Technology Does Not Solve Political Problems

Powerful tools just make strong people stronger.

Oh good. (Photo: Getty)

If you are fortunate or unfortunate enough to spend time around people who work for big tech firms, you will find that their views on every issue tend to be rooted in the assumption that the tech industry itself will determine the future of said issue. So discussions about the economy become, “What will AI mean for the economy?” Discussions of politics become, “How will new tech help my side win the next election?” Discussions of climate change become, “How fast can we innovate ways to capture carbon in the atmosphere?” Discussions of culture become, “Is AI making good art?”

In other words, do not hang out with tech people if you can help it.

Kidding! To some extent, this is just a tic of human nature—hanging out with media people will force you to endure endless conversations about news stories that imply that reality is little more than fodder for journalistic angles, which are what really matters. In the case of tech, though, the consequences can be worse than just tedium. That’s because the tech industry is uncommonly consequential to all of us—and the techno-utopian vision prevalent within the industry, which assumes that the world’s problems are a series of technological problems to be solved, and that technological progress is the key driver of increased human well-being, can therefore lead to uncommonly bad outcomes for society, when it turns out to be a critically incomplete understanding of how things work.

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Alfred Nobel claimed to be surprised that his invention of dynamite contributed to war, not peace. Had to establish that Peace Prize to try to even the scales for all the dead bodies. This is as good a lesson as any for well-meaning tech industry people who possess a genuine belief that we can innovate our way out of social and political problems. We can’t. That’s because technology, while an extraordinarily powerful tool, does not by itself change the way that power is distributed in society. If the hand that holds the dynamite wants to use it to clear away rocks, you get great new roads. If the hand that holds the dynamite wants to use it to make bombs to drop on neighbors, you get mass death. If you say, “We’ll only give dynamite to peace-loving people,” the stronger, war-loving people will come and take it away. If you don’t change the overall power arrangement, new technology will just make strong people stronger. So too with today’s technologies. Except worse.

Consider the internet—the most transformative technology of my lifetime, so far. Tom Friedman and all of the other techno-utopians told me that the widespread availability of cheap high speed internet and smartphones would enable the cab driver in Djibouti to become an online entrepreneur just as easily as someone in Silicon Valley, and a new wave of equal opportunity would revolutionize the future of the world. Is that what happened? I don’t mean in an anecdotal sense, Is that the big socioeconomic story of the internet? No. The big socioeconomic story of the internet, despite all of the ways that it has changed our culture and entertainment and communication and Ways We Summon a Car, is that it has produced the biggest individual fortunes that the modern world has seen. It has, by any reasonable measure, increase inequality. It has consolidated more power in a smaller number of hands. Yeah, the Arab Spring was planned on Facebook. It failed. So were some genocides. They succeeded. In the past you had to buy a printing press to spread your words. Now you can publish things globally for free. Despite that fact, information control has become so centralized on a small number of platforms that the world’s richest man saw fit to spend $44 billion to buy a social media platform, and used it to help elect a fascist. All the guys who control the biggest tech companies, the ones that we were told would unleash a new World That Is Flat that would allow anyone anywhere to use these amazing new free or low-cost tools to compete with the well-funded big boys, ended up sitting behind the fascist on stage when he took the oath of office. Hey, whoa! Where did the internet age’s beautiful dream go off the rails?

The answer, of course, is that the belief that a radical new technology would produce a radical new world was always naive. Technology is not politics. It cannot solve political problems. It can, however, exacerbate political problems. The power of new technologies, controlled by the strong, makes them stronger. Obviously! I’m sure it sucked to get hit with a stick but it sucked even worse to get sliced in half with a hardened steel sword and even worse to be mowed down with a machine gun and even worse to have your whole city incinerated with an atomic bomb. All of these technologies have far more productive uses than war; but they were used for war because war is how strong people build and consolidate and maintain their own power. That is the thing that strong people do, above all. The internet doesn’t shoot you, but it has allowed strong people to create a total surveillance state and then guide missiles directly into your bedroom window, if they deem it necessary. Tom Friedman may protest that he was talking about other uses of the internet. Turns out that doesn’t matter. Great power concentrated in few hands means that those are the hands that will control the new technology. That means that the new technology will be used for their benefit. All visions of a sunny, technology-enabled bounteous future that do not grapple with this basic fact are doomed to be revealed, one day, as parodies of themselves.

This same pattern will hold true with AI, which is (presumably) the next great tech advance of our time. Absent very strong government regulation to prevent it, it is virtually certain that AI will lead to a greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands, as it replaces labor to the benefit of the investment class. To a lesser degree, the winners of this process will be the executives and (to an even lesser degree) the workers at the tech firms that produce and perfect the new technology. You don’t have to be much of a futurist to see this all coming. Nor do you have to be unreasonably grumpy to be a pessimist about the prospects of reining this in before it’s too late. Having watched this generation of big tech companies successfully avoid most meaningful regulation, the AI companies have a strong playbook to follow, and plenty of money to invest in removing all obstacles in their path. The Republican tax bill that just passed the House includes a provision blocking states from regulating AI for the next ten years. In ten years, it will be too late. All according to plan.

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This is, I admit, a pretty grim vision for the nice regular people who work in tech. You liked computers and so you went to school for it and got a job at a big tech company and next thing you know you’re BUILDING THE EVIL PANOPTICON in exchange for a six figure salary and free lunch. The dark political outcome of this process is not what many of these workers thought they were signing up for. The good news is that there is something that these people can do that will meaningfully shift the balance of power that currently allows decisions of monumental global importance to be made by a few billionaires.

Max out donations to the Democratic Party? No. That’s not it. The thing is: unionize. I will tell you with no exaggeration that unions within the big tech companies would be the single strongest regulatory force in the entire tech industry, and I am including “government” and “Wall Street” in that statement. Wall Street is driven by the profit motive and therefore aligned with the project of unrestrained power for Big Tech. Government regulators are captured by tech money in politics, and seriously outgunned. But a unionized work force could, in fact, make demands about the pace and use and deployment of tech products, and—unlike any other force—would be be in a position to codify and enforce rules around all of these things. In the absence of government regulation, union contracts have thus far been the only things that have established any real rules around the use of AI. The few union contracts that have done so, however, have not covered companies that are actually building the technology. A union at Google or Facebook or OpenAI or other big tech firms would be in a position to negotiate rules about how AI could be used that would benefit all of society. The workers who build the product have an inherent power that no one else does. A union would allow them to wield that power. If you are a distraught tech worker searching for a way to avoid the bleak knowledge that your own prosperity comes at the cost of very scary downstream political consequences, organize your workplace.

Is that easy? No. Is it, however, within the realm of possibility? Yes. If you do not believe that workers can accomplish this, do you therefore believe that the United States government under Donald Trump will do a better job of responsibly regulating these technologies? No? Then I guess you’re leaving it all in the hands of the killer robots. Maybe this time will be different.

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• Related reading: The Failure to Organize the Tech Industry Will Eat the Labor Movement Alive; AI, Unions, and the Vast Abyss; The Hammer, Not the Handshake. Also relevant to this discussion is my book about the labor movement, which you can read if you’re interested in what a national revival of labor power might look like. Totally not relevant to this discussion: I wrote a piece this week for Flaming Hydra about breakfast.

• While the biggest tech companies in America are all non-union, there are in fact unions organizing and winning in the video game and tech industries. Most recently, the tech workers at the Washington Post just voted overwhelmingly last week to unionize. RIGHT IN THE HEART OF JEFF BEZOS COUNTRY. Hell yeah! All eyes on the management of the Washington Post, which is now legally obligated to negotiate a contract in good faith with these workers.

• I want to take a moment to thank all of you for reading this publication, How Things Work. I started this site based on the untested theory, “Maybe it is possible to build a sustainable publication without a paywall, just by saying to readers, ‘Hey, if you like reading this site, and if you are not destitute, please chip in the few bucks it takes to become a paid subscriber.’” Amazingly, this method has worked so far. So let me repeat it as a brief reminder and small request: You can read this site for free. If you like it, and if you are not broke, I would appreciate if you take two seconds to become a paid subscriber by clicking the button below. It’s affordable, and it helps this place survive. I appreciate each and every one of you.