Critical Analysis
Technology is often described in terms of future advancement, with various claims of benefit. Digital technologies will make things faster, clearer, better, and even make bad things invisible. This has been the promise of modern innovations in artificial and mixed reality, in non-fungible tokens, in blockchain, in mobile computing, in the internet of things, and continuing backwards to the initial theoretical computational thinking of Blaise Pascal, Charles Babbage, and Vannevar Bush. Many of these inventions start with a fiction—a science fiction—and are then pursued in earnest by champions of that fiction. As fictions, they often bring to life that faster, clearer, better and invisibleness through scenarios of work, home and play: people doing common things, but freed of the banality of the commonness in order to use their brain and heart, rather than encountering the tedium of the activity itself.
These inventions typically follow several bell-shaped paths. One is the path of miniaturization, either literally or metaphorically, as described by Gordon Moore’s Law. Another is (unrelated) Geoffry Moore’s path of consumer adoption, with enthusiastic and almost manic passion on the left, and reluctance on the right. A more linear path is the path towards commoditization, where the technologies that are deemed successful become cheaper and cheaper to the point of having no material profit potential for companies; they become utilities. And Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle tracks a more frenetically shaped view of the media throwing expectations at technological change.
In each of these cases, there is typically an academic and scholarly discussion of an implicit corresponding and plottable curve of change in socio-political inequality, in change of emotional wellbeing, in change of economic disparity, and so-on; but these curves do not find themselves into the popular journals and popular media with much excitement, likely because they point empirically to a negative and not very compelling future.
In Vannevar Bush’s seminal article How We May Think, he presents a number of these new technologies, many of which have subsequently come to bear, been hyped, adopted, commercialized, and commoditized, and simultaneously studied and critiqued. Yet the technologies persist, and the critiques do not stick. Articles like How We May Think are instruction guides rather than warnings, and popular dystopic films like Bladerunner and the Fifth Element perversely become goals for tech-centric entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. It’s easy to write this billionaire championship off as a pure pursuit of profit, but there’s something more happening: these corporate leaders actually want to live in the worlds that they see depicted in these films.
The most recent of these broad futures is the large language model as a driver for “artificial intelligence”, and the corresponding application through easy-to-use chat and visual interfaces. It bears a striking resemblance to the future world Bush predicts (or implicitly proposes), where a user will be able to use a device to build and traverse trails in the same way that the human mind works; he describes that both the mind and the new device “operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next which is suggested by the association of thoughts.” He proposes these activities occurring at and in a desk; he was not quite optimistic enough, as they have really come to bear in a smaller and much more simple form of a phone. The technology has made poor strides in wearables, with Humane raising $230 million to build an AI wearable pin just like another of Bush’s devices, a device that a user “wears on his forehead, a lump a little larger than a walnut” to take pictures. Humane failed, and discontinued their walnut in under 2 years, but the pursuit of this science fiction continues.
The science fiction of Bush is interpreted by entrepreneurs as a playbook, and by scholars as a warning. The scholars continually lose. Perhaps the entrepreneurs are louder, or perhaps they are more charismatic, or perhaps the passionate and almost desperate optimism of “consumers,” looking to escape from the very inequities presented by these technologies themselves are simply offering supply for demand. Throughout his years of writing, Bush was consistent in his own optimism and in championing the social benefits of technological “progress.” It is telling that in one of his later essays titled Automation’s Awkward Age, he acknowledges the potential for social inequity of advancement, but blames those who are left out:
I am far from saying that we shall not encounter serious problems as mechanization proceeds at an exponential rate. On the contrary, I am sure we will. The lot of the poorly educated or insufficiently skilled, always hard, will become harder. The man-in-the-rut, who loves his rut,Emphasis mine, and what the actual fuck will need retraining at society’s expense and, as we have already come to now, the retraining will not always take. The old, like the young, will need more care, shelter and protection. All these groups and some others will need greater help from society than they are at present getting. This is the price of progress: it need not be too high for what is thereby achieved (The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush, p344).