Are Smartphones and A.I. Bringing Us Together or Tearing Us Apart?
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, the baby boom was well underway with birth rates climbing through the roof. Books were being written about the “population explosion.” China had to impose its one-child policy to keep its population from getting out of hand. We were beginning to worry that we would soon need to find another planet to accommodate all the children being born throughout the world, especially as death rates were falling. Darwin’s natural selection of humans to rule the earth was creating a gigantic population explosion that we were going to have to take seriously before it was too late.
Back in the day when the only phones available were dumbphones attached to a phone line, teenagers interacted a lot directly in person. Couples held hands instead of holding tightly onto smartphones. They developed emotional ties and learned to build commitments to one another. Around twenty years of age or so, they took a partner in marriage.
More recently, I have begun coming across more and more people in their forties and fifties who mention that they haven’t yet gotten around to looking for a partner in marriage. I could understand that some people might have been born to parents in bad marriages or had some other reason for deciding not to get married, but “not getting around to” seemed like a rather strange reason for not having gotten married early on.
What has happened to the birth rates in the United States and around the world? Almost all the birth rates had fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman in her child-bearing years. Only a few countries such as some in the middle of Africa are still above that replacement rate. In recent years the United States’ rate was at 1.62 and falling. Some countries such as South Korea with a rate of 0.75 have fallen well below one child per couple. The whole abortion controversary in the United States and the refusal of doctors to get involved with miscarriages in case they were judged to be abortions was putting women’s lives at risk and was clearly going to drive our birth rates down even more.
The world is facing a Darwinian natural selection paradox. The dominant species on earth is suddenly losing population. What happened to the survival of the fittest theory? Will humans go extinct? What is going on here? Should we leave a note for the last remaining human to remember to turn off the lights?
Are smartphones and artificial intelligence (A.I.) bringing us together or tearing us apart? Are we creating a new world of freedom and bounty for all or a world that benefits a small wealthy elite at the expense of everyone else? Are we making the best possible decisions together in democracy or would we be better off letting one dominant person or A.I. algorithm call all the shots?
In life we have to decide to commit to one another or just try to go it alone. We can work together with a commitment to one another in a “win-win” strategy or follow an “I-win-you-lose” approach to life. Marriage is clearly a commitment to a spouse and potentially to children as well.
But what about in employment? Back in the day, many people made a work-life commitment to a particular employer for their entire career of thirty or forty years. And our employer often provided us with a defined pension plan for our dedicated service of many, many years. But nowadays, jobs seem to last only two or three years. Our employer has changed the defined pension plan into a defined contribution plan. The idea that we were “all in this together” has changed to we are “all on our own.”
Commentators have expressed concern about artificial intelligence (A.I.) taking over as if it were a concern for the future. What most people don’t realize is that computer algorithms are already directing our behavior more than we may realize. A simple example is Google Maps where you can use your smartphone to tell you exactly how to drive to get to a pre-specified destination. The smartphone’s voice commands sound simple enough: “Stay in the left lane. Turn left at the next traffic light.” But we are blindly following the computer’s orders. It is just the beginning.
A standard Google search directs us to nearby stores to find a product we ask about. But an A.I. algorithm designed to think for itself might respond to our request to find a flexible, rubber garden hose by directing us to Home Depot, Lowes and a nearby neighbor’s back yard. Stealing a neighbor’s garden hose may not be what we had in mind. An A.I. algorithm does not automatically understand what is legal and ethical and what is not. We may understand that it is important to avoid driving through high crime neighborhoods, but the A.I. algorithm may not be programmed to take this into account. How do I tell Google Maps that I am an old retired person with lots of time who is more interested in the safest way to get there than the shortest or quickest way?
A lack of knowledge of the law may be just the tip of the iceberg for an A.I. algorithm. What about having empathy for another person? In humans the area of the brain that provides us with a sense of empathy is the anterior cingulate. Most humans have a pretty good sense of empathy, although you may occasionally come across someone who does not. For example, I ran into a guy from my neighborhood with a poor sense of empathy who I hadn’t seen for some time. When he saw me, he said: “Hi, Larry. I thought you were dead.” An A.I. algorithm would most likely also have a complete lack of empathy. The A.I.’s response to a screaming child might be to ask itself “What is the fastest way to turn off this noise?” rather than “How can I help this child?”.
An even more concerning use of A.I. is in social media where the algorithm is tasked with maximizing the user’s facetime on the platform. It sounds simple. But the A.I. algorithms have discovered that people pay more attention to things that sound threatening than things that are merely interesting. Just as a student can use A.I. to create a new paper out of “thin air” from a wide range of sources, A.I. algorithms not only present existing conspiracy theories but actually create their own composite conspiracy theories from data about people’s most prominent concerns. One report claims that such created conspiracy theories have been responsible for much of the killing of Rohingya people in Myanmar.
It is not that A.I. is inherently evil and wants to kill us, but the goals that we set for the algorithms could create situations where we end up killing one another. The world is currently on a knife edge between those people who want to help the dear neighbor and those who want to run the dear neighbor off the road. Are we playing us-versus-them or we-are-all-in-this-together? At the moment, the world appears focused on fighting over the pie rather than trying to grow the pie for the benefit of everyone.
On your smartphone do you only see posts by people who agree with you, or do you see alternative viewpoints? We all have a limited amount of mental energy and may not want to waste it on some long-winded discussion. Are you interested in knowing the arguments of the other side in a debate or do you want to conserve your mental energy and have a strong confirmation bias in wanting to block out opposing facts and arguments? Do you like to think new and different thoughts, or do you dislike cognitive dissonance and reject alternative points of view out-of-hand?
A.I. presents us with two distinct futures: (1) where private enterprise in a free market trains A.I. to maximize profits for Facebook, Google, Amazon and other dominant companies, or (2) where government agencies tasked with keeping a close eye on A.I. development ensure that it achieves the greatest good for the greatest number.
In the distant past, the king, the pharaoh, the emperor or the czar controlled everything. You had to stay in your place in the established order or face execution. Slaves who were unable or unwilling to do the work were killed. From an economic efficiency point of view such a slave was consuming valuable resources (food, clothing, etc.) and not producing enough to warrant continued existence.
This old top-down system was called feudalism. The former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Yaroufakis, calls our emerging A.I. dominated society “Technofeutalism” in his recent book by the same name. The dominance of private technology firms with their smartphone and A.I. driven knowledge and control over our individual behavior may inevitably lead to the end of the rein of humans on this earth. After all, we are inherently inefficient creatures with very limited mental energy and rather restricted intelligence compared to Deep Mind with its ever more powerful A.I. data analysis centers.
What I have discovered in my marriage and in democracies throughout the world is that joint decision making can work much better than one person deciding everything. As Winston Churchill was reported to have said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Thinking together may not be easy, but it is much better than simply relying on a dominant leader with limited knowledge and limited mental energy.
We all have limited brain capacity and a limited amount of mental energy. The success of Homo Sapiens as opposed to Neanderthals and six or seven other branches of the human family is based on our empathy and sense of trust and moral obligation that enables use to benefit from the separation and division of labor. If we only cared about ourselves and were willing to take advantage of others whenever and wherever possible, we would never have gotten this far. Our commitment to fairness is the fundamental key to our success.
In Econ-101: Principles of Economics we are typically told that each person maximizes their own “utility” by rationally choosing among all the possible choices. Dan Ariely’s book “Predictably Irrational” captures the reality of people not behaving in the manner predicted by Econ-101. Even the conservative, former Federal Reserve chair, Alan Greenspan, realized this anomaly in 1996 when he declared that the stock market was exhibiting “irrational exuberance” in defiance of the prevailing conservative “Efficient Market Hypothesis.” Economists have finally come to realize human irrationality in the creation of a relatively new field called “Behavioral Economics.” Traditional economic theory is so far from reality that it is not a distant cousin but a creature from a different universe. The new age of instant communication with smartphones and artificial intelligence is totally unrelated to free enterprise in a free market working to maximize profits or shareholder value.
Working together in discussion and debate and welcoming alternative points of view allow us to make much better decisions than we would make if we had to figure everything out on our own.
We are running out of time. As with climate change, we have a very limited amount of time to face up to the danger before us. We must either confront the danger that these new technologies pose to our well-being and existence or surrender to the “inevitable” disaster that awaits us. Now is the time to confront this problem by working together to figure out how to deal with this.
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