The Great Singularity: the long anticipated convergence of humanity and machine: perhaps an upload to eternal life, perhaps implants for enhanced biology, perhaps a fully engrossing artificial reality, perhaps an apocalypse of killer machines. The visions are many.
But almost no one envisioned Facebook among the horses of a Singularity Apocalypse—because any Devil worth its salt comes not with the face of a monster, but in the guise of everything we ever wanted.
And want it we did: every one of the social media platforms and titans of technology that now intermediate our lives has brought not only novel convenience, but soothing confirmation of the stories we tell about ourselves. The Cold War is over—like history itself—and democracy and capitalism have triumphed. We’ll wire and wifi the world, and autocracies will fall like dominoes from Eastern Europe to the Asian Pacific. We’ll forge new connections, and we’ll work and sell in new free markets, and we’ll share information to drive unimaginable vistas of progress.
It wasn’t all wrong. It’s hard to envision the same reach and resonance for marriage equality or Me Too or Black Lives Matter without social platforms, and it’s hard to work from home or flex our schedules or shop online without new technology in the mix.
But these technologies have cracked the foundations of civil society. In 2016 the Internet that we exported to the “liberated” East boomeranged from Kremlin troll farms to poison democracy.
And when information flow changes from trickle to tsunami, it doesn’t expand to a “market of ideas”—it contracts to top 5 search results. Worse: in pursuit of profit, we delegate “personalized” searches and feeds to algorithms and supercomputers, which stoke outrage and envy, because that’s what generates attention and sales from our hopelessly outmatched reptile brains. Our worldview becomes a “funhouse” mirror in a horror show run by commercial Matrix.
Meanwhile, the deregulation that promised to trickle wealth down has instead propelled it upwards on private rockets to the edge of space, taking with it stable employment, dignity of work, and our senses of purpose and place. And in the future, who will need markets to calibrate our needs and desires, when Big Data knows these parameters long before we ourselves do.
Democracy, reason, markets—the hallmarks of the West—all frayed, if not in tatters.
So what now?
I only wish I knew.
There are practical starting points. Perhaps blockchain can pry personal data from data brokers and return it to individuals. Perhaps platforms can be held accountable for content, when profit-based algorithms govern their “free speech.” Perhaps while disease, starvation, and lack of education still exist, inherited wealth can be limited so that it cannot wholly endow a lineage in perpetuity. Perhaps we could demonopolize, or limit roles such that no entity serves simultaneously as seller, platform for third-party sales, product manufacturer, competitor to sellers on its own platform, and information broker.
But these all feel like fingers in a dike. The Singularity, it’s said, arrives when technology transforms more realms more rapidly and radically than human minds can comprehend.
Perhaps the Singularity becomes a war front: which is more hackable, a raucous democracy or the data lockdown and Great Firewall of China? Perhaps we’re solving the Fermi Paradox: perhaps the Singularity and the Great Filter are one and the same.
I swear I’m not a Luddite. I hope we can redress the disequilibriums that threaten us. I’m pretty conventional, and I much prefer the vision that most of us Americans were raised on: that democracy, education, free speech, market economies, and equal opportunity will bring peace and prosperity to all who apply themselves with reasonable vigor and play by the rules.
But increasingly, I fear that hopeful prospects for the future may rest in the answer to the standard Tech Support Question One: Is it plugged in?