On a recent summer weekend, I found myself behind the wheel of a self-driving electric car, riding the highway from my home in Madison, Wisconsin, to Minneapolis, Minnesota. The car—loaned to my family in the hopes of inducing us to buy it—handled traffic, pit stops, highway exits, and dense urban neighborhoods without a hitch.
My first experience with a long, complex drive on autopilot was dazzling. It also filled me with dread. I knew I didn’t want to buy the car, a Tesla, if only because I can’t stand the association with the company’s chief executive officer, white supremacist super-oligarch Elon Musk. Musk’s gleeful destruction of the federal government, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, has caused enormous harm and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. Regardless of my intentions, though, “driving” the car without controlling it gave me the feeling of being whisked into a dystopian future.
When my family and I discussed that feeling on our drive, the car’s casually chatty, female artificial intelligence (AI) voice butted into our conversation, filling us in on details we didn’t remember about Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel Christine, about a malevolent 1958 Plymouth Fury that goes on an autonomous-driving murder spree.
Shortly after we returned from our weekend trip, news about one Tesla killing a woman after crashing through the brick wall of her Texas home and another accident involving a Tesla that careened into the outdoor dining area of a California restaurant, killing another woman, made headlines.
None of this means self-driving technology is inherently evil, can’t be made safe, or that it won’t soon be the norm. Flying past semis on Interstate Highway 94, I felt bad for the people employed as truck drivers, still the dominant occupation for men in the United States, now apparently going the way of the horse and buggy. Disruptive change to life and work as we know it brought on by new technology isn’t new. But worries about the pace of that change and the direction it’s taking us are more acute than ever.
Pew Research Center surveys show that half of U.S. adults are worried about AI, and only 10 percent are more excited than worried about the effects of the increasing use of the new technology.
Something bigger than automation and job loss is driving AI anxiety. It’s one thing to consider outsourcing highway transportation, code-writing, assembly-line work, and even health care research and diagnoses to AI. But bots writing legal briefs, love poems, term papers, emails, and text messages and replacing humans as companions and lovers give us the uncomfortable feeling that we’re on our way to giving up critical parts of what it means to be human. Add to that the dystopian vision of “singularity”—a future AI that overtakes human intelligence, wresting control of society from us and potentially leading to our extinction—and you have the makings of the ultimate horror story.
Against this frightening prospect, economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, a prolific author of books on technology, work, the environment, and society, has written Rescuing the Future: Reimagining Artificial Intelligence in a World on the Edge.
Rifkin places current technological advances in the context of changes and upheavals dating back to pre-industrial times. Right now, he suggests, we are living through the collapse of confidence in a standard Western approach to life “consumed by the expropriation of the natural world and obsessed with finding ever new technical ways and means of upping efficiencies in the extraction, commodification, and propertization of nature’s bounty.”
Certainly the latest round of technological change accelerates a growing sense of alienation and separation many of us have been feeling for some time from the work of our bodies and minds in concert with the natural world. We evolved to be part of a larger community of animals and plants, to experience the seasons and the ways in which we interact with natural systems. Rifkin goes back to the big questions about what our existence means and how we operate in concert with our world. He goes to the root of the problem many of us are experiencing as a kind of low-grade dread.
Instead of continuing down the deadly road of an economy based on the fictitious idea of ever-increasing consumption and perpetual growth, which has led to climate change, mass extinction, and despair, Rifkin suggests that the rise of an economy based on information, sharing, and ecological care could grow out of the development of AI. He traces our extractive view of the world as far back as Aristotle, whose theory of nature as a collection of static objects and resources he contrasts with an earlier notion of an “animated world” of life-giving forces and processes that humans are engaged with, not apart from.
In broad strokes, Rifkin lays out an intriguing philosophical argument for a shift in consciousness to the idea that we cannot extract our way to a better future, and that sharing and caring for the Earth is the only sane and healthy path forward. He makes a pretty good argument that young people are turning toward a more communal, caring approach to living in the world.
But the details of the economic and political shift to the more sustainable and resilient future Rifkin envisions are a bit fuzzy.
Among the few, sketchy examples of a pivot to a sharing economy he cites are the ride-sharing platforms Uber and Lyft. In place of carbon-heavy industry and transportation, he suggests that 3D printing is leading us to a revolutionary stage in which ideas, not goods, are transferred around the globe, and hyperlocal manufacturers are able to 3D print products, machines, and buildings on site using local materials.
It’s a big, shiny idea. But Uber hardly seems like the model for a more equitable and sustainable future. During a recent late-night trip home from the Milwaukee airport to Madison, my Uber driver asked me to cancel my ride and Venmo him the payment directly. The app, which used to take a 30 percent cut of his fares, was now taking more than 50 percent, he explained, and would leave him losing money on the ride. As for 3D printing, the first image that popped into my mind reading Rifkin’s book was of plastic guns printed at home by unregistered users. The second was of the tables full of crappy toys that have mushroomed overnight at my local farmers market.
Still, if Rifkin’s exuberance seems overblown when you look too closely at the details, his general outline of where we might go in the future reminds me of science fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s Project Hieroglyph, a serious effort to get science fiction writers to envision a better—not dystopian—future. What begins as fantasy soon becomes reality, Stephenson convincingly argues.
“Take Isaac Asimov’s novels and short stories about robots coexisting with humans, most notably his 1950 anthology I, Robot,” Annalee Newitz wrote in a Smithsonian magazine article on Stephenson’s project in 2012. Asimov “wrestled with such weighty issues as whether artificial beings have legal rights and the unforeseen dilemmas that could result from programming robots with moral directives. Upon Asimov’s death in 1992, the flagship journal of computer engineers credited him with demonstrating ‘the enormous potential of information technology’ and highlighting the difficulties of maintaining ‘reliable control over semi-autonomous machines.’ ”
In an essay entitled “Innovation Starvation,” Stephenson wrote, “Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF [science fiction] has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone.” It’s time for the people who imagine the future to picture something better.
Rifkin makes an important contribution to this project. In his sweeping philosophical take on AI, he shows that it is possible to build a just economy, and that the concentration of wealth and power, and the destruction of a democratic, more egalitarian society, isn’t inevitable.
But it’s not going to happen on its own.
Technology won’t deliver us from our current social and economic nightmare any more than its development makes the nightmare inevitable. In addition to brilliant theory, imagination, and technological innovation, the hard work of a progressive movement to take control of our politics is going to be necessary. That’s the challenge.