Speeding Into Oblivion
We're doing too much, too fast in a world dominated by political and economic inequality.
Vacation note: I’m taking one! I’ll be away the week of August 26th — playing video games in my basement — so there will be no posts that week. I’m back September 2nd. Thanks for reading and for your support.
I keep trying to live my life like a semi-normal person and then something happens, and my hopes are dashed. So, when a gunman tried to kill former president Donald Trump, well, my night of video gaming was shuffled around. When president Joe Biden decided to not to run for re-election, my day out at a local soccer game (1-1 draw between Ottawa and Winnipeg) was upended. Because as the news unfolds, it’s hard not to be drawn into it.
But the news is always unfolding. So much, so fast. If there was ever a ‘normal’ time, it seems long past. Everything is happening, all at once, all the time now.
Good opinion writers are a bit like a filter, which means we process information and try to let important stuff pass through to the public. That’s not a perfect simile but, then again, who has the time?
No one.
I’ve written about time before, about how things are moving so fast, about how that’s bad for democracy, destructive of thought. Today I read about advanced military weapons in the United Kingdom as the military, as Deborah Haynes writes for Sky, “for the first time test-fired a laser beam from an army vehicle, destroying targets at the speed of light from more than a kilometre away…” It turns out the United States has been on this for a while, naturally. That made me think of those terrifying robot dogs that are already being used by the police and military. And that made me think about artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles and Uber and social media and, well, just about every technology that touches or comes close to touching the figurative and literal old line about moving fast and breaking things.
A lot of important news about developments related to these issues is missed to lost. A lot of public and political attention that ought to be paid to them is missed because some other important, unprecedented, attention grabbing thing is happening. And it’s happening so fast.
That’s the thing about speed — it can get fast. Dazzling analysis, I know. But stay with me. Speed encourages volume in some cases, the faster you can do things, the more of it you can do. That’s true of news writing, widget production, medical imaging, social media posts, and so much of the tech world. It’s also true of technological development in many industries, and it rebounds on itself such that as speed produces more stuff, it also produces a faster pace of development.
The human brain can’t keep up with the speed and volume of contemporary life. Neither can democracies. That means we’re trying to process too much, too fast, and unable to fully comprehend and think through developments in industry that shape collective life. Industry types and politicians and officials know this — and count on it.
By the time we realize something has happened, it’s too late to do anything about it, including deciding whether we wanted it to happen in the first place. When you have power and money and influence to fight even modest attempts to slow you down, as the tech world luminaries do, for instance, then you end up working with a sort of impunity that absolutist monarchs would have envied.
I don’t recall us having a serious public conversation about whether we wanted a lot of the technologies and subsequent policies — or lack thereof — that we’ve got. There was some struggle over Uber and British Columbia held out for a while, but the debate was weak and seemed settled before it got started. There’s a bit more of a discussion happening around AI, but ask your average person about it, what it is, what it does, how we should regulate it, and you’ll find that by the time the population has wrapped its head around the various technologies that comprise AI — if they ever do — it’ll be too late to do all that much about it. The same could be said about many politicians, for that matter. Ditto military lasers and robot police dogs. Those technologies are easier to understand, but we won’t have a robust discussion about them. They’ll just keep showing up on social media and in press releases and then one day they’ll be normalized and tacitly accepted.
A big part of the problem is institutional, which is to say that democratic institutions in most democracies don’t really enable deep civic engagement — nor do politicians and officials. This is about power. Few who have it wish to share it, which is why our debates are so superficial and partly why people are so cynical. People aren’t stupid. They know that most politicians knock on your door because they want your vote, but when the door closes, the transaction is complete. After that, they’d prefer it, thanks so much, if you’d just get back to doing your job serving capital while they do theirs, which is the same thing but in a different way.
Another big part of the problem is money and power. We don’t share these things equally or equitably, which means that those who have the bulk of it — not us — get to make decisions and rules and do as they please. Under the cover of speed and volume, they get away with a lot and by the time we get even close to catching up, it’s all over. The new normal has arrived and that’s that. You might say ‘Same as it ever was’ but the power and reach of technologies and industrial processes have changed in such a way that the stakes are much higher now, as are the amount of things we ought to be considering but don’t have the time, energy, or chance to address.
I’m screaming into the void here, but the solution to this problem is to level the playing field, to adopt egalitarian political and market practices, to ensure everyone has adequate resources to take part in social and political life, to slow down our politics, to slow down technological development and roll-out when necessary, and to adopt inclusive institutions.
I’ve said all this before, but I’ll keep saying it until the robot police dogs take me out.
Here in the US, the Supreme Court dramatically weakened federal agencies’ regulatory power in a decision last month that has largely flown under the radar because so much else has been happening (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo). I find it terrifying because these regulatory agencies are the last lines of defense counterbalancing the moneyed interests. The agencies have full time staff who just work on striking the right regulatory balance, and now those regulations will lose most of their teeth.
"Future Shock" was the term 60 years ago, though about zero of Toffler's predictions worked out.
Mostly, new technology is a Good Thing, by definition, certainly when it just enhances already-agreed priorities. Nobody complains about improved medicine and dentistry.
Only haters of previous vaccines hated mRNA.
I think that Mr. Moscrop's concerns haven't really changed; he has a long record of concern about rich people and unregulated businessmen. Corey Doctrow has the right of it about so-called "AI", when he points out that the *REAL* "artificial intelligences" operate very slowly, with human components that are replaced if they show human feeling; they are called "corporations", all running a program to maximize shareholder returns without regard to social or physical harms they do, save to obey regulation.
There could be social media that disallows anonymity and holds you to account for every insult or threat; electronic speed could also ensure that somebody uttering a threat on the 'Net is in handcuffs a half-hour later, as if they'd broken into a liquor store. Social media that adjudicates what is a "lie" and surrounds your every post with a red-border for "convicted liar" for the next 30 days. That's all possible, if we want it, and demand it. It has nothing to do with technology; it has to do with regulating how humans treat each other.