It has been a disaster for society.
16 June 2024 — The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. This is an extreme statement, but I’m in an extreme mood. This morning I plowed through buckets of science and technology clips to draft my weekly Sunday “From the Science Porthole” post, and all I saw were huge, underlying themes.
Yes, if I had the energy, I suppose I could fill a hundred pages trying to show it, but what would be the point? Whole books have been written already, and by now you either agree or you don’t. So I won’t try to prove anything in particular. Instead I will devote this essay to just a few general themes.
We’re living in a world of AI-powered news. No, I don’t mean large-language models are writing news reports. Just the opposite. In tech business news, at least, AI is the thread that runs through most everything nowadays. Apple’s AI presentation last Monday drove this week’s news cycle, while the other big story of the week, Tesla’s shareholder vote over Elon Musk’s pay, also had AI as a subtext – specifically his involvement in the company’s AI efforts. Despite the ubiquity of AI in news coverage, one point doesn’t get enough scrutiny: are the advances society is going to get from the new technology worth the cost?
By cost, I particularly mean the impact on the power supply. Data center demands for power threaten to suck the energy world dry, and as the energy analysts have detailed, it is setting back any serious efforts to shift away from carbon-emitting power sources and so improve the environment.
Note to readers: But I have given up on humans. As I have written, the planet will be fine. The people will be gone but the planet itself will outlast us. Ok, the sun will burn out in 2-3 billion years and Earth will become a cinder but that’s another issue for another day.
And to what end? Judging from how some tech companies are marketing their AI-powered services, it’s about helping consumers design a menu for a dinner party, plan a vacation or find a photo on their phone. The idea, of course, is to get consumers to spend money on new devices or AI subscriptions.
Or it’s about helping businesses improve employee productivity, including by cutting jobs (great 🤦♂️).
It’s only been about, always been about the 🤑 💶 💴 💷
Despite the attention these uses have drawn, the real promise of AI surely should be its potential to help solve existential challenges like deadly disease or dangerous drivers. Efforts to utilize the new tech in those directions are underway. Google, for instance, has its AlphaFold project aimed at accelerating cures for diseases. Elon Musk is making AI the centerpiece of his efforts at Tesla to develop fully autonomous driving. Microsoft, meanwhile, is using AI to try to improve cybersecurity, among other things – an effort that can’t come too soon. Data breaches at major companies have become so commonplace that they draw little attention despite the pain they inflict. No one knows the issue better than Microsoft, whose president, Brad Smith, was hauled over the coals about the company’s cybersecurity failings at a congressional hearing on Thursday.
But fighting deadly diseases, solving autonomous driving and even fixing cybersecurity are not cheap or quick undertakings. Yet big tech companies are spending tens of billions of dollars to develop AI.
So they need a return. How to do it?
Well, quick returns from the consumer and business services that are skewing investments, shortchanging more important needs. Big companies aren’t governed by nonprofits requiring them to put humanity’s interests first. So what will happen is AI’s biggest advances will end up as trivialities saving consumers a bit of time while they play with their phones.
Oh, and you say “but what about the innovations”? No, Big Tech wants to kill that, too.
Yes, I know the mantra. Silicon Valley prides itself on disruption: “Start-ups develop new technologies, upend existing markets and overtake incumbents. This cycle of creative destruction brought us the personal computer, the internet and the smartphone. It’s fabulous, yes?”
Except that in recent years, a handful of incumbent tech companies have sustained their dominance. Why? I believe they have learned how to co-opt potentially disruptive start-ups before they can become competitive threats.
Just do a quick scan at what’s happening to the leading companies in generative artificial intelligence:
• DeepMind, one of the first prominent A.I. start-ups, was acquired by Google. OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit and counterweight to Google’s dominance, has raised $13 billion from Microsoft. Anthropic, a start-up founded by OpenAI engineers who grew wary of Microsoft’s influence, has raised $4 billion from Amazon and $2 billion from Google.
• Last week, the news broke that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating Microsoft’s dealings with Inflection AI, a start-up founded by DeepMind engineers who used to work for Google. The government seems to be interested in whether Microsoft’s agreement to pay Inflection $650 million in a licensing deal – at the same time it was gutting the start-up by hiring away most of its engineering team – was an end run around antitrust laws.
Microsoft has defended its partnership with Inflection. But is the government right to be worried about these deals?
Of course it is. In the short run, partnerships between A.I. start-ups and Big Tech give the start-ups the enormous sums of cash and hard-to-source chips they want. But in the long run, it is competition – not consolidation – that delivers technological progress.
Today’s tech giants were once small start-ups themselves. They built businesses by figuring out how to commercialize new technologies – Apple’s personal computer, Microsoft’s operating system, Amazon’s online marketplace, Google’s search engine and Facebook’s social network. These new technologies didn’t so much compete with incumbents as route around them, offering new ways of doing things that upended the expectations of the market.
But that pattern of start-ups innovating, growing and leapfrogging incumbents has stopped. The tech giants are old. Each was founded more than 20 years ago – Apple and Microsoft in the 1970s, Amazon and Google in the 1990s, and Facebook in 2004. Why has no new competitor emerged to disrupt the market?
The answer isn’t that today’s tech giants are just better at innovating. The best available evidence – patent data – suggests that innovations are more likely to come from start-ups than established companies. And that’s also what economic theory would predict.
An incumbent with a large market share has less incentive to innovate because the new sales that an innovation would generate might cannibalize sales of its existing products. Talented engineers are less enthusiastic about stock in a large company that isn’t tied to the value of the project they are working on than stock in a start-up that might grow exponentially. And incumbent managers are rewarded for developing incremental improvements that satisfy their existing customers rather than disruptive innovations that might devalue the skills and relationships that give them power.
The tech giants have learned to stop the cycle of disruption. They invest in start-ups developing disruptive technologies, which gives them intelligence about competitive threats and the ability to influence the start-ups’ direction. Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI illustrates the problem. In November, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said that even if OpenAI disappeared suddenly, his customers would have no cause to worry, because “we have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything”.
Of course, incumbents have always stood to gain from choking off competition. Earlier tech companies like Intel and Cisco understood the value of acquiring start-ups with complementary products. What’s different today is that tech executives have learned that even start-ups outside their core markets can become dangerous competitive threats. And the sheer size of today’s tech giants gives them the cash to co-opt those threats. When Microsoft was on trial for antitrust violations in the late 1990s, it was valued in the tens of billions of dollars. Now it’s over $3 trillion.
In addition to their money, the tech giants can leverage access to their data and networks, rewarding start-ups that cooperate and punishing those that compete. Indeed, this is one of the government’s arguments in its new antitrust lawsuit against Apple. They can also use their connections in politics to encourage regulation that serves as a competitive moat.
Remember those Facebook ads advocating greater internet regulation? Facebook wasn’t buying them for charity. Facebook’s proposals “consist largely of implementing requirements for content moderation systems that Facebook has previously put in place” concluded the tech-investigations site The Markup in its long study of regulation and the tech industry. That would give it a first-mover advantage over the competition.
When these tactics fail to steer a start-up away from competing, the tech giants can simply buy it. Mark Zuckerberg made this clear in an email to a colleague before Facebook bought Instagram. If start-ups like Instagram “grow to a large scale,” he wrote, “they could be very disruptive to us”.
The tech giants also cultivate repeat-player relationships with venture capitalists. Start-ups are risky investments, so for a venture fund to succeed, at least one of its portfolio companies must generate exponential returns. As initial public offerings have declined, venture capitalists have increasingly turned to acquisitions to deliver those returns. And the venture capitalists know that only a small number of companies can acquire a start-up at that kind of price, so they stay friendly with Big Tech in hopes of steering their start-ups to deals with incumbents.
That’s why some prominent venture capitalists oppose stronger antitrust enforcement: it’s bad for business.
Co-option may seem harmless in the short run. Some partnerships between incumbents and start-ups are productive. And acquisitions give venture capitalists the returns they need to persuade their investors to commit more capital to the next wave of start-ups.
But co-option undermines technological progress. When one of the tech giants buys a start-up, it might shut down the start-up’s technology. Or it might divert the start-up’s people and assets to its own innovation needs. And even if it does neither, the structural obstacles that inhibit innovation at large incumbents could sap the creativity of the acquired start-up’s employees.
A.I. looks like a classic disruptive technology. But as the disruptive start-ups that pioneered it get tied up with Big Tech one by one, it may become nothing more than a way of automating search engines.
This is why I say the internet and its consequences have really been a disaster for the human race. The forces that lie behind the screens and wires and tubes of the web have become so entangled in our lives we are struggling like flies, but doomed to never break free.
We have allowed digital technology to feel “so revolutionary”. It has become our central nervous system, our new consciousness.
And as to AI, it has become the language of our culture. Perhaps the mathematical language is supposed to be comforting. This is how a rationalist, materialist culture works, and this is why it is, in the end, inadequate. There are whole dimensions of reality it will not allow itself to see. I find I can understand this story better by stepping outside the limiting prism of modern materialism and reverting to premodern (sometimes called “religious” or even “superstitious”) patterns of thinking. Once we do that – once we start to think like our ancestors – we begin to see what those dimensions may be, and why our ancestors told so many stories about them.
Story telling and narrative. That’s the ticket.
But, alas, we are down the digital rabbit hole. If you are being used, piece by piece and day by day, to construct your own replacement, then moderating this process is hardly going to be adequate. At some point, the lines you have drawn may be not just crossed, but rendered obsolete.
The bigger danger lies in how unfettered AI, and social media, in liberal societies has not only harmed childhood but has fostered a fatal fragmentation of society. I have always been intrigued how authoritarian regimes (most especially China) have no qualms in trying to protect its kids and culture with far stricter controls. And so liberal societies are being tested as never before by a social media ecosystem that pushes the cohesion of society to its outer limits.
I’m probably more concerned the damage smartphone-driven social media is doing to children, substituting virtual in-experience for physical interplay with unlike-minded others, depriving them of the skills to cope in a diverse society, stealing their attention and inducing a level of anxiety that has led to an alarming surge of mental illness, including depression, self-harm and suicide among teens. At this point, our liberal societies will never moderate that. They cannot.
Which is a shame. Well, a travesty. The dropping test scores in American schools as the TikTok obsession distracts kids from the concentration required for learning should be a worry. But American educators just do not care. So I imagine there will be geopolitical implications as China takes the challenge of social media far more seriously by enforcing age and time limits on the use of and access to smartphones. China is engaged in a battle with the United States for cultural and economic supremacy. Of that there is no doubt. Making American children less creative and less productive, depriving them of any spare attention to actually do anything, must make the Chinese government happy.
For America, that all leads to social disintegration, lack of solidarity and shared values, nihilist consumerism and individualism. Its the establishment of stable values that hold a society together. That is now all gone.
Technology has done so much to polarize societies in the West, allowing the public square to virtually disappeared. Until social media turbocharged fragmentation, there was a common space where competing ideas could be contested and settled in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole. The peer-to-peer connectivity of social media redirects the flows of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public. Without a trusted platform for common discourse, a society – well, a democratic society – can’t function.
In America, it is why even when truth-seeking mechanisms, including the courts, determined the last U.S. presidential election was not stolen, there’s no real way to spread that around to the large portion of society that believes that it was. The displacement of a public square by the viral spectacle of social media hits at the heart of the sober deliberative quality that protects democracy from the pure wash of public passions.
It all becomes performative and comes at a superfast pace. Just as television changed the way we are and made us into passive consumers, the central act in social media is posting, judging, criticizing and joining mobs. Donald Trump is the quintessential person who thrives in that environment. If not for Twitter, Trump never could have been president. So, when U.S. politics moved into the Roman Colosseum, I think the Founding Fathers would have said, “Let’s just give up. There’s no way we can build a democracy in this environment”.
AI has only compounded matters because with AI coming in, the problem of the loss of authority is magnified tenfold or even a hundredfold when anyone can create a video of anyone saying anything in that person’s voice. It’s going to be almost impossible to know what’s true. We’re in for a wild ride if we’re going to try to run a democratic republic with no real authority.
The U.S. has simply become ungovernable.
Technology is not neutral. It never was. Every device, every system wants something from you. It is the societal structure we allowed to develop.