AI's dystopian future

Silicon States: The Power and Politics of Big Tech

Lucie Greene
HarperCollins, 288 pages, Rs 699
 
The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

Amy Webb
Publicaffairs, 320 pages, Rs 599

Both these books have one mission: They are cautionary tales. They endeavour to caution a thinking person about the dangers that lie ahead as the Information Age dawns. And it’s important to note that neither of them is a left-leaning, anti-capitalist missionary. Lucie Greene works for the international advertising agency J Walter Thompson and Amy Webb teaches at New York University’s Stern School of Business. So, in a sense these are cautionary tales from insiders. 

Both paint a dystopian future in which elected governments have slipped into the background and the world is ruled by what one calls “Big Tech” and the other calls “Tech Titans”. Greene’s Big Tech is made up of Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google and Amy Webb’s Tech Titans have these four plus the Chinese web players, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and Microsoft and IBM.

A reader would be well justified in raising an eyebrow and wondering what possible harm could these entities do other than making us all spend too much time away from our near and dear ones and sit gazing at laptops and mobile phones, or waste time gossiping with online friends or, at worst, tempt us to buy things online that we really don’t need to live a normal life.

Both spend considerable effort to point out that the people who run all these giant worldwide companies are drawn from a narrow segment of the populations of their own countries (America and China) and the world where their services dominate over all other players. First, their leaders and key employees are, according to both authors, overwhelmingly male. Women are rare to find among their leaders or among the venture capital and private equity firms who supply them with capital. These male stars are, in America, almost exclusively drawn from private schools (signaling wealthy parents) and Ivy League universities and are overwhelmingly white with almost no representation of Blacks or Hispanics. China’s dominant search engine Baidu is dominated by graduates of the same elite American universities; Carnegie Mellon, MIT and University of California Berkeley. Collectively, they form a tribe of their own; Amy Webb’s name for them is “AI Tribes”, where the AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. A common trait among these AI Tribes is that they have spent years immersed in mastering programming language skills plus disciplines like game theory and computational biology and neural nets. They have had no time or energy to study, for example, the role of Muslim women in literature, or the history of colonialism and other such topics that deal with learning about the human condition.

A critical point that both the author make is that this narrow world from which the leaders of these giant companies and their key employees come from and live in creates in inbuilt bias into the algorithms they design: They assume that the users of their services are all like them.

Both authors point to the heavy hand of the governments in the creation and support of these tech giants. Amazon has a $10 billion contract with the Pentagon and Google has helped the US Department of Defense analyse Drone footage. They say that NASA contracts are increasingly being given to Silicon Valley companies, be it to Musk to build space ships or to startups devoted to predictive policing techniques. The links between the Chinese tech giants and the Chinese state are not publicly advertised but is believed to be as close. In normal times, such relationships would have been laughed off (or condemned) as crony capitalism, but both the authors express concern because companies involved in such projects have to tread “a tricky path between national security and full transparency”. 

Both authors warn that the cultural influence that these prestigious tech giants have today far outranks governments or academia or even Hollywood, so what they say tends to be given greater credence than these hitherto prestigious groups.

And both echo an even more serious concern that a very small group of tech giants end up making deciding what news you get to read, what and who you converse with…in other words this small group will make decisions for the rest of us.

The authors believe (one says so directly and the other implies) that the people in power today, be they politicians or civil servants or intellectuals, are completely “unaware of technology and have no literacy around it at all.” Both the authors speak of the decision-making elites lack of preparedness to deal with AI and the speed with which it is developing and taking over many functions in human society. “What happens to society when we transfer power to a system built by a small group of people that is designed to make decisions for everyone? What happens when these decisions are biased toward market forces or an ambitious political party?”

Where can all this lead to? One of the authors conjectures that we will all live in a “post-border” world, i.e. a world order in which national borders do not exist anymore, national governments don’t matter as well, power is exercised only by the tech giants. Digital feudalism reigns supreme and human beings are like “the wooly livestock of a feudal demesne grazing under the watchful eyes of barons in their hilltop Cloud Castles”.

Both authors go well beyond such cautionary tales and have specific (though different) suggested plans of action to deal with this frightening future.