Conclusion: Marx Was Right (Sort Of)
If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are, a different game you should play.
—Yoda
When we first met John Seely Brown in chapter one, he was cruising down the California coastline in his high-tech Porsche. But he’s not always doing that. Most of the time he’s spreading confusion—literally. He calls himself the “chief of confusion.” He’s a technology consultant to businesses and organizations, but his role isn’t to provide solutions to issues. Rather, like Socrates, he tries to help people ask the right questions. “In this new world we’re living in, questions may be more powerful than answers,” he says.1
More Yoda-isms—appropriate for one of the men who coined the term “ubiquitous computing,” a concept about how technology invisibly surrounds us. It sounds like the Force, but I’ve come to understand his meaning over the past few years working on this book, which has been predicated on questions, starting with a very basic one: What is technology doing to us? In each chapter, we’ve extrapolated that fundamental question into the various aspects of human existence: How is technology affecting our health, our relationships, our collective happiness, and so on?
As the religious adherents we met in chapter eight pointed out, any conclusions that we may draw inevitably lead to more questions. In figuring out what this all means and how to apply this knowledge, we have to decide what to ask ourselves going forward. We know what technology is doing to us and has done over several millennia of evolution, but what do we do about it now? Do we like its effects? If not, is there any way to stop or reverse them? What will Humans 4.0 look like?
In the broadest sense, technology’s effects on the world and humanity generally have been benevolent. Advancing technology, along with the globalization it enables and deepens, has driven the world economy for centuries by creating possibilities and efficiencies, allowing new opportunities, bridging distances, and equalizing positions. Governments that have allowed or encouraged these two interlinked forces to take root and expand freely have benefited tremendously; those that haven’t find themselves and their people left behind. With bottom-up revolutions continuing to foment and explode in the Middle East, it’s clear that people in some of these outlier nations are no longer content with taking a back seat to history’s direction. We can only hope that for the people in willfully oppressed parts of the world, such as North Korea, technologically driven globalism seeps through the cracks and works to bring them into the fold.
Despite short-term blips such as Occupy Wall Street, the long-term global trend is evident: The world has been heading toward greater prosperity for some time, with particular acceleration in the past few centuries. Not just is computing becoming ubiquitous; so too—one day—will relative wealth be everywhere.
This richness translates into many measurable benefits, starting simply with how long people live. With basic human needs being met and technology providing cures and treatments for all manner of ailments and previously fatal diseases, children will grow into adults who then achieve life spans comparable to tortoises. Their long lives will teem with comforts, from automobiles and air conditioners to electric screwdrivers and robot vacuums. Life will no longer be as “nasty, brutish and short” as it was or even as it is—except, of course, when it comes to cleaning the toilet.
This important improvement in the basics and some of the luxuries shouldn’t be understated, but unfortunately it is. In the advanced world, we generally don’t think about how good we have it. We rarely experience the early death of a child, and that’s increasingly applying to adults as well. We almost never contemplate that, just a few short centuries ago, families didn’t have electricity and had to sleep together to keep warm. Happiness baselines, so we forget how hard life can be and instead complain about how our Wi-Fi range doesn’t cover the backyard or that we can’t use the bathroom because the maid is cleaning it. Perhaps a biological imperative paradoxically prompts us to focus on the negatives, but it’s a shame nevertheless how little we consider how far we’ve come and how much we fret about what really doesn’t matter.
The big-picture advancements have also resulted in one of humanity’s greatest and again unheralded achievements: the decline of war. The conditions that drive people to fight in conflicts and commit terrorism still exist in many parts of the world, but the rapid spread of prosperity has diminished those causal factors significantly and will continue to do so. More and more people are gaining things they’d rather not lose—family and loved ones, possessions, or even just hope—which is something that can happen when they engage in violence against their neighbors. At this point, game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma become more relevant to the average person: The creep of prosperity tells individuals that everyone gains by cooperation, or, more specifically, that no one loses by it. We’ll return to this important development shortly.
Factors other than economics lead people to harm their neighbors, but here too technology is helping. Advances in neuroscience are giving medical practitioners a better understanding of the mind and personality, so perhaps even the unwell people who shoot up schools or commit other heinous murders might receive improved diagnoses and treatments before they do so. With serious efforts and resources going into understanding the brain—the real “final frontier”—we may eventually understand evil in all its forms, and how to prevent it. This progress, combined with prosperity’s mitigating effects on violence, means that progress is pointing to a decline in conflict of all sorts. The idealistic notion of entirely eliminating people’s desires to kill or inflict harm against their neighbors doesn’t seem so fanciful when cast in that light.
Greater prosperity, better disease treatment, and the decline of violence all add up to more people enjoying lives unprecedented in length—and they’re getting longer all the time. The natural fear that follows is that this is ultimately contributing to overpopulation and that a shortage of resources, particularly food, is therefore inevitable. But that’s not the case. As we’ve seen, one of the other major effects of income growth is a corresponding decline in the number of children born. That rate is falling dramatically and considerably faster than the death rate around the world, which is why the population will plateau if not dip within this century.
Technological advancement in food production shows no sign of abating. In fact, it may reach unprecedented growth as genetically modified organisms gain more acceptance and new characteristics. Bigger fish, insect-resistant crops, and plants needing little water are all near-term technologies currently in development. Regulators, the public, and even individuals who previously criticized them, meanwhile, are becoming less skeptical. Beyond genetic engineering, breakthroughs in creating synthetic meat have allowed scientists to grow beef and the like in labs from animal embryos. In 2013, a synthetic hamburger—bankrolled by Google co-founder Sergey Brin—received positive reviews from taste testers, paving the way for feeding the newly emergent middle classes of India, China, and other rapidly developing nations. Such breakthroughs hold the promise of feeding billions of people cheaply, while at the same time addressing animal rights concerns. Imagine: Hindus eating burgers! For decades the media has perpetuated the Malthusian nightmare of widespread food shortages caused by overpopulation, but the reality is quite the opposite when demographic trends combine with ongoing technological advances. With a plateauing population, it’s entirely possible the world will experience an overabundance of food this century. A hundred years from now, it may be cheap and plentiful.
Of course, not all the large-scale effects of advancing technology have been good. The worst of it has been the toll on the environment. As people move out of poverty, they acquire cars, air conditioners, and flat-screen televisions, all of which use energy and create waste. The threat of ruining the planet through prosperity is real and being exacerbated by that same emergent middle class, which means we must take steps to avoid this fate before it’s too late.
Fortunately, many efforts are under way to mitigate the paradoxical effects of wealth, some more complex than others. My favorite is a low-tech solution for stopping hurricanes thought up by former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold and explained in Steven Levitt’s SuperFreakonomics. The idea is to float large rings in the ocean with equally giant plastic cylinders attached to their undersides. The cylinders would force colder water to the surface to alleviate the warm-water conditions that cause hurricanes to form. It’s a goofy concept that may never come to pass, but it’s just one example of the sort of ingenuity—and creative entrepreneurialism—at work around the world. Solutions to prosperity-induced environmental damage will emerge . . . hopefully before giant disasters like the Boxing Day tsunami and Hurricane Katrina hit again.
AGREE TO DISAGREE
On a more personal level, technology’s effects are more mixed. As we’ve seen over the second half of this book, technology is enabling and accelerating individualism on every level: the jobs and companies we create and where we work, the art and entertainment we create and consume, the relationships we have with other people and organizations. Whether it’s the photos, books, blogs, and music we make and share or the new business ventures we attempt, technology is allowing us to be more creative. It’s also lessening our dependence on social institutions such as marriage and religion by allowing us to seek out and form our own social circles more tailored to our own interests. Social relationships now are more likely to be grassroots than imposed from the top down by institutions.
In each case, the individual is being empowered to fulfill the upper echelon of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This is great because, with the basic requirements of life met, we can search out the deeper sources of happiness and satisfaction: who we are, what greater purpose we have, and how we achieve it. In many ways, technology is empowering people to discover their true identities and reasons for being, which means that real-world evolution is playing out very differently from how some dystopian science fiction predicted. Technology hasn’t absorbed us all into a hive mind, like the Borg on Star Trek. Quite the opposite, actually. It might be tough to swallow for the average person working a soul-crushing job in an office somewhere, but it’s not society lacking in this case; it’s that the individual hasn’t yet awakened to the possibilities that society is making available to him or her, either on a personal or career level.
The larger growth of expression and commerce says something fundamentally poignant about humans in general: We’re a creative bunch, with no apparent limits on that creativity. Just when we think we’ve run out of artistic or commercial ideas and the movie theaters are full of nothing but sequels, along comes Nirvana, Amazon.com, or Breaking Bad to change everything. New creation arises that takes what was done before and reconfigures it into something new and often better. In that sense, we’re more than capable of keeping up with exponentiality because of our unceasing ability to think combinatorily. The old cliché holds that nothing is certain but death and taxes—and maybe not much longer for the former—but we can add human combinatorial creativity to that list. It’s inevitable and will continue.
The growth of individualism will also continue and may increase dramatically. The next frontiers in technology—robotics, nanotech, neuroscience, and biotech—promise huge improvements in this area. Genome sequencing becomes significantly cheaper every year. Soon we’ll be able to map and read our entire genetic code through an app on our phone while nano-sensors inside our bodies report on troubles as they arise. As Eric Topol, the digital doctor we met in chapter three explained, this will lead to an explosion in personalized health care that eliminates much of the guesswork about our individual issues. Combine that with the brain map currently being researched and possibly even a personality map that follows, and, as per the directive of the Delphic Oracle, we will know ourselves completely, inside and out. That makes the strides in individualism we’ve made so far seem quaint.
The flip side of this coin, however, is insularity, a less desirable trait because of the strong evidence linking it to unhappiness. As we saw, fewer group and organizational bonds—such as fewer people getting married and joining community-minded institutions like churches—are leading to growing insularity, which can cause distrust among people. Greater individualism and insularity can also cause divisiveness to grow. That doesn’t necessarily mean violent war, but anyone who’s watched a heated discussion online transform into a vitriolic argument and then all-out flame war knows that the distinction might not be all that great. With individuals increasingly enabled to find their respective voices, there’s a greater potential for disagreement.
People are even questioning physical facts, as Suzanne LaBarre, online content director of Popular Science, lamented in 2013 when the magazine shut down reader comments on stories. “Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to ‘debate’ on television,” she wrote in an editorial explaining the publication’s decision.2 Some might consider that debate a good thing since communication and conversation often deepen our understanding of a topic, but I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when even basic facts fall victim to our divisiveness.
The preponderance of minority governments in many advanced nations both reflects this growing individualism and highlights the need to adjust to it. It’s easy, after all, to govern people with uniform views who agree with one another, but how will we do so when that’s no longer the case? Bhutan stands as an unfortunate example. Even a tiny country focused on universal happiness can’t please all of its people. In the face of this growing individualism, fundamental changes to governmental structures and even borders are inevitable. We could see the rise of micro-nations, consisting of small groups of people who agree with one another. Perhaps the long-held notion that democracy is the best form of government will face serious challenges. These are the questions we need to ask.
Fortunately, our disagreements don’t look like they’ll manifest themselves violently, online comments notwithstanding. Exceptions will occur, of course, but for the most part people have subconsciously—maybe even consciously—realized that they’re living the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the lines between self-enrichment and universal harmony have blurred. That brings us to the heart of what I think Humans 3.0 really are.
CAVE-MOUNTED TELEVISION
At first glance, the directionality of the world and its people seems to be diverging. Things are getting better in the big picture, but that isn’t necessarily the case when we drill further down. Technology is bringing us to a certain level of comfort, but then it stalls out, if it doesn’t wind up doing more harm than good in the end. The question, then, is clear: What good is further progress if the links between us are fraying and we’re not getting any happier?
Ultimately, it’s not that simple. What we’re experiencing is a technologically driven social dialectic. The first stage means the splitting of human development into two paradoxically divergent paths—globalized harmony versus rampant individualism—but such dialectics inevitably converge. Georg Hegel, drawing on his forerunner Immanuel Kant, postulated that history was moving in such a dialectical pattern. In perhaps his most well-known example, he suggested that people naturally divide into two classes: masters and slaves. But with masters inevitably becoming dependent on the slaves, the slaves eventually gain their freedom.
Karl Marx took the idea further with his belief that human evolution represented the dialectical story of class struggle. He thought human history would have five epochs, starting with the sort of primitive communism that our caveman friend Blarg lived, in which no one owned anything and only the common good mattered. From there, mankind evolved into the master-slave relationship common in much of the ancient world, followed by the lord-and-serf dichotomy of feudalism in the Middle Ages. Capitalism followed, where property owners or the bourgeois lorded over workers or proletariats and formed the system through which our modern era operates. In each previous case, the oppressed class rose up to replace the ruling class, resulting in a short-term Hegelian synthesis. But that synthesis ultimately ushered in a new divergent dialectic. The final synthesis, Marx theorized, was a return to Blarg-ian communism. With people tired of oppressing their neighbors for millennia, a new era of collegiality—where again, only communal harmony mattered—would arise.
Where Marx and his many adherents, from Vladimir Lenin to Mao Tse-tung, got it horribly wrong was believing that they could force this ultimate synthesis, that political parties or even charismatic individuals could somehow manufacture this ideal communism and foist it upon the masses. As the fall of this imposed communism in the twentieth century proved—dramatically in the Soviet Union and more subtly in China—it just isn’t possible. People aren’t willing to give up everything they have because some ideology tells them to do so, especially when the systems ended up as oppressive and repressive corruptions of the ideal that inspired them in the first place. Worse still, communism wasn’t possible unless everyone went along for the ride. People living behind the Iron Curtain weren’t willing to accept less freedom or material wealth when they easily could see how much of both the people on the other side had.
But in the long term, Marx wasn’t entirely wrong. Communism may be humanity’s ultimate dialectical synthesis. It’s just happening naturally and taking a different form than he or his followers anticipated. The key to it all is the complexity of human understanding.
Consider that flat-panel TVs and genetic engineering were inconceivable to Blarg; there were too many intermediary steps to take before he could even imagine them. He needed to learn how to walk before he could dream of running. Yet, with every discovery, invention, and innovation since then, the human brain has become more capable of conceiving this figurative “running” —up to a point, of course. Going back to the future prediction discussed in chapter one, it may not be difficult at all to envision where the world is going over the next few decades. It’s only after the Singularity, which observers believe will happen in the middle of this century, that the future gets hazy. It’s difficult to imagine what might happen after computers surpass our collective intelligence, which explains why so many people are afraid of this inevitability.
Still, thoughts that were overly complex just years ago—even to the average person—are becoming simpler and clearer by the day, which proves that it isn’t just technology that is advancing exponentially. So too is our ability to think in complex terms . . . reality television and Justin Bieber notwithstanding. This ability to think bigger and more deeply is manifesting itself both externally, as we expand our thoughts into the outer universe, and internally. Aside from research taking place in biotechnology, genetics, and neuroscience, we’re discovering new depths to our selves and our creativity. Thus technological advance is furthering what we understand and know about ourselves.
These advances give us a different way of looking at the Prisoner’s Dilemma and game theory in general, both of which can test the ability to think in simple or complex terms. Choosing the path of self-enrichment at the expense of others has always been the simplistic course of action; gaining less without costing someone else in the process has been the more complicated option, requiring the chess-like ability to think several moves ahead. The history of mankind has been a tale of bouncing between these two extremes, but we’re becoming more capable of understanding the second path as our thinking gets more complex. We are starting to realize that we benefit individually when everyone gains.
That’s a hard pill to swallow given the constant, daily reminders we have of basic human greed. If a politician isn’t embezzling public funds, a big company is lobbying to crush environmental regulations or prohibit municipalities from building their own telecommunications networks. Greed, in all its sad and sickening incarnations, affects everyone.
Yet the scientific evidence linking greed to a biological imperative is scant, which means it’s largely a socialized condition. In other words, we aren’t born with greed, we learn it. In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, journalist Robert Wright argues that history has been the story of people increasingly learning that selfless cooperation is the best way to get what they selfishly want. From North American natives to their counterparts on the other side of the world in the “inscrutable Orient,” people historically have shown a tendency to help one another with the knowledge—either conscious or subconscious—that such altruism will benefit themselves either directly or indirectly. It may have taken the form of one tribe giving surplus supplies to another or one country giving economic aid to another, but there’s a deep, fundamental understanding of the benefits of this sort of sharing. Globalization has “been in the cards not just since the invention of the telegraph or the steamship, or even the written word or the wheel, but since the invention of life,” says Wright.3 “All along, the relentless logic of non-zero-sumness has been pointing toward this age in which relations among nations are growing more non-zero-sum year by year.”
The opposite of greed, altruism, may in fact be a biological imperative not just for humans, but for all organisms. Consider the man who volunteered for watch duty to keep his Medieval village safe from pillaging invaders. This brave and selfless sentry stood a higher chance of dying than those he was guarding, so wouldn’t natural selection weed out such foolhardy individuals? Wouldn’t the selfish souls who hid in their well-appointed fortifications have won out, genetically speaking? Evolutionary psychology tells us otherwise, as we’ll see in a moment. Countless other examples of selflessness permeate daily life, despite the well-publicized stories of shameless greed and corruption.
The concept is known as kin selection, sometimes referred to as Hamilton’s Rule for W. D. Hamilton, the evolutionary biologist who popularized it in the sixties. The mathematical explanation is complicated, but he theorized that humans perform altruistic acts if they can identify a kinship with their beneficiary. In other words, the presence of the trait that prompted the courageous sentry to risk his life enabled more people in his overall kin group to survive more often and reproduce. Under that definition, we naturally are more altruistic with close friends and family. Perhaps that’s why we give them gifts on birthdays or at Christmas. It also explains why certain monkeys and shrimp engage in allomothering, caring for the offspring of their relatives. Researchers proved Hamilton’s Rule in 2010 when they found that red squirrels in the Yukon often adopted the orphaned offspring of their relatives, but not those of nonrelatives. “By focusing on adoption in an asocial species, our study provides a clear test of Hamilton’s Rule that explains the persistence of occasional altruism in a natural mammal population,” the researchers wrote.4
Even non-organics impulsively come to understand the benefits of cooperation and altruism. Swiss researchers conducted an experiment in biological evolution in 2011 that found swarms of tiny robots naturally gravitated toward this kind of behavior. The sugar-cube-sized robots began as directionless entities wandering aimlessly into walls. They eventually evolved into foragers that collected little tokens representing food, which the scientists expected. What surprised them, however, is that the machines continued to evolve to the point where they helped one another. One experiment featured large tokens that only several robots together could push, and, without that specific programming, the machines naturally cooperated to do just that.5 The scientists concluded that altruism “should only evolve among related individuals, and this is also what has been found in a wide range of organisms, ranging from bacteria to social insects and social vertebrates.”
We can extrapolate such findings, along with Hamilton’s Rule, into the larger context of the world’s evolution. All organisms have a natural tendency to cooperate with one another both because of inherent genetic links and because of logical self-interest. That tendency is often subsumed by the equally natural drive to compete when resources are scarce, but therein lies the answer. As resources become more plentiful, as the world marches onward to prosperity, the urge to compete lessens. Adding to that are the rapidly growing connections, inter-relatedness and inter-dependency that globalization causes. As one country comes to know and depend more on another, the motivations for altruism between the two inevitably increase.
This is also the case when it comes to people. If we’re more motivated to give of ourselves to people close to us, this circle of closeness is going to expand as globalization continues. A hundred years ago, people in the West didn’t have many ways in which to feel kinship with those in Africa or the Middle East. Now, thanks in large part to technology, increasingly they do. The same is inevitable in the reverse, as those parts of the world become better connected. Even the superficial connections brought about by social media help in this regard, since we’re more likely to help out that “friend” we barely know on Facebook than we are a total stranger. In this sense, the social network’s claims of shrinking degrees of separation carry some valid weight.
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND
The diverging dialectic, then—globalized harmony versus rampant individualism—is destined for a new kind of synthesis. As in the Prisoner’s Dilemma and unlike in Marx’s models, it’s a situation where both directions can win and merge, rather than one subsuming the other. In a simpler time, that may have been the necessary outcome, but with humanity’s understanding of itself becoming more complex, it’s possible to have both.
Let’s go back to the example of the smartphone from the first chapter. That simple device derives from thousands of different individual technologies. Countless inventors and companies are competing to make the best cameras, GPS chips, or radio antennae that go into such devices. It’s the same with humanity. Many individuals and countries are competing against one another in various aspects of life and economy. Yet together, those competing components form something greater than their parts.
That has always been the case, but we’re only just now becoming aware of it thanks to an increasing ability to think in such increasingly complex terms. Back in chapter two, we saw a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report on how the world’s emerging economies aren’t necessarily bad news for established nations since everyone likely will benefit. Just as countries can specialize in their areas of competitive advantage yet still prosper all together because of it, so too can people. Harmony and individualism aren’t engaged in a zero-sum game but a mutually beneficial evolution.
When I started working on this book, my hypothesis was that Humans 3.0 were the embodiment of the Anthropocene era, where mankind had evolved from being subjugated by nature to mastering it. Over the past few years of delving into this evolution, however, my views have evolved. Throughout history, we’ve bounced between competition and cooperation, often not aware that we were doing so. Humans 3.0, the updated software to the hardware supplied by nature, isn’t just the synthesis of that dialectic; it also represents the emergence of our consciousness of it. We’re not just becoming a different kind of people; we’re becoming aware of the fact that we’re becoming a different kind of people. Humans 3.0 therefore aren’t just group harmony or competitive individualism. We’re both, a combination of the two, an unprecedented step in history. It’s been a slow process so far to get here, but, just like the technology behind it, it’s speeding up.
Becoming more optimistic about the future and technology’s effects on humanity than when I started this book surprised me. Initially I believed that technology was a benevolent force overall because its positive effects outweighed its negative effects, but that’s a simplistic outlook. It’s not just about whether the possibilities created by smartphones are more important or widespread than some of the addictive behaviors they’ve propagated; it’s about gaining a deeper insight into what technology says about us and what it enables on a more soulful level. My own consideration of this book’s central thesis has become more complex.
As I get older, I’m getting younger in a sense. I play more video games now than I ever did as a child and I have more Legos now than I ever did too. I recently took up volleyball again, and just a few years ago I developed a taste for curry, a spice I couldn’t tolerate when I was younger. I also started listening to Rush, the legendary Canadian rock trio. As a teenager, I’m not sure which I hated more—the spice, or the band. Now, Rush is the most sublime music I can contemplate.
I like to think my horizons are expanding and I’m devoting more time to leisurely—some would say childish—pursuits because I can. At the risk of hyperbolizing, much of that is because technology has made me prosperous. I make my living writing about it. I’m far from rich, but it enables my career and lifestyle. I can explore and discover more of Maslow’s hierarchy as it pertains to my own situation. However, like most self-employed people who spend inordinate amounts of time working at home, alone, I’m more cognizant of the disconnective side effects than most—particularly if the growing number of conversations I’m having with my cats offers any indication. Fortunately, I’m aware that my forced absence from a social workplace is having adverse effects on my sanity, which is perhaps why I’ve started purposely partaking in group activities like sports. I just don’t appreciate technology’s positive effects on the world and humanity, I’m grateful for what it’s done for me personally, and cognizant of where it may be harmful.
As for Humans 4.0, I can’t wait to transfer my essence into a machine and fly across the galaxy. But we won’t have to cross that bridge—or write that book—for at least another few decades.