One question defines us: Who am I? The answer is elusive. A name or gender or race does not provide a wholly sufficient answer, nor does a role in a family or a job description. How do we define our essential self?
From childbirth, an enormous portion of our identity is defined in relation to other people: whom we know and who knows us, the context in which we are viewed and how we wish to be viewed. We tend to view ourselves reflected through the eyes of others. We see the world largely in terms of those in our daily lives. First, the eyes are those of our immediate family. Later, we define ourselves by associating with friends and classmates. As adults, we derive our identity in a similar way, from the families we make for ourselves, our coworkers, people we associate with politically, and people in our clubs or activities. To some extent, we also derive identity from those with whom geography, culture, or religion gives us some affinity—our neighbors, our countries, those who share our traditions and beliefs.
When I identify myself, it is often in terms of my personal relationships: as the romantic partner of the great (and patient) woman with whom I live, or as a father of two wonderful, creative, often hilarious, and loving daughters, or as a son or a brother proud of the family he grew up in. Professionally, I am, or have been, a writer and a CEO and an editor and a government official. Each of these dimensions of me requires someone else, or a group of people, to round out the identification: family, colleagues, readers, partners, constituents. No one of these is sufficient to completely identify an individual; rather, each is a piece of the mosaic that, taken together, equals our points of view—our “selves”—and philosophers through the ages have suggested that other, deeper forms of reflection and peeling away earthly things, experiences, and relationships are the keys to discovering an entirely different awareness of who we are.
Throughout human history, these associations have been driven by one factor more than any other—proximity. We saw ourselves through our associations with those who were literally as well as temperamentally, emotionally, politically, or spiritually close to us.
Now, in the connected world and that of the approaching era of machine intelligence, that is changing.
Thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones and the connectivity of global networks, effectively every person on the planet will be connected to one another in a man-made system in a few years’ time. This will be a historical watershed of profound importance. It is, as we have discussed earlier, on par with the Renaissance, though I think that it is probably much larger in its significance, because it will touch so many more people, and change so many more lives much more profoundly. Imagine: the entire world will truly be a single community, one in which it will be infinitely easier than at any time before for anyone anywhere to reach out and connect with anyone anywhere else anytime. We are reweaving the fabric of civilization.
Let us take a moment to appreciate the staggering speed and scale of this change. The printing press with moveable metallic type was introduced for the first time during 1377, in Korea, during the Goryeo Dynasty. It took another sixty-five years or so for the idea to be first presented in Europe in the form of Johannes Gutenberg’s handiwork. It was not until 1800 that the invention resulted in the printing of 1 billion books. In contrast, portable cell phones went from zero to 1 billion subscribers in about twelve years. To grasp the suddenness of the onset of this era, note that it took seventy-five years to go from zero telephone users to 50 million. It took Facebook three and a half years to reach the same milestone. It took the video game Angry Birds thirty-five days to do likewise.
Half the cellular devices being sold now are smartphones, which make up about 80 percent of all Internet usage. What that means is that people are doing a lot more than making calls and playing Angry Birds on those phones: the phones are changing the way people spend and manage their money; identify, make, and maintain friendships; participate as citizens; become educated; stay healthy; keep up to date with news; and be entertained, as well as commit crimes, incite revolutions, and seek new disruptive innovations. Even the poorest continent on earth, Africa, is expected to have approximately 80 percent cell phone penetration by 2020.
We are likely to go from perhaps 20 billion devices on the Internet today to an estimated 50 billion in 2020. Most of those devices will be embedded in things—in your refrigerator, in cars, in industrial machinery, in jet engines, attached to sensors in bridges, and in buoys out at sea—and all will be capturing data and processing it in real time, giving us an extraordinary kind of heightened, real-time awareness of life and commerce on this planet that even today we can hardly imagine. Compound that with the enhanced power with which new computers will be able to assess that data, and the ability to harness thousands or millions of computers to handle massive analyses in unison, and you can see the era of machine intelligence approaching.
There have been few watersheds quite like it, and none that have hit the earth with such suddenness or caught the planet so ill-prepared for the consequences of the changes being unleashed.
The implications for our identities are profound. Soon, we won’t just be connected to every person on the planet but to every business, to a huge universe of machines and sensors that can tell us how life is being lived across the globe and in real time. We will have one global cultural ecosystem for the first time in history—where everyone, everywhere can touch, influence, and, more than ever before, relate to anyone anywhere, all the time.
Because the connected world is rewiring the ties that bind us, it’s going to force billions of people to reassess who they are. We will interact with new friends and partners, view distant societies, acquire new skills and abilities to take advantage of the connections that can serve or threaten us. Each of us will find ourselves closer to worlds that once seemed distant, familiar with experiences and people who once seemed foreign. Even those who choose to burrow into the Web—to associate only with the like-minded—will find that their connections will be less bound by distance or contained by national borders.
Meanwhile, the generation that has grown up from birth with these connections already takes these modes of interaction as a given. Their town square is virtual and infinite, a place where they can meet and interact with and get to know anyone, anywhere.
Just two decades ago, there were only three groups on the planet that could be measured in billions of people: the Chinese, Catholics, and Muslims. Today, they are rivaled by virtual communities: Facebook, Google, and Yahoo users. Since we derive identity from the groups we associate with, and, since such groups develop their own cultures, rules, and vernacular, it is reasonable to ask how these virtual megasocieties are impacting our own view of ourselves, and the day-to-day reality of who we are, how we act, and with whom we interact. How are our identities evolving?
It might seem easy to dismiss all this as technophilia—an overemphasis on a wave of new gadgets that’ll have a secondary effect on our lives, like ATMs or dishwashers. Yet the question we need to ask is: How might technology change our own character or that of our civilization? In other words, when the old barriers fall between me and new sources of friends, partners, collaborators, and the networks of associates that help us to define ourselves, we must ask: “Who am I?”
Now, let’s look closely at one of the aspects of identity on which much of history has turned—our place as citizens of a tribe, a city, a state, or a nation. Along with religious identity, this aspect of who we are has been the source of conflict and bloodshed and mayhem since the dawn of time. It has become the basis on which society is organized. The words we use to describe our compatriots—from “countryman” in English to Landsmann in German—literally suggest that we are whom we share geography with.
Not any longer. “Who am I?” will increasingly be answered less by answering “Who lives nearby?” or “With whom do I share local customs?” and more by “Who shares my beliefs or my likes?”; “With whom do I share psychic rather than geographical space?”
Like the town square of old, the ease of engaging with people across the globe is giving rise to virtual communities that can share interests, develop social bonds, and coordinate efforts. When proximity is no longer primary, other important barriers fall as well. On the Internet, it becomes possible to enter new communities with different standards, to redefine or mask old or traditional definitions of oneself, and to strip away the kind of inhibitions associated with face-to-face interactions. Local community standards that once might have made a relationship or an interest or a subject taboo no longer apply.
This dissociation can be both liberating and dangerous. A new name, a new persona, allows for fewer inhibitions. So, too, the Internet allows those whose views are so idiosyncratic that they are unlikely to be matched anywhere else in a local environment to find like-minded counterparts. To take just one example, the It Gets Better Project was started by syndicated columnist and author Dan Savage and his partner in 2010 to provide a support system for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. What started as a single YouTube video grew into a movement whereby individuals around the world could share their stories, find support in their struggles, and unite in solidarity. Imagine the challenges to convening such a group that once existed in a judgmental society and how much easier it is to do with the reach, speed, and privacy of the Internet. Instant communities, be they refugees or oppressed minorities, of the politically like-minded or of scientists trying to tackle a common problem (the original purpose of the precursors of the Internet), are now proliferating daily.
Unfortunately, this new connectivity can also produce negative consequences. You know the stories: in the shadiest corners of the Dark Net, parts of the Web that are both difficult to reach and completely anonymous, a host of criminal actors from pedophiles to traffickers to terrorists is able to communicate and plan, to connect and collaborate invisibly. Alienated, angry men and women in search of a mission and a way to express their unhappiness with the world have connected in chat rooms and via social media; the result is the recruitment boom that has fueled the rapid rise of the Islamic State.
Even in more normalized parts of society, the question remains: With ever increasing connectivity, will the real intimacy of live human interaction suffer? Will the ability of Internetizens to conduct themselves face-to-face or to manage complex social situations deteriorate? In 2010, Japanese government data revealed that 700,000 of its citizens suffered from hikikomori, defined by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare as “people who refuse to leave their houses and isolate themselves from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months.” The Internet, it seems, offers an enabling tool to keep individuals with hikikomori isolated in their own world and to deepen their sense of disconnect from everyone else. Unfortunately, hikikomori is a critical contributor to Japan’s high suicide rate among young men devoid of hope and unable to reach out for help.
It remains to be seen how deep or enduring such changes will be. Certainly, it would be a mistake to assume all the changes to come are for the better.
However, it is not the purpose of this book to advocate for sweeping civilizational changes. They are coming whether we like it or not. The issue is whether we are prepared for the changes—how they will impact the very nature of who we are. Can we take advantage of what is best about them? Can we minimize that which is negative?
The unifying power of the Internet can strengthen, but also destroy, what makes us unique. The desire to live together in a hyperconnected world, to communicate and work with people, may require a certain global assimilation in which some of our distinctions, for better or for ill, are subsumed into an unprecedented human universality. I’m speaking here of language.
Throughout history, when people seek to connect to advance their self-interest, they start by finding a common language and setting common expectations. Five hundred years ago, there were perhaps seven thousand languages being spoken in the world. Today that number has fallen to five thousand, representing twenty-five major linguistic groups. Of those, a few are dominant. Perhaps one in two people on the planet speaks a language characterized as belonging to the Indo-European linguistic family.
Now, the Internet is accelerating the process of linguistic consolidation. Of the top 10 million websites in the world, approximately 55 percent are in English. The next largest number are in Russian (5.9 percent) and German (5.8 percent). While the number of non-English websites has grown steadily during the past decade, English remains dominant, with one study showing that it has remained the language of approximately half of all websites since 2005. Among the top 10 million websites, only eleven languages besides English are represented by more than 1 percent of the sites.
By another metric, as of late 2013, English-speaking users made up 28.6 percent of Internet users, Chinese-speaking users made up 23.2 percent, and then, after that, the distribution falls into single-digit numbers, with Spanish at 7.9 percent and seven others with 2 percent or more.
The writing is on the screen (and, likely, in one of a handful of languages). This means that when people want to take advantage of all that connectivity—which they will need to do to survive, to do business, to participate in society, to be educated, and to get health care—they will need to do so in one of the very few languages that will be commonly spoken in connected space.
New technologies are likely to make language translation easier and perhaps slow the trend toward a lingua franca on the Internet. The Internet also has the power to preserve cultural idiosyncrasies by simply increasing access to information, materials, and people from one’s own background and exposing broader audiences to them. But, as we have seen with music and movies, most content on the Web is also limited to a few languages, representing a few cultures. English dominates the global market for movies, television, and music. A study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the US will dominate the market in 2019, with approximately 32 percent of all entertainment and marketing around the world. The top ten largest corporations in the field, according to Forbes, are incorporated in either the United States or the United Kingdom.
Questions of cultural homogenization are inflammatory worldwide, as we naturally lament the loss of rich traditions. But the impact and economic value of Web content is linked to the size of audiences, so more is produced for those who consume the most. The sheer size of the libraries of such content is an incentive for others to become fluent in those languages.
Another question is: How important is language to identity, and do we gain more than we lose by removing barriers to communication? I think that we do, and that we fetishize differences that have caused eons of pain at our own risk. Nostalgia for divisions between people is one of the most dangerous—and frequently exploited—forces in history.
Language, of course, is just one of the dimensions of national identity at risk in the post-geography world. Today, Internet users can go venue shopping for cultural commonalities—be they religious, musical, artistic, or political. The paradoxical tension between the power of the connected world to help preserve or redefine the local or to create new forces of homogenization is an essential characteristic of this new era. It can facilitate the mobilization of flash mobs to protect a shared value or advance a shared cause. Alternatively, it can enable people to choose the criteria for the community they wish to occupy in the cyberlandscape. Arithmetic helps. When you have the world to choose from, you can build large communities of people with very specific interests or combinations of values.
Homogenization and localization are not even countervailing forces in this world. Consider modern, global elites—the richest, most powerful citizens of the world. Through interviewing the leaders of the world’s largest companies and financial institutions (for books of mine, like Superclass or Power, Inc.), I found that these jet-setting participants in global markets often had more in common with one another than they did with the citizens of the countries in which they were born or lived. They read the same few newspapers (the New York Times and the Financial Times), websites, and books; dressed in similar ways; vacationed in similar places; stayed in the same hotels; visited one another in a very limited number of exclusive neighborhoods; and ate in a limited number of celebrated restaurants. Hop from one of those restaurants to another around the world on any given evening, and you would likely hear very similar conversations, because interests and sources of information overlap so much.
This is not just a product of the culture of being a 1 percenter. It is also a natural expression of their self-interests. Steve Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, the private equity group, once said to me that, thanks to the global network he had built up, he was one phone call away from reaching out to anyone in power anywhere on the planet. In other words, developing the most powerful people into a closely knit network serves the professional, economic, and political interests of each member of the elite.
Unsurprisingly, top financial professionals and other elites globalized faster than other segments of the planet’s population because they had access to the technologies of connection earlier. While connections are nothing new, connections that extend everywhere, easily, are. And they do not simply manifest themselves as facilitated backroom chatter. They have, as in the case of Blackstone and private equity, led global finance to open capital flows to every corner of the world much faster than other industries have globalized. Why? Because every new market they wired in became a new opportunity to do business—visibility led to liquidity, which led to profits. And the lynchpin of visibility was connectivity. This, in turn, has driven global growth and led to the promulgation of more universal application of the rule of law (as that is required by bankers to protect their interests in those capital flows). At least, that’s one argument the proponents of globalization (and I’ll admit that I am one) have made. Having said that, linking markets and elites in those markets also enables them to mobilize where their interests align, and, because they are powerful, this has led to a disproportionate focus in the making of global regulations and laws and tax regimes on serving the interests of those who are most powerful and best positioned to wield global influence and on ignoring or underplaying the interests of the more disconnected, less well-informed, less globally influential average citizens.
New technologies, therefore, can and do provide special advantages for elites in the world today to connect with one another and to grow the gaps between themselves and digital have-nots—which is precisely what has happened on a planet where a few hundred of the families control more wealth than the bottom two-thirds of the planet’s people. Will these technologies fail to become the tools of a new democratization? Will there emerge a new technological superclass that always maintains special advantages over the rest of the world, especially in areas where money buys tech power and expertise that gives special advantages like the access to and analysis of big data, security, or financial analytics and management? Or will growing access to the Internet and cheap but powerful tools provide greater transparency for the world at large into the ways of elites and ultimately serve as a leveler? This is as critical a set of social questions as we are likely to encounter in the era ahead.
More pertinent to those of us without private jets: Does this palpable acceleration of globalization mean that you might soon be less likely to describe yourself as American or Chinese or French? Probably not. In fact, the free flow of cultures worldwide—made possible not just by the Internet and new communication technologies but also by modern transportation—has created a backlash. The rise of Islamist extremism is largely motivated by a desire to preserve ancient traditions in the face of encroaching Western values. A flow of refugees, who have been enabled by new technologies even when the passages they make have sometimes been dangerously low tech, also produces a backlash and a rise of nationalism. Technology is obliterating borders, and some people who feel that their identity is in flux and are clinging, in vain, to keep it rigidly fixed.
It’s clear that our newly connected world has the power to both homogenize and help solidify the local. The question should not be which of these forces will prevail; indeed, in my view, we should expect to live with contradictions and tensions like these in the future, just as we have in the past.
Perhaps the solution rests with the myriad individuals and organizations that are using new technologies and the opportunities they create to help ensure that a convergence of civilizations is the more likely long-term prospect than a clash of civilizations. We see evidence of this new reality all around us, whether it is a social media–savvy pope, whose millions of followers are gaining spiritual insights in statements of 140 characters or less, or in the breathtaking goal set by Facebook to have 5 billion members on its site by 2030, creating a community greater than any nation, one whose rules are being set by techies and businesspeople rather than elected or selected officials. These individuals are using the networks of wires linking the world and its communities as a kind of loom; each individual piece may be unique, but the result weaves together the fabric of a new global society.
Of all the challenges to our traditional views of our own identities that we are likely to encounter in this new era, among the greatest will be the emergence and evolution of artificial intelligence. Evolution is a resonant word in this regard. A tipping point looms for our very idea of what it means to be intelligent, what intellectual capacity is. The past limits we ascribed to intellect—those of the human brain—will be transcended. Intelligence beyond ours is possible. In the whole history of humanity, there has never been a moment when our species did not possess the most powerful intellectual capacity on our little planet. That is a distinction that is not likely to survive this century.
Philosopher Nick Bostrom has been at the forefront of considering the implications of this looming watershed. Based on his years of work with leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, he has become convinced that profound changes are just ahead. He asked those leaders when they thought that we would have machines that could truly think independently of the men and women who made them. Some answered 2030. Some said 2040. Some said 2050. No one said never or centuries from now. This is just a couple of ticks of the historical clock away, just a generation from now.
Bostrom poses important questions about how the emergence of this new force within our society is likely to take place. As Bostrom has posited, if we can create an intelligence as great as our own, what comes next? If that intelligence surpasses ours, what will the machines that possess the capability to reason and innovate do next? Surely they will not stop from seeking ways to create even greater machine intelligence. At what point, and in what ways, do we defer to greater machine intelligence?
Professor Sherry Turkle at MIT is another visionary who has spent much time reflecting on how we interact with our technology, how we develop strong emotional bonds with and dependencies on comparatively primitive artificial intelligence even today. Imagine, she asks, how we might feel when robots are caring for our children, replacing breadwinners, or delivering medical care. How will we conceive of ourselves when sentient robots or superpowered computers assume many more of our roles within society? Or how will we use machine intelligence and technologies to enhance our own capabilities? We already know that brains can be wired to machines (or to other brains) to enhance human performance. How would augmented human intelligence be made available? What would become of social and economic divides if it were not available equitably? (Let’s be honest: it very likely won’t be.)
Artificial intelligence is quickly moving beyond mere machines and is slowly but irreversibly being woven into the rest of the fabric of our lives. Consider what might happen with AI-empowered virtual reality.
Rony Abovitz has. He is the president and CEO of Magic Leap. A son of an inventor and an artist, Abovitz’s virtual reality headset does not replace the world in which we live with a fantastical boardroom—rather, it overlays our reality with a digital one. “Imagine,” he recently said, “you are walking in China, and all the billboards are in English. And at restaurants, as people are talking to you, there are live subtitles,” he says, explaining what the device will enable. “You don’t even realize you’re in a computer; it’s just happening.” Virtual buttons and sensors could appear all over your home, letting you know when you are running out of milk or laundry detergent and giving you instant access to ordering more from a supplier like Amazon.
As virtual reality expands, it allows us to conduct more of our daily lives in this created space that is the intersection of the real world and an overlay of artificial sports arenas, schools, marketplaces, and hospitals. Think Pokémon Go writ large, a seamless interweaving of the digital and natural worlds. There may even come a time when the computers we build shape our environments without any human commands. We will certainly be required to act in our physical world, but what will it mean to live when more and more of our lives takes place in artificial space? Will it become harder to tell the real from our facsimile of it, when the bulk of our lives is conducted by clicking on overlaid computer buttons? What, then, is real? Where is home? Which world is more comfortable for us? We could ask whether humans could become more acclimated to the artificial environment, but we have already established that they can and do. After all, the artificial world has been created by men and women to embody the planet of their fantasies, the one they wish they could occupy, or at least the one that might entertain or empower them.
AI is also finding its way into our very beings. Medical researchers are developing digestible biosensors to monitor a host of bodily functions. Dr. John A. Rogers is a leader in the field of bioelectronics, which is the intersection of electronics and organic systems. With over one hundred patents to his name, Rogers recently accepted a position at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he will continue working with state-of-the-art nanotechnology to develop soft electronics with silicon semiconductors flexible enough to operate with the human body to give instant updates of medical information to patients and their medical teams.
MIT-trained futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil projects the success of these endeavors and their introduction into our most essential human systems. He writes and speaks widely about his theory that this technology will become so sophisticated in the coming decades that our craniums will hold not only our brains but countless nanobots infused with our DNA scurrying around our capillaries. These tiny machines will enhance our own mental processes with nonbiological thinking. While others think of such a cyborg future as replacing the human with the mechanical, Kurzweil sees a brighter future for humanity: artificial intelligence will improve upon both rational and emotional thought by literally connecting our brains to the Internet. If his predictions come to pass, we’ll be able to enhance our thinking and draw from wider sources when contemplating big ideas, searching for innovative solutions, or simply exploring a new genre of music.
With our experience being so thoroughly infused with artificial intelligence, what will it mean to be human, to exist? Will these tools, as Kurzweil predicts, simply build upon our humanity, improving our ability to express our personhood? Will they lead to improved efficiency in our businesses and associations by allowing meetings to take place anywhere at any time, with each participant’s ideas enhanced by online resources and instant access to resources? Or will we slowly recede into artificial intelligence, the machines creating our worlds and fueling our thoughts? What is the answer to the question “Who am I?” when the thoughts framing it emanate from tiny computers created and programmed by someone else?
We can go further. What if a machine were deemed to be self-aware, as intelligent as a human, possessing a kind of consciousness or even just possessing unique knowledge of benefit to society: How might the law evolve to protect the machines and/or the knowledge within them? Can we envision a day in which smart machines have rights? And what if the machines outpace our intelligence and reasoning abilities? What would we make of humanity then? What would they make of it? Would such questions gradually become less relevant as humans gradually become seen as simply an evolutionary link to higher, machine intelligence?
Nick Bostrom has recently made a career of thinking about this future in which artificial intelligence surpasses, and possibly stands in the place of, our own. Before that day comes, he contends, we need to teach artificial intelligence to adopt our values. As machines develop and learn, we can establish initial conditions and program the initial goals to ensure that machines develop so as not to threaten the things we hold dear.
As you can see, in countless ways, the coming changes to our society will force us again and again to consider the basic question “Who am I?”. But they are not just forcing such a reappraisal; they should also be enabling it. What once our neighbors or our elders or centuries of custom might have crushed, connectivity and ubiquitous communications are allowing to flourish. Multiply such changes across all the facets of each of our identities and the result is profound. Touch every person on the planet with such changes, accelerate the ways in which such changes can occur, identify all the new aspects of ourselves we will be able to examine in this world, and the promise is greater still. Of course, many will seek to use emerging technological resources to counter the trends of self-empowerment and self-awareness and growth. That struggle will certainly be a hallmark of the decades ahead, especially in societies that seek to remain closed and to fight the changes that are surely coming.