The Emerging Utopia

Byron Reese

Toffler’s Future Shock electrified so many readers because it clearly described a feeling that many were having but that few had articulated, namely that the world was changing so fast that it was disorienting and confusing, like being on a merry-go-round spinning ever faster, holding on with a combination of anticipation and fear. The rate of change Toffler described in 1970 has only increased in the intervening decades, driven largely by two factors. First is the increasing speed and falling cost of the now ubiquitous computer. This part wasn’t much of a surprise. Gordon Moore’s famous law predates Future Shock, so we already had a glimpse of what was coming. But the real surprise was what happened when we connected these computers with a common communications protocol and created the consumer internet. Who could have imagined the social change that this would bring about? Frankly, no one.

Who saw Wikipedia coming? Or Etsy, eBay, Google, Amazon, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest? Who saw the open source movement or Creative Commons? Who predicted there would be 100,000,000 blogs, or that a billion videos would be uploaded? Who saw what the internet would do to music? Or watching movies? Or public discourse? No one at all. We transformed society, created $25 trillion in wealth and made a million new companies. All from simply connecting computers together. That was unexpected. Certainly, the foresighted at the time glimpsed pieces here and there, but the sheer enormity and pervasiveness of the transformation were beyond anyone’s ability to imagine. We can only envision futures within the frame of reference of the present, so our minds are unable to conceive a coherent world where everything is different.

If the internet, a tabula rasa of a technology if ever there was one, did all that, what would happen if computers could actually think? This is the hope and promise of artificial intelligence. If just connecting computers changed the world, what would happen if, by the power of computing, everyone on the planet was effectively made smarter? That’s what AI does. With a smartphone in your hand, you can be a doctor, a lawyer, or almost anything else.

Almost all economic growth comes from technology. We know this intuitively. I don’t work harder than my great-grandparents did, but I live a more lavish life than they ever aspired to. How can this be? Simple: An hour of my labor yields so much more than an hour of theirs ever did. Technology is a trick our species learned way back. It is a way to multiply what we are able to do. My body may be limited by the 100 watts of power it constantly consumes, but with technology, I can make that 100 watts do ever more.

For all of human history, there has never been enough of the good stuff. Not enough food, not enough education, not enough leisure. And there have always been utopians who dreamed of a day where there would be plenty for everyone, an end to scarcity, that first assumption of every economic theory that there has ever been. Interestingly, the dreamers of old seldom achieved their utopias through technology, but through an advancing of human nature. Human nature has stubbornly resisted advancing, but not to worry, technology can more than take up the slack.

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Those who worry that advances in technology will be bad for people because it will eliminate jobs have always puzzled me. More productivity is always good for all people, and if that isn’t true, then we should lobby to require everyone to work with one arm tied behind their back.

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Of course, there is a real difference between creating enough of the good stuff and everyone having enough of the good stuff, and this is a challenge we are still wrestling with. But there are encouraging signs all around that we are heading in the right direction. The number of people in abject poverty is declining, as is the number of hungry people in the world, in spite of population growth. The world’s middle class is expanding, and almost everyone everywhere has more than their ancestors. Progress is unacceptably slow, but it is constant.

All of this has happened because of technology, because of this trick of doing more with the same. Technology increases productivity, and this is always, always good for humans. Those who worry that advances in technology will be bad for people because it will eliminate jobs have always puzzled me. More productivity is always good for all people, and if that isn’t true, then we should lobby to require everyone to work with one arm tied behind their back. If we did that, here’s what would happen: Productivity would fall, new jobs would be created because we would need more people to do, well, anything. But those jobs would pay much less because those doing them have such low productivity. Now imagine the opposite. Suddenly, we all have three arms. Our productivity goes up accordingly. This is good for people. But I do understand and sympathize with the worry, for it is always clear what jobs technology will destroy and always unclear what it will create. It was true of the internet. People predicted the decline of newspapers, yellow pages, stockbrokers, travel agents, and a hundred other jobs, and they were right about every one of them. But no one saw the millions of jobs the internet would create, jobs so new we had to make up hundreds of new words just to describe them. We can never predict these jobs, we can only take comfort in a simple, irrefutable truth: that empowering people with more productivity is good; that knowledge is power.

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It is the vanity of every age to think it lives at the great turning point of history. That being said, we live at the great turning point of history, the moment when we will overcome scarcity and build a better world for all.

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This is why I am so excited about artificial intelligence. Imagine what will happen to productivity when everyone is effectively smarter. When a free app on your phone gives you amazing new superpowers. You might remember in the movie The Matrix that when a character needed to know how to do something, he could just download the knowledge into his brain. We won’t be able to do that, of course, but we will be able to do something like it—a shadow of it—and that will profoundly change the world.

It is the vanity of every age to think it lives at the great turning point of history. That being said, we live at the great turning point of history, the moment when we will overcome scarcity and build a better world for all. We are the generation that will see the utopia emerge. Not because we are better than those who came before us, but because we live at the moment when the rate of technological advance is so fast that it will give all humans superpowers. And with those superpowers will come super productivity. That productivity will achieve a vastly expanded universal standard of living, since artificial intelligence empowers everyone who uses it.

I believe we will do this, for it is no longer a question of ability, merely a question of will. We must simply decide to live in this world, to will it into being, and we and our children and all who come after us can occupy it.

Byron Reese is an Austin-based author. His most recent book is The Fourth Age: Smart robots, conscious computers, and the future of humanity.