Tech: The Digital Revolution Won't Save Us

Originally published in the Globe and Mail. Read the full text here.

Tech utopianism? Or Techno-pessimism? Two different books make the case for each

Will digital technology make our lives substantially better in the long run? Will it make us happier, healthier and more productive? Or does the tech revolution create as many problems as it solves? The question may be unanswerable, but that doesn't stop writers from trying. Personally, I'm open to all perspectives – those of the optimists, the naysayers and the people who stake out a place in between – but I don't trust idle speculation. An intellectually honest book about the future must be based in a reliable assessment of the present.

In his new book, Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of the Species, Canadian journalist and blogger Peter Nowak begins with a bunch of sweeping predictions. He says that digital technology will eradicate extreme poverty and privation, and that, due to the ascendance of artificial intelligence, "humanity has the potential to arrive at … total understanding of the universe."

This is wild stuff, and most of it is, if not unsubstantiated, then at least under-substantiated. Nowak denies that he's a tech utopian, but I'm not convinced. Sure, he comments on some unsettling trends in digital culture – the decline of privacy, the polarization of wealth – but reassures us that computing and human ingenuity will (probably) set things right in the long run. His cheeriness strikes me as glib. The rise of the digital economy has been accompanied by some frightening developments; a responsible book about technology, even an optimistic one, should take them seriously.

To justify his many confident prognostications, Nowak repeatedly cites Moore's law: a prediction, made with surprising accuracy in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, that every two years scientists will find a way to double the number of transistors that can fit onto a chip – thereby doubling the computational power of our machines. Nowak takes Moore's law as an allegory for the exponential pace of change. It may take us a long time to invent new technologies, he argues, but once we do, we refine and augment them incredibly quickly.

This is a strained analogy. Moore's predictions probably won't prevail forever: There's a limit to how small we can make our transistors, and when we hit that limit, the pace of change may slow down significantly. Plus while Moore's law forecasts the advent of smaller, faster computers – at least for the time being – it doesn't predict a qualitative shift in what computers can do. It doesn't demonstrate, as Nowak implies, that we'll find a way to feed the burgeoning global population in 2050, or that robots will one day become competent novelists, or that the singularity – the moment when computers develop conscious minds of their own – is coming soon.

Read the full text here.