The technological society doesn't "need" most of us - but who defines "need"?

 

Yuval Noah Harari is one of the policy gurus assisting the World Economic Forum.  He has a distinctly jaundiced view of the future of humanity, as illustrated by these quotations:

"AI is not even near its full potential; it’s just in its infancy. We haven’t seen anything yet. So, every 10 years, you are likely to lose your job or your job is going to be completely transformed by the new wave of the latest machine learning wizardry. And if you want to stay in the game, you will have to basically reinvent yourself — and not just once, but repeatedly."

"What you try to do a thousand years ago with the priest preaching from the pulpit you will be able to do in a far more invasive way in 10 or 15 years with all kinds of brain-computer interfaces and direct biological interventions."

"One of the dangers in the 21st century is that machine learning and artificial intelligence will make centralized systems much more efficient than distributed systems, and dictatorships might become more efficient than democracies."

It's no surprise, then, that in a recent TED podcast, Harari is not very optimistic about the future of most of the human population.  Breitbart provides this partial transcription.

"A lot of people sense that they are being left behind and left out of the story, even if their material conditions are still relatively good. In the 20th century, what was common to all the stories — the liberal, the fascist, the communist — is that the big heroes of the story were the common people, not necessarily all people, but if you lived, say, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, life was very grim, but when you looked at the propaganda posters on the walls that depicted the glorious future, you were there. You looked at the posters which showed steel workers and farmers in heroic poses, and it was obvious that this is the future.

"Now, when people look at the posters on the walls, or listen to TED talks, they hear a lot of these these big ideas and big words about machine learning and genetic engineering and blockchain and globalization, and they are not there. They are no longer part of the story of the future, and I think that — again, this is a hypothesis — if I try to understand and to connect to the deep resentment of people, in many places around the world, part of what might be going there is people realize — and they’re correct in thinking that — that, ‘The future doesn’t need me. You have all these smart people in California and in New York and in Beijing, and they are planning this amazing future with artificial intelligence and bio-engineering and in global connectivity and whatnot, and they don’t need me. Maybe if they are nice, they will throw some crumbs my way like universal basic income,’ but it’s much worse psychologically to feel that you are useless than to feel that you are exploited.

"Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population, because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence [and] bioengineering, Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people."

That's precisely the problem with many modern governments, and with organizations such as the W.E.F.  It's easier and more convenient for them to manage a technological society in which the people have little or no say.  Technology doesn't vote;  it doesn't get hungry;  it doesn't ask whether something is right or wrong;  it has no emotions.  It's told what to do, and it does it without argument or demur.  It's a heck of a lot easier managing a society in which everything important functions like that, than it is a human society where people question, debate, object, discuss, and want changes.

Look at the laws being passed all over the world to control carbon output, combat climate change, and implement "green" policies and philosophies.  They're being imposed on people willy-nilly, by technocrats who insist that they have The Truth and they're going to implement it, whether the people like it or not.  Canadian truckers, Dutch farmers, American democracy, Covid everybody . . . they're all inconveniences to be brushed aside on the road to the Great Technological Future, where everything will be Organized and Arranged as the powers that be want it, and (they presume) we'll put up and shut up.

"You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy."  That's not a pious wish, or a pipe-dream.  That's an order, comrade!

Peter