Permanent crisis
Beatrice Erkers: There’s a trend right now in Silicon Valley of reaching for historical analogies, especially the Renaissance and the age of empires. Why those periods, and why now?
Ada Palmer: Right now, everybody feels like the world is in a state of crisis, and when the world is in a state of crisis, we tend to look at other time periods, both past ones and imagined future ones. You see enormous interest in both past and future during and after the French Revolution, when everyone is suddenly wearing clothing that’s a reproduction of what they imagine ancient Rome looked like. You see the same in the Renaissance, which is also a period of crisis, in the aftermath of the Black Death. History is a wide palette of alternatives that people reach for as a tool to help them understand our world in times of crisis.
The narrower answer is that the periods tech people keep invoking are the ones we associate with disruptive technology. When we talk about the Renaissance, we usually attribute its growth to technology. Tech people love to compare what’s happening now to a Gutenberg revolution. They love to think that a new technology they’re creating is going to accelerate historical change. Just as the Middle Ages were supposedly stagnant and then we suddenly had a period of acceleration toward modernity, they imagine we’re in a period of acceleration toward an exciting science fictional future that’s just around the corner. And the 19th century, another age of empire, is the other age we strongly associate with technology, via the Industrial Revolution.
There’s also the fiction problem. We have an awful lot of science fiction and fantasy about empire, because empire is easy to write about. The power is in the hands of a few characters. It’s very big, but it’s also very dramatic. It’s much harder to write fiction about a complicated plural republic with 52 interlaced political offices and everybody coming from complicated, slightly middle-class backgrounds. Just try writing fiction about the European Union and you will figure this out. So when people look back to history dominated by technology, and forward to futures dominated by technology, they’re seeing a lot of models of empire.
Ken Liu: I agree with all that, and I’d add that there’s an element of justification going on. When history is invoked, it’s often a way to explain and legitimate exercises of power. When Venice was trying to become a great city, it went to Alexandria to steal the body of St. Mark, so that it could prove itself a great Christian city. When people think they’re making great transformations, it can seem a little scary, and one way to legitimate it is to say: Historically, things happen because they’re inevitable. You can complain about what I’m doing all you want, but I’m just an agent of history.
Ada: We’re all aware of the type of history we call Great Man theory of history, which centers all agency in a couple of heroized figures, and which we’ve been trying to move away from. But one of the biggest types of history people turn to instead is Great Forces history, in which everything is giant gears grinding, and as soon as there’s a certain amount of torque in the system, the machine tips. That’s an important analytical tool. But just as much as Great Man history, Great Forces history erases agency for everyone, except perhaps economists, who get to believe they’re wielding the great forces.
Ken: That’s my favorite version: Economics as storytelling with numbers.
Ada: And if you don’t have a choice in the thing you’re doing, if it’s an inevitability, that’s one of many ways to accept it and justify it, both to others and to yourself.
Beatrice: How much of this is really about AI, though? That’s the revolution Silicon Valley believes it’s living through.
Ada: I think we’re wrong to separate generative AI and call it a completely new revolution. I often talk to Silicon Valley people who want to ask, are we so special that we’ve had six Gutenberg revolutions in a row, 10 years apart? And I say no, we’re having one Gutenberg revolution: the computer.
The personal computer, the internet, the cell phone, social media, and generative AI are all iterations of the same one fundamental technological change, the same way Gutenberg’s press kept having new impacts for decades through news networks, pamphlets, and eventually the newspaper. A little too much of our analysis of Silicon Valley right now is of the past five years instead of the past 20.
The guy behind the refrigerator
Beatrice: Ada, when I interviewed you before, you mentioned that Petrarch could imagine political change but not the end of disease. And what happened instead is that we ended a lot of diseases. What’s our version of that blind spot?
Ada: He thought it would be easier to defeat the Dire Horseman War than the Dire Horseman Plague. And we’ve found that in fact we’ve made more progress against the Dire Horseman Plague than against the Dire Horseman War. Some of the STEM problems have proved easier than some of the social science problems.
We’re not entirely missing this, but you constantly hear people encouraging STEM, STEM, STEM while diminishing the humanities and the social sciences as partners, whereas people who are really deep in it, who are scientists, understand there’s a symbiosis: We don’t make progress by funding just one of the three. There’s a perception that wealth flows toward technological innovation, rather than recognizing that wealth flows toward lots of kinds of innovation, only some of which is technological.
Ken: I don’t want to focus so much on Silicon Valley, though. The problems we have today don’t stem from a few people or a few inventions. They have their roots much further back, in what I’d call the gradual mechanization of humans.
Take AI displacing jobs. This is not something that happened in the last five years. We’ve been creating the conditions for it for a century or more. If you worked in customer service 40 years ago, you were a respected professional. Over time we turned those into scripted jobs. Once you’ve gotten things to that point, it’s not very difficult to throw the human out and put in a language model. It’s not the model that caused this. It’s that we’ve been making humans behave more and more like machines, up and down the chain: devaluing work, taking the meaning out of it, turning it into a mechanistic process where you’re a cog performing what your role demands. The pushback Silicon Valley is getting now is the tip of the iceberg. What’s really being expressed is a much deeper loss of meaning, dignity, and participation.
by Beatrice Erkers, with Ada Palmer and Ken Liu, Asterisk Magazine | Read more:
Image: 2001: A Space Odyssey
