BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
By Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson
Published by Basic Books, 2023 rrp £25
REVIEW BY PATRICK NOTHER
On 19 May, on the doorstep of the premises of Alphabet / Google’s Deep Mind laboratories in King’s Cross, London, under a banner demanding ‘Pause AI’, a small demo co-ordinated with similar actions in San Francisco and Brussels protested the unregulated advance of research into Artificial Intelligence.
These were the first such IRL (‘in real life’) demonstrations of scepticism towards the rapidly developing technology – more recently 350-plus industry leaders published an open letter warning AI could lead to human extinction, presenting a danger on the same level as “pandemics and nuclear war”. While a month earlier, an open letter published online by the Future of Life Institute and now endorsed by more than 30,000 tech wizards (including Elon Musk and Steve Woziak) and their apprentices called for a six-month moratorium on all such research.
This letter claims “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening…”
EXISTENTIAL IMPORTANCE FOR ALL OUR FUTURES
While calling for “robust AI governance systems” to oversee the industry, the tech biz experts highlight safety and technical issues – “AI research and development should be refocused on making today’s powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal” – i.e. avoiding familiar Science Fiction scenarios around such tropes as ‘the Rise of the Machines’, ‘Terminator Assassins’ and ‘a Rogue, but impeccably logical Hal 9000’.
But while such concerns might have existential importance for all our futures, further dangers are emphasised in the volume under review here, and ones that go beyond AI to involve a whole range of technologies which will totally transform the world over the next few years and decades. These include neuro-technologies, quantum data processing, the internet of things, biotech, gene-splicing, extended realities, new energy distributions etc. etc.
The authors have produced a detailed review of how over the previous millennium the benefits of technological progress have been captured by ruling elites, at the expense of wider populations whose living conditions might meanwhile have actually declined. The everyday but marginal improvements to agriculture that had fed the growing populations of ancient empires accelerated so greatly during the Middle Ages (with, in particular, technologies for ploughing the land and selecting and milling grains) that society might have advanced to a proto-modernity at a much earlier date. However, a brutal aristocracy allied to a pious and universal church monopolised this wealth to construct numerous castles, monasteries and cathedrals, which for all the latter’s beauty left a peasantry so ill-nourished and with such damaged natural immunity that the C14th Black Death killed possibly 40 million, or between 30% and 60% of the total European population.
TECHNOLOGY MIGHT WELL BE OUTRUNNING US
Similarly, once quotidian improvement had become a more general scientific progress under the rubric of the Enlightenment, for more than a century an ever expanding provision of goods and services resulted in enough wealth to construct a profusion of palaces and stately homes furnished with globally-sourced treasures (cathedrals to an elite prototype consumerism), while a newly forged proletariat laboured in dark, satanic mills.
In the former case it took radical theological reform and religious wars to change the paradigm… in the latter, even more comprehensive political and social reform, autonomous organisation and the backup of the threat of, and actual revolutions. But technological advance is nowadays so ubiquitous and multi-faceted, and the methods to monitor and control it become so complex, that ways of dealing with the threats can seem to become remoter by the day. Indeed, overall, technology might well be outrunning us.
An extremely well-researched and very readable work, Johnson and Acemoglu’s message is that technology can once more be tamed, and its gains shared more equitably. They propose a number of strategies to ‘redirect’ innovation by deploying a well-equipped toolbox of policy resources to develop particular industries towards more benign ends. Utilising higher taxes on capital and wealth to fund training and education, strengthening anti-Trust laws and corporate accountability, protecting privacy and personal data ownership, and more generally committing to democratic rights, values and principles are just some of a host of government-led interventions they propose.
EGOTISTICAL AND ULTIMATELY HUBRISTIC AGENDAS
But they in no way go far enough. For it is the wealth and power of a handful of billionaire tech bros, who happened to be at the right place at the right time and cashed in accordingly, that chiefly governs the direction today’s technologies develop; along with their continuing ability to leverage speculative finance from untethered global funds. To redirect their egotistical and ultimately hubristic agendas will take more than the well-meaning measures proposed here.
A deeper crisis threatens all of us – one of wilful blindness regarding our prospects for survival as an advanced civilisation. The tech bros and an assortment of preppers and survivalists might have alternative plans, but for most of us we can only hope that policies will be found to do more than just ameliorate the situation.
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity is available from Bookbusters, Queens Road, Hastings.
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