From killing mosquitoes to killing thoughts

The sense of disorientation and impending doom is exacerbated by the
accelerating pace of technological disruption. The liberal political system has
been shaped during the industrial era to manage a world of steam engines, oil
refineries and television sets. It finds it difficult to deal with the ongoing
revolutions in information technology and biotechnology.
Both politicians and voters are barely able to comprehend the new
technologies, let alone regulate their explosive potential. Since the 1990s the
Internet has changed the world probably more than any other factor, yet the
Internet revolution was directed by engineers more than by political parties.
Did you ever vote about the Internet? The democratic system is still
struggling to understand what hit it, and is hardly equipped to deal with the
next shocks, such as the rise of AI and the blockchain revolution.


Already today, computers have made the financial system so complicated
that few humans can understand it. As AI improves, we might soon reach a
point when no human can make sense of finance any more. What will that do
to the political process? Can you imagine a government that waits humbly for
an algorithm to approve its budget or its new tax reform? Meanwhile peer-topeer
blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin might completely
revamp the monetary system, so that radical tax reforms will be inevitable.
For example, it might become impossible or irrelevant to tax dollars, because
most transactions will not involve a clear-cut exchange of national currency,
or any currency at all. Governments might therefore need to invent entirely
new taxes – perhaps a tax on information (which will be both the most
important asset in the economy, and the only thing exchanged in numerous
transactions). Will the political system manage to deal with the crisis before it
runs out of money?

Even more importantly, the twin revolutions in infotech and biotech could
restructure not just economies and societies but our very bodies and minds. In
the past, we humans have learned to control the world outside us, but we had
very little control over the world inside us. We knew how to build a dam and
stop a river from flowing, but we did not know how to stop the body from
ageing. We knew how to design an irrigation system, but we had no idea how
to design a brain. If mosquitoes buzzed in our ears and disturbed our sleep,
we knew how to kill the mosquitoes; but if a thought buzzed in our mind and
kept us awake at night, most of us did not know how to kill the thought.

The revolutions in biotech and infotech will give us control of the world
inside us, and will enable us to engineer and manufacture life. We will learn
how to design brains, extend lives, and kill thoughts at our discretion. Nobody
knows what the consequences will be. Humans were always far better at
inventing tools than using them wisely. It is easier to manipulate a river by
building a dam across it than it is to predict all the complex consequences this
will have for the wider ecological system. Similarly, it will be easier to
redirect the flow of our minds than to divine what it will do to our personal
psychology or to our social systems.

In the past, we have gained the power to manipulate the world around us
and to reshape the entire planet, but because we didn’t understand the
complexity of the global ecology, the changes we made inadvertently
disrupted the entire ecological system and now we face an ecological
collapse. In the coming century biotech and infotech will give us the power to
manipulate the world inside us and reshape ourselves, but because we don’t
understand the complexity of our own minds, the changes we will make might
upset our mental system to such an extent that it too might break down.

The revolutions in biotech and infotech are made by engineers,
entrepreneurs and scientists who are hardly aware of the political implications
of their decisions, and who certainly don’t represent anyone. Can parliaments
and parties take matters into their own hands? At present, it does not seem so.
Technological disruption is not even a leading item on the political agenda.
Thus during the 2016 US presidential race, the main reference to disruptive
technology concerned Hillary Clinton’s email debacle,3 and despite all the talk
about job losses, neither candidate addressed the potential impact of
automation. Donald Trump warned voters that the Mexicans and Chinese will
take their jobs, and that they should therefore build a wall on the Mexican
border.4 He never warned voters that the algorithms will take their jobs, nor
did he suggest building a firewall on the border with California.

This might be one of the reasons (though not the only one) why even voters
in the heartlands of the liberal West are losing faith in the liberal story and in
the democratic process. Ordinary people may not understand artificial
intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing
them by. In 1938 the condition of the common person in the USSR, Germany
or the USA may have been grim, but he was constantly told that he was the
most important thing in the world, and that he was the future (provided, of
course, that he was an ‘ordinary person’ rather than a Jew or an African). He
looked at the propaganda posters – which typically depicted coal miners,
steelworkers and housewives in heroic poses – and saw himself there: ‘I am in
that poster! I am the hero of the future!

In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of
mysterious words are bandied around excitedly in TED talks, government
think tanks and hi-tech conferences – globalisation, blockchain, genetic
engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning – and common people
may well suspect that none of these words are about them. The liberal story
was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of
cyborgs and networked algorithms?

In the twentieth century, the masses revolted against exploitation, and
sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now
the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining
political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Trump might thus
demonstrate an opposite trajectory to that of traditional socialist revolutions.
The Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were
vital for the economy, but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and
Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power, but
who feared that they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the twentyfirst
century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that
exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any
more.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against
irrelevance than against exploitation.