling.

Betting on sports has gone from an ethically dubious and legally ambiguous diversion accompanied by massive downside risks that everyone recognises, to a ubiquitous feature of sports advertising that celebrities feel no apparent shame in promoting, and which sports teams and leagues feel no evident misgivings in exploiting for profit. Gambling was already dogged by the risk of ruinous compulsion even before it was technologically fused with phone apps whose mere mechanical use is meant to be compulsive. A sports-fan turned compulsive gambler through compulsive scrolling on his addictive-by-design gambling apps — I think the business term for this is synergy. The philosophical term for technology’s ability to effect this sort of moral revolution is: power.

One admirable thing about the movement of UK mums is that they take up this matter of power with admirable stoutness and directness. Sure, they indulge in a little safetyism in their online manifesto — but less than I would have expected. Perhaps because they’re parents and want to resist what phones will do to the inner workings of their families, their articulation of “The Problem” is surprisingly political — concerned as much with unfashionable matters of will, freedom, and personhood as it is with the familiar issues of anxiety and depression.

The manifesto begins with not a predictable warning about mental health (that’s the second heading) but with the obvious (and yet still quibbled-about with brain-dead reference to “moral panic”) point that “Smartphones are Highly Addictive”. It points out that “[t]ech companies spend millions on making apps and devices intentionally addictive”. For anyone who has spent time researching the cognitive-science end of the technology business (companies such as “Dopamine Labs” and other the Stanford-trained practitioners of “behavioural design”), or for anyone who’s read Natasha Dow Schull’s Addiction By Design, it’s clear that the tech industry has a dark vein of misanthropy running through it. The fact that this force of hating people informs the design of products that children use for hours a day should justify a constant, contrary state of disgust and alarm among parents, whatever the latest studies tell us about depression. Other headings in the mum’s manifesto include “Smartphones Reduce Attention Spans” and “Smartphones Rob Children of Their Childhood”. These points express a basic parental concern about what kind of life their children should live, and what kind of person their children should be.

My wife Juliet and I had these thoughts in mind when we held off on getting our daughters phones until the end of their American middle school years. At this point they were both 14, the only kids their age they knew who didn’t have phones. During those last phone-free years, their avid reading was beginning to grow in sophistication. They had lived in their Harry Potter worlds in earlier grades, but as middle-schoolers, along with the gripping kid-with-cancer romances that make up today’s YA canon, they were diving into longer, more difficult fiction, serious, award-winning novels written for adults. Then, after we gave them the phones they’d long been clamouring for, their recreational reading of books basically ended.

We are considered techno-puritans in our world. I’ve been theoretically suspicious and personally cranky about technology for many years, and Juliet, who has always been indifferent to tech gadgets and averse to the consumer worship of them, is a strong, steadfast anti-tech influence on our daughters. She has far more emotional stamina and far deeper tolerance for parent-daughter conflict than I do (but, as a school counselor, she’s an expert at making her points about technology without hectoring). When we gather our daughters’ phones at 10pm every weeknight, we assume we’re just practicing what everyone already knows about kids and phones and sleep. But when we let on to other parents that we do this, they are often astounded. Literally no one else does this.

And yet our anti-tech vigilance isn’t nearly enough. There’s always a reason for them to be tethered to phone and laptop until the very last minute. This points to tech’s power in the home, the no-win dilemmas it introduces into the job of raising kids. Household regimes of tech-rationing that keep devices turned off for designated hours are hit with constant exceptions and requests for exceptions. These make for a stream of irritating negotiations in the short run that, in the long run, undermine those regimes altogether. But a more ad hoc approach — “Okay, everyone, there’s too much dumb scrolling going on! Hand over your phones for the next two hours!” — is simply an invitation for open confict. You want a calm respite from compulsive behaviour, but you end up with two hours of argument and resentment.

In other words, when kids’ social worlds are completely mediated by smartphones, and when their phone behaviour has grown as compulsive as its designers mean it to be, imposing tech limits within individual households is a volatile, unpleasant, generally futile business. The blunt, no-defiance, “authoritarian” parenting style I was raised by would be much better suited to our domestic tech challenge than the “authoritative” parenting we’re obliged to use. We calm, reasoning parents are no match for the barrage of facile but exhausting complaints and counterarguments generated by the tech-teenager nexus.

This household dilemma has an analogue in the study of children’s tech use. On his blog, the Yale psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, has a helpful discussion of the difficulties scientists face in measuring the effects of tech use on the mental health of children and teenagers. In many cases, scientists have simply surveyed kids on how much time they spend online and then sought connections between time spent online and mental health outcomes, or compared kids who are offline, for whatever reason, with the much larger number who are online. Even when such studies show some negative effects, Haidt argues, these effects are probably understated. This is because offline and low-use kids are still living in a world where everyone they know is constantly, cognitively hooked up to a smartphone. So these offline kids are experiencing the cohort effects of whatever is passing among their online friends and acquaintances, plus the isolation effects of losing this one crucial and nearly universal means of socialising, plus, if their tech use is habitual, some substantial short-term hit to their well-being from having this habitual behaviour interrupted. It’s not surprising that studying the harms of tech use in this way would show weak effects at the individual level.

This analytical problem points us back towards a practical problem, what, in a discussion of the specific risks of social media for girls, Haidt calls “a trap — a collective action problem”. “Each girl might be worse off quitting Instagram even though all girls would be better off if everyone quit.” Both studying the problem and doing something about it are thus hobbled by the powerful network effects that digital technology generates, how it turns itself into an entire ecosystem seemingly all at once, entangling us in practical and social imperatives we didn’t choose and can’t opt out of without substantial cost. (I just took my son to a professional basketball game, for which our “tickets” were active bar codes I needed my iPhone to display. As the ticket service informed me, “Your phone is your ticket.” When I fantasise about ditching my iPhone, I have to consider things like that.)

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Daisy Greenwell’s understanding of her problem as a parent seems trenchant in this light. It was in her initial Instagram post that she made the bleak observation, ”[W]e all know this is a bad decision for our kids.” But we make this decision anyway. Why? Because the network effects of digital technology throw us into a collective-action problem. Do you want a no-phone son who misses all the online texting and planning and gaming his friends are doing, as my 13-year-old son is presently missing those things? Do you want a no-Instagram and -TikTok daughter who misses out on the meme-culture that all her friends consume and inhabit, as my daughters did for several years? If not, you better make the bad decision, get your kid that phone that, once it takes up residence in your home, you know you’re going to hate.

And, in this light, her practical response to her dilemma as an individual parent is also wise: start localised movements, where parents can tackle the collective-action problem together, on workable scales. As Jonathan Haidt suggests, achieving phone-freedom on these scales is likely to be both healthy and clarifying, to yield better-adjusted kids and a better understanding of the cohort-level changes in happiness and habit we owe to smartphones. These will be natural tests of something that, so far, has been both hard to escape and hard to study. My only criticism is that, so far, Greenwell and her fellow mums seem shy about extending this experiment to older kids, teenagers who might really benefit from a cohort-level break from smartphones.

As it happens, Juliet was witness to a natural experiment like this recently, when she chaperoned a 10-day high school science trip on which the students were forbidden from bringing their phones (and from which one student was sent home for sneaking his phone in his bag). These kids, aged 15 to 18, slept in small cabins without TVs and so were forced to entertain themselves and each other with conversation, board games, and book-reading. As the trip began they were clearly uneasy without their phones, but they stopped itching for them after a few days, and, by the end of the trip, they were all expressing, unbidden, how much happier and calmer they were without their phones. They saw how life without phones differed from their lives as they lived them at home, naggingly networked into the collective action problem they know as teenage living. When, during their return trip, a massive storm stranded them in Los Angeles for two days, and all 11 of them had to cram into the house of one boy’s grandparents, they experienced this stressful detour as a collective adventure, with more board games, conversation, and, now, back in civilisation, horror movies they watched together. Many of these kids began this trip as strangers and ended it as friends. It takes almost nothing — for a parent of phone-age kids, especially — to imagine how different it would have been if they were holding phones in their hands the whole time.

Before I picked Juliet up from San Francisco International, she’d told me we’d be giving a ride to one student, the 16-year-old son of one of her colleagues. On the way back to Oakland this boy mentioned several times how happy everyone seemed on the trip, how easy it was to get to know each other under those conditions. At one point Juliet asked him if he was relieved to be going home to his own bedroom – after 10 days of doing fieldwork and sleeping in a cabin and being stranded in L.A.

“I’m actually kind of dreading it,” he said.

“Why?” Juliet asked.

He said – I swear to God he actually said — “Because that’s where my phone is.”

And yet, this reminder of our King’s frailty, at 75, also stands for a broader transformation now afoot: the Boomerdämmerung, or twilight of the Baby Boomers. In old Norse mythology “Ragnarok”, translated by the German composer Richard Wagner as Götterdammerung, or “Twilight of the Gods”, is a time of cruel weather, moral chaos, and monsters rising from all points of the compass. Mountains will fall, the seas will rise, and the world-serpent will come ashore, as the gods clash in one final, world-ending battle.

But there is hope. This fateful time, for ancient Germanic legend, is a period both of terrible destruction and also of renewal: the Götterdammerung may see Valhalla aflame, but in its aftermath the world will be rebuilt anew.

Wagner used this motif as a backdrop for the final opera in his four-part Ring Cycle, an adaptation of an old Germanic myth first performed in 1876. It premiered just a few years after the fateful 1871 union of Germany: a transformation that tipped the first geopolitical domino that would culminate in the cataclysm of two World Wars.

Living through the era from the Ring Cycle to Yalta must have felt itself like a kind of Götterdammerung. Certainly, the first generation born after its 1945 resolution were determined to build a wholly new world, amid the ruins of the old. A demographic bulge group, conceived and born amid the relief, reunion, and rebuilding that consumed Europe after the two wars, the Boomers threw out the old sexual codes, dismissed pre-war European culture as stuffy and “square”, and scorned anything that smacked of nationalism, patriotism, or old high European culture as dangerously Hitlerish. In place of all that, they dreamed of new, sunlit Valhallas, freed from the dark gods of industrialised wartime destruction.

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The culture they bequeathed us — what today is denounced as the “Boomer Truth Regime” — worshipped transformation, freedom, youth, and the future. Tradition and heritage was a drag. We were all on a path toward ever more individual self-realisation. But it was two-edged.

In her 2021 book Boomers, Helen Andrews argues that in each case, this generation – from Steve Jobs to Camille Paglia and Aaron Sorkin – set out to liberate us, but “what they passed on to their children was worse than what they inherited”.

Jobs sought to free our inner rebels, but created instead the stultifying world of social media; Al Sharpton turned social justice into a shakedown geared toward making well-off liberals feel good about their opinions; Paglia profited from an academic rigour whose abandonment she helped to legitimise.

These arguments will be familiar to anyone of my age and younger, who looks askance at the generation that benefited from free university education and affordable housing, and has since presided over an era in which both have become something more like Ponzi schemes. Today the university system the boomers bequeathed us is a monolithically Left-wing and increasingly academically flaccid visa factory; housing, meanwhile, is a piggy-bank for those that have and a pipe-dream for the rest.

But the consternation that has greeted news of King Charles’ ailing health should remind us that not all boomers are created alike, or indeed all boomerism. It’s easy to dismiss this generation, with its optimism and sheer good fortune, as one characterised principally by the self-absorption and wanton destructiveness Andrews skewers in the figures she profiles. But even leaving aside the fact that the boomers are all our parents and grandparents, I don’t greet our approaching Boomerdämmerung with glee.

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Andrews can say, with some justice, that many boomers have not just failed to preserve and pass on the legacy they received to their own progeny, but actively consumed that cultural and economic seed-corn for their own selfish pleasure. “Spending the kids’ inheritance” is so common and celebrated among boomers it even commands an acronym (“SKI-ing”), how-to books and celebratory articles.

But there are boomers and boomers. Much of the social fabric in my small town is held together by boomers. They show up to church. They donate their time to committees, volunteer for the council, make cakes for coffee mornings, and pick up litter. Small-town boomers are unfailingly polite, kind, generous, and public-spirited. In keeping with this spirit, boomers volunteer at much higher rates than younger generations: over 50% of those aged 65-74 do so at least once a year.

Nor is this the only store of cultural capital that threatens to expire with the boomers. As murmurs of concern grow louder over a supposed competence crisis — whether or not this is driven by “diversity” hiring practices — they are now exiting the workforce at accelerating rates. It appears, too, that they are often doing so without passing on their skills to younger generations.

What will life be like once they’re gone? In the 1988 comedy Funny Farm, the character Mickey says dismissively of an unstable river crossing: “That ain’t a bridge. It’s termites holding hands”. That is: burrowing insects have hollowed out a once-sturdy piece of woodwork, and are maintaining its semblance only by clinging to one another, meaning the slightest hint of pressure will cause that solid-seeming form to collapse into powder.

And the Boomer Truth Regime is now taking on a similar character. Something once unshakeable is now so fragile that — for better or worse — it’s only the tenacity of the very creatures that caused that fragility which still holds it together. The world’s only superpower, for example, the regime surely most closely identified alike with boomer self-discovery and boomer post-nationalism, faces a Presidential election this year. And both front-runners are boomers: men older than King Charles, and yet clinging to power with every ounce of their remaining vigour.

What they’re now preserving is, ironically, a regime implacably hostile to the idea of preservation. The Boomers scorned the prewar order of patriotism and tradition. They gave us a regime of unlimited self-expression, post-national governance, and individual freedom. And it was all mythologised via the narrative of Good vs Evil that grew up around the Second World War. But as the boomers’ grip on power begins to falter in earnest, so we’re witnessing a steadily accelerating re-evaluation of the Boomer Truth Regime origin-story, the Ragnarok of that war.

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As the wolf Fenrir shakes off his chains, and the mountains and oceans of Boomer Truth begin to shudder and boil, this re-evaluation of our past will also grow more febrile. Even those of us who chafe under Boomer Truth may not like the form this takes. One central pillar of that truth regime, for example, has always been a definition of the good relative to absolute evil as epitomised by Hitler and the Nazis, with the Holocaust as its central exhibit. But today, one in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth. That proportion among boomers, by contrast, is close to zero. The same stark generational shift can be seen in the rising proportion of young people who support a strongman leader.

Only a fool or ghoul would try and speculate on how our political landscape will evolve once the boomers are gone. But I suspect we’ll miss them bitterly: for though some aspects of boomerism undermined their own postwar settlement, boomers are also now the main force holding that settlement together.

King Charles surely epitomises this dual aspect of boomerism. A staunch Traditionalist and admirer of the anti-modern thinker René Guénon, he is criticised by some for being too backward-looking — while also (for example in his expressed wish to serve as “defender of all faiths”) standing accused by others of destructive progressivism and betraying the Church of England. Most likely though, as with boomers in the aggregate, he’s both: classically boomerish in his simultaneous ironclad confidence in the persistence of tradition, and certainty that traditions can and should be remixed at will in the name of progress.

Subsequent generations understand more clearly that this faith is often misplaced. Skills may be lost in generational transition, cultural reserves may be exhausted, carefully-accumulated inheritances may be frittered (literally) on cruises or (figuratively) on self-discovery and “modernisation”. But the true extent of the loss will, most likely, only become apparent as the ineluctable Boomerdämmerung approaches.

I wish King Charles a speedy recovery and a long reign yet. But in the end, as the Old Norse seeress reminds us, not even the gods can escape the cycle of death and rebirth. The growing frailty of the boomers feels like a chill wind of mortality, blowing around my own middle-aged vitals. But it blows an even more chilly wind of mortality around the world the boomers created, and whose increasingly brittle form is now fracturing at an accelerating pace.

At once, a Japanese prize barely heard of in the Anglosphere was making headlines around the world. Has the worst nightmare of the gatekeepers of high literary culture come true? Do the judges of the prize have faces dripping with egg, like a Master of Wine who picked the Blue Nun in a blind tasting? And is Rie Kudan, for her part, cheating? Well, no… and no.

To the latter question, we could counter that she was using AI-generated language precisely to make a point about AI-generated language: that is, that she wanted (as she puts it) to test the way “soft and fuzzy words” can obscure our ethical clarity. We could counter, further, that ChatGPT didn’t decide which 5% of the novel was going to be by ChatGPT, nor which bits of ChatGPT’s language were going in there.

And to the former question — whether the judges were just wrong to think the novel good — we can say: surely we’re past all that. If they thought The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy was flawless, then by their own lights — and if they’re decent critics we can expect readers to agree — it was. Didn’t we all learn at GCSE that the reader’s interpretation of the poem is much more important than trying to figure out what the author meant by it? Didn’t Roland Barthes pronounce The Death of the Author as long ago as 1967?

The idea of the single, inspired author originating a text of near-sacred originality is itself a hangover from the Romantics. It’s a two-century blip. Before then, fiction-writers often did their damnedest to pretend they were copying from someone else, even when they were making it up. Chaucer was forever talking about “myn auctor”, and a text that came adapted from a precedent was seen as more trustworthy and high-status than one that didn’t. Milton reworked the Bible, Shakespeare reworked Holinshed, and so on and so forth.

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In more recent times, experimental and modernist authors have been using randomness, or the home-made equivalent of algorithms, to generate their texts for 100 years or more. In 1920, the Dadaist eminence Tristan Tzara announced that poetry could be written by taking a newspaper article of the length you wanted your poem to be, cutting it into its constituent words with a pair of scissors, shaking them about in a bag and then transcribing them in the random order in which they emerged. There’s a funny bit about it in Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties.

That was only the starting gun for all manner of literary jiggery-pokery. William S. Burroughs and his collaborator Brion Gysin picked up Tzara’s baton in the Sixties, experimenting with “cut-ups” (much like Dada poetry) and “fold-ins” (where you would fold two pages of an existing book together so the edges met, and read across the fold to make a new text). The fantasy writer Jeff Noon’s 2001 book, Cobralingus, presented a set of algorithmic instructions for transforming a text through what Noon called “filter gates”, something analogous to a DJ remixing a record. The children’s writer Andy Stanton recently published Benny the Blue Whale: A Descent into Story, Language and the Madness of ChatGPT, a serious/silly account of his experiments getting ChatGPT to write a novel about a blue whale with a micropenis.

Arbitrary literary constraints or outright randomness, then — which is to say, things outside the author’s control which help determine the final text — have a very honourable place in literary history. You could even see the sonnet form or the villanelle as a species of algorithm. The mid-century Oulipoians sought out baroque formal constraints (most famously, Georges Perec’s managing to write a novel without the letter E) by way of liberating their creativity rather than stifling it. Italo Calvino wrote a novel — The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) — around a tarot pack. B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) presented the reader with loose pages in a box and invited you to read the novel in any order you liked.

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None of which is to say that Ms Kudan is necessarily an avant-gardist, or needs to be. Only that it’s a very narrow and regressive view of literature to see handing over control of some of your text to chance or to an algorithm as “cheating”. It’s what you do with the result that counts, and what Ms Kudan did was apparently, well, flawless.

There are, no question, literary-ethical problems with ChatGPT. If the algorithm has been “trained”, as some hefty lawsuits are currently complaining it has been, on vast screeds of copyright text without permission or compensation for the authors, that’s a violation deserving of redress. You could even make the case, perhaps, that 5% of Ms Kudan’s prize money should rightfully be distributed to every Japanese language author on whose copyright work the algorithm was trained. But that question is a business and intellectual property issue: to one side of the purely literary question of its part in the creation of The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy.

Indeed, if you were of a literary-theoretical cast of mind you could point out what Tzara and his successors were gesturing to in an oblique way anyway: intertextuality. Every text, in the end, is made of other texts. Every word in a novel or poem is a borrowing: it depends for its meaning on the vast constellation of other contexts in which it has appeared, and through which its reader will understand it. Every author, in his or her individual way, is a meat-brained ChatGPT, “trained” on a lifetime’s reading of classics and copyright works.

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That’s really where the case of Ms Kudan really does probe an anxiety in the culture. What if the writer is (in the phrase Martin Amis used of V.S. Pritchett) a mirror, not a lamp? The Romantic model of the artist is underscored, after all, by a reassuring idea about humanity: that we are creators not creations, that what makes us distinctive isn’t simply a neurological compost of our inputs but some ineffable inner essence that can only be captured in the act of expression.

Is it possible, then, that we so fiercely police the distinction between what Large Language Models can do and human creativity because we’re… touchy about it? That we’re worried it may be a temporary distinction of degree rather than a fundamental difference of category; which is to say, no distinction at all?

One intellectual who anticipated these developments decades ago is Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher at Oxford University and director of its Future of Humanity Institute. He joined UnHerd’s Florence Read to discuss the AI era, how governments might exploit its power for surveillance, and the possibility of human extinction. 

Florence Read: You’re particularly well-known for your work on “existential risk” — what do you mean by that?

Nick Bostrom: The concept of existential risk refers to ways that the human story could end prematurely. That might mean literal extinction. But it could also mean getting ourselves permanently locked into some radically suboptimal state, that could either collapse, or you could imagine some kind of global totalitarian surveillance dystopia that you could never overthrow. If it were sufficiently bad, that could also count as an existential catastrophe. Now, as for collapse scenarios, many of those might not be existential catastrophes, because civilisations have risen and fallen, empires have come and gone and eventually. If our own contemporary civilisation totally collapsed, perhaps out of the ashes would eventually rise another civilisation hundreds or thousands of years from now. So for something to be an existential catastrophe it would not just have to be bad, but have some sort of indefinite longevity.

FR: It might be too extreme, but to many people it feels that a state of semi-anarchy has already descended.

NB: I think there has been a general sense in the last few years that the wheels are coming off, and institutional processes and long-term trends that were previously taken for granted can no longer be relied upon. Like that there are going to be fewer wars every year, or that the education system is gradually improving. The faith people had in those assumptions has been shaken over the last five years or so.

FR: You’ve written a great deal about how we need to learn from each existential threat as we move forward, so that next time when it becomes more severe or more intelligent or more sophisticated, we can cope. And that specifically, of course, relates to artificial intelligence.  

NB: It’s quite striking how radically the public discourse on this has shifted, even just in the last six to 12 months. Having been involved in the field for a long time, there were people working on it but broadly, in society, it was more viewed as science-fiction speculation, not as a mainstream concern, and certainly nothing that top-level policymakers would have been concerned with. But in the UK we’ve recently had this Global AI Summit, and the White House just came out with executive orders. There’s been quite a lot of talk, including about potential existential risks from AI as well as more near-term issues, and that is kind of striking.

I think that technical progress is really what has been primarily responsible for this. People saw for themselves — with GPT-3, then GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 — how much this technology has improved. 

FR: How close are we to something that you might consider the singularity or AGI that does actually supersede any human control over it?

NB: There is no obvious clear barrier that would necessarily prevent systems next year or the year after from reaching this level. It doesn’t mean that that’s the most likely scenario. But we don’t know what happens as you scale GPT-4 to GPT-5. But we know that when you scaled it from GPT-3 to GPT-4 it unlocked new abilities. There is also this phenomenon of “grokking”. So initially, you try to teach the AI some tasks, and it’s too hard. Maybe it gets slightly better over time because it memorises more and more specific instances of the problem, but that’s the hard, sluggish way of learning to do something. But then at some point, it kind of gets it. Once it has enough neurons in its brain or has seen enough examples, it sort of sees the underlying principle, or develops the right higher-level concept that enables it to suddenly have a rapid spike in performance. 

FR: You write about the idea that we have to begin to teach AI a set of values by which it will function, if we have any hope of maintaining its benefit for humanity in the long term. And one of the liberal values that has been called into question when it comes to AI is freedom of speech. There have been examples of AI effectively censoring information, or filtering information that is available on a platform. Do you think that there is a genuine threat to freedom or a totalitarian impulse built into some of these systems that we’re going to see extended and exaggerated further down the line?

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NB: I think AI is likely to greatly increase the ability of centralised powers to keep track of what people are thinking and saying. We’ve already had, for a couple of decades, the ability to collect huge amounts of information. You can eavesdrop on people’s phone calls or social-media postings — and it turns out governments do that. But what can you do with that information? So far, not that much. You can map out the network of who is talking to whom. And then, if there is a particular individual of concern, you could assign some analyst to read through their emails. 

With AI technology, you could simultaneously analyse everybody’s political opinions in a sophisticated way, using sentiment analysis. You could probably form a pretty good idea of what each citizen thinks of the government or the current leader if you had access to their communications. So you could have a kind of mass manipulation, but instead of sending out one campaign message to everybody, you could have customised persuasion messages for each individual. And then, of course, you can combine that with physical surveillance systems like facial recognition, gait recognition and credit card information. If you imagine all of this information feeding into one giant model, I think you will have a pretty good idea of what each person is up to, what and who they know, but also what they are thinking and intending to do.

If you have some sufficiently powerful regime in place, it might then implement these measures and then, perhaps, make itself immune to overthrow.

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FR: Do you think the rise in hyper-realistic propaganda — deep-fake videos, which AI is going to make possible in the coming years — will coincide with the rise in generalised scepticism in Western societies?

NB: I think in principle a society could adjust to it. But I think it will come at the same time as a whole bunch of other things: automated persuasion bots for instance, social companions built from these large language models and then with visual components that might be very compelling and addictive. And then also mass surveillance, mass potential censorship or propaganda. 

FR: We’re talking about a tyrannical government that uses AI to surveil its citizens — but is there an innate moral component to the AI itself? Is there a chance that an AGI model could in some way become a bad actor on its own without human intervention?

NB: There are a bunch of different concerns that one might have as we move towards increasingly powerful AI tools and there are completely unnecessary feuds that people have between them. “Well, I think concern X should be taken seriously,” and somebody else says “I think concern Y should be taken seriously.” People love to form tribes and to beat one another, but X, Y, Z and B and W need to be taken into account. But yes, you’re right that there is also the separate alignment problem which is: with an arbitrarily powerful AI system, how can you make sure that it does what the people building it intend it to do? 

FR: And this is where it’s about building in certain principles, an ethical code, into the system — is that the way of mitigating that risk?

NB: Yes, or being able to steer it basically. It’s a separate question of where you do steer it — if you build in some principle or goal — which goal or which principle? But even just having the ability to point it towards any particular outcome you want, or a set of principles you want it to follow — that is a difficult technical problem. And in particular, what is hard is to figure out if the way we would do that would continue to work even if the AI system became smarter than us and perhaps eventually super-intelligent. If, at that point, we are no longer able to understand what it is doing or why it is doing it, or what’s going on inside its brain, we still want an original scaling method to keep working to arbitrarily high levels of intelligence. And we might need to get that right on the first try.

FR: How do we do that with such incredible levels of dispute and ideological schism across the world?

NB: Even if it’s toothless, we should make an affirmation of the general principle that ultimately AI should be for the benefit of all sentient life. If we’re talking about a transition to the super-intelligence era, all humans will be exposed to some of the risk, whether they want it or not. And so it seems fair that all should also stand to have some slice of the upside if it goes well. And those principles should go beyond all currently existing humans and include, for example, animals that we are treating very badly in many cases today, but also some of the digital minds themselves that might become moral subjects. As of right now, all we might hope for is some general, vague principle, and then that can sort of be firmed up as we go along.

Another hope, and some recent progress has been made on this, is for the next-generation systems to be tested prior to deployment to check that they don’t lend themselves to people who would want to make biological weapons of mass destruction or commit cybercrime. And so far AI companies have done some voluntary work on this: Open AI, before releasing GPT-4, had the technology for around half a year and did red-teaming exercises too. Research on technical AI alignment would be good to solve the problem of scalable alignment before we have super-intelligence.

I think the whole area of the moral status of digital mind will require more attention. I think it needs to start to migrate from a philosophy seminar topic to a serious mainstream issue. We don’t want to have a future where the majority of sentient minds or digital minds are horribly oppressed and we’re like pigs in Animal Farm. That would be one way of creating a dystopia. And it’s going to be a big challenge, because it’s already hard for us to extend empathy sufficiently to animals, even though animals have eyes and faces and can squeak.

Incidentally, I think there might be grounds for moral status besides sentience. I think if somebody can suffer, that might be sufficient to give them moral status. But I think even if you thought they were not conscious but they had goals, a conception of self, the sense of an entity persisting through time, the ability to enter into reciprocal relationships with other beings and humans — that might also ground various forms of moral status.

FR: We’ve talked a lot about the risks of AI, but what are its potential upsides? What would be the best case scenario?

NB: I think the upsides are enormous. In fact, it would be tragic if we never developed advanced artificial intelligence. I think all the paths to really great futures ultimately lead through the development of machine super-intelligence. But the actual transition itself will be associated with major risks, and we need to be super-careful to get that right. But I’ve started slightly worrying now in the last year or so that we might overshoot with this increase in attention to the risks and downsides. It still seems unlikely, but less unlikely than it did a year ago, that we might get to the point of a permafrost, some situation where it is never developed.

FR: A kind of AI nihilism?

NB: Yes, where it becomes so stigmatised that it just becomes impossible for anybody to say anything positive about it. There may pretty much be a permanent ban on AI. I think that could be very bad. I still think we need to have a greater level of concern than we currently have. But I would want us to reach the optimal level of concern and stop there.

FR: Like a Goldilocks level of fear for AI.

NB: People like to move in herds, and I worry about it becoming a big stampede to say negative things about AI, and then destroying the future in that way. We could go extinct through some other method instead, maybe synthetic biology, without even ever getting to at least roll the die with AI.

I would think that, actually, the optimal level of concern is slightly greater than what we currently have, and I still think there should be more concern. It’s more dangerous than most people have realised. But I’m just starting to worry about overshooting, the conclusion being: let’s wait for a thousand years before we develop it. Then of course, it’s unlikely that our civilisation will remain on track for a thousand years.

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FR: So we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t?

NB: We will hopefully be fine either way, but I think I would like the AI before some radical biotech revolution. If you think about it this way: if you first get some sort of super-advanced synthetic biology, that might kill us, but if we’re lucky, we survive it, and then maybe invent some super-advanced molecular nanotechnology and that might kill us, but if we’re lucky we survive that, and then you do the AI, and then maybe that will kill us. Or, if we’re lucky, we survive that and we get utopia. Well, then you have to get through three separate existential risk, like first a biotech risk, plus the nanotech risk, plus the AI risks.

Whereas if we get AI first, maybe that will kill us, but if not, we get through that and then I think that will handle the biotech and nanotech risks. And so the total amount of existential risk on that second trajectory would be less than on the former. Now, it’s more complicated than that, because we need some time to prepare for the Ay, but you can start to think about optimal trajectories rather than a very simplistic binary question of: “Is technology X good or bad?” We should be thinking, on the margin, “Which ones should we try to accelerate and which ones retard?”

FR: Do you have existential angst? Does this play on your mind late at night?

NB: It is weird. If this worldview is even remotely correct, that we should happen to be alive at this particular point in human history — so close to this fulcrum or nexus on which the giant future of earth-originating intelligent life might hinge — out of all the different people that have lived throughout history, people that might come later if things go well: that one should sit so close to this critical juncture, that seems a bit too much of a coincidence. And then you’re led to these questions about the simulation hypothesis, and so on. I think there is more in heaven and on earth than is dreamed of in our philosophy and that we understand quite little about how all of these pieces fit together.

The Manchester-based project features in a fascinating article by Jocelyn Kaiser and Ann Gibbons for Science magazine. Basically, the UKB is a massive database containing the standardised, searchable medical details of half a million individuals. Crucially, it includes genetic information:

“From 2006 to 2010, the UKB enrolled 500,000 people aged 40 to 69 through the United Kingdom’s National Health Service… Investigators sampled their blood and urine, surveyed their habits, and examined them for more than 2400 different traits or phenotypes, including data on their social lives, cognitive state, lifestyle, and physical health.

“The blood samples yielded DNA for genomic analyses…”

This rich and extensive source of data allows researchers to uncover all sorts of correlations between different genes, medical conditions, behavioural traits, lifestyles and life outcomes. Though correlation does not necessarily imply causation, it does help identify promising avenues for further research.

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It’s not just what’s in the database that makes it special, but also how easily researchers can get information out of it:

“The crucial ingredient, however, may be open access. Researchers around the world can freely delve into the UKB data and rapidly build on one another’s work, resulting in unexpected dividends in diverse fields, such as human evolution. In a crowdsourcing spirit rare in the hypercompetitive world of biomedical research, groups even post tools for using the data without first seeking credit by publishing in a journal.”

Are the UKB and its funders (which include the Wellcome Trust and the UK government) missing a trick? Why not commercialise such a valuable data source instead of giving it away?

That, however, is a very low dimensional way of thinking, one that ignores the benefits of sharing:

“‘The U.K. is getting all of the world’s best brains’ to study its citizens, says Ewan Birney, director of the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, U.K., and a member of the UKB’s steering committee.’”

It also burnishes the reputation of the UK as a world centre of excellence in bioscience – not to mention a place where the ultra-patient investments of the public voluntary sectors can happily coexist and cooperate with those of the private sector.

Not so long ago, open access, or ‘open source’, was the buzzword of the digital age and “information wants to be free” its motto. The success of operating systems like Linux and websites like Wikipedia seemed to provide all the proof needed that open source was the future.

But that was before the likes of Facebook and Google showed how ostensibly free services could be used to build trillion dollar businesses on the basis of relentless data extraction and commercialisation. Indeed, in controlling data flows, they have essentially privatised whole chunks of the internet, creating gated marketplaces in the process.

Thus as well as its direct contribution to scientific research, the UKB also serves as a vital reminder that profit-hungry data-hoarding is not the only way.

With the giants of Silicon Valley pushing into healthcare and technological progress increasing the speed and affordability of harvesting genetic data, can the UKB model hold out? In the era of ‘the quantified self’ will we surrender our medical data to the tech giants as easily as we’ve surrendered our social and consumer data?

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There are reasons to hope that Britain in particular can hold back the tide. As well as an impressive range of private, public and independent research institutions, there is our trump card: the National Health Service.

Like all healthcare systems, the NHS is riddled with various inefficiencies and dysfunctions. It should not be above criticism, but even the NHS-sceptics ought to recognise just how well-placed it is for the era of biomedical big data.

Firstly, it is a national health service – a single organisation, providing a broad spectrum of healthcare services to a large and diverse population. Though the data already in the UKB is immensely valuable, it represents a tiny fraction of the potential resource.

Secondly, the NHS is trusted and loved by the people it serves. That goodwill means that, as a nation, we’re willing to help as well as be helped – for instance, by giving blood. I doubt that millions of us would be willing to donate our erythrocytes to a commercial concern. It is the same goodwill that could persuade millions wore us to become data donors.

Thirdly, the NHS provides an answer to concerns about how our medical data might be used – and especially our genetic data. The nightmare is that if the genes of every individual were to be sequenced and recorded, a ‘genetic underclass’ would emerge – denied affordable medical insurance because of what’s in their DNA. The NHS, however, is free at the point of need to every citizen regardless of genetic inheritance.

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Long-term projects such as the UKB also have a reassuring record of anonymising and protecting its donors’ data. According to Kaiser and Gibbons, organisations accessing the UKB have to “sign a legal agreement not to try to reidentify any participant”.

This good practice needs the full backing of the state. British policy makers should be striving to establish the UK not only as the world leader in medical big data, but also in medical confidentiality. The two objectives may be in tension with one another, but they also need to be reconciled. The more that law-abiding citizens can be confident that their own genetic information will not, and cannot, be used against them, the more they will be ready to share it with scientists.

Ultimately, genetic research depends upon genetic privacy.