When I started my blog some 8 years ago, I called myself a “Technology Optimist” in my first post. I wrote that
I am excited to be living in a time when we are making tremendous progress on understanding aging, fighting cancer, developing clean technologies, and so much more. This is not to say that I automatically assume that technology by itself will solve all our problems (I guess that would be a “technology pollyanna”). Instead I believe that – over time – we as a society figure out how to use technology to actually improve our standard of living. I for one am sure glad I am not living in the Middle Ages.
The fundamental tenor of this book is one of optimism. This is in part a reflection of my personality. I am pretty sure it would be impossible to be a VC as a pessimist. You would focus only on the many reasons why a particular startup won't succeed and never make an investment.
Optimism is a theme that I will return to many times in this book and so it is a good idea to make this apparent bias of mine clear upfront. It is more than a personal bias though. Optimism has a profound role in human affairs and its source is the power of knowledge.
I am optimistic about what humanity can ultimately accomplish using the internet and advances in artificial intelligence both of which will accelerate the creation and distribution of knowledge.
Another way to say that I am an optimist is to say that I believe in progress.
Progress has become a loaded word. Is there such as thing as true progress and what does it look like? Aren't we humans responsible not only for the many diseases of civilization but also for the downright extinction of countless species and potentially our own demise through climate change?
Yes, we do have problems. And one might, as a pessimist, focus on these problems and conclude they cannot be solved. This is like looking at a startup and concluding there is no point in even getting going — or funding it — because, well, there will be problems.
The beauty of problems though is that they can be overcome by human ingenuity.
Is that true for all problems? Well, it has been true so far as we are still here.
This is in and of itself quite remarkable. We are slower and weaker than many other species. But humans alone have developed the capacity for knowledge. And knowledge turns out to be extraordinarily powerful. It allowed us to figure out, for instance, how to make fire. We may take this for granted today, but no other species has managed to do this and to record and share its knowledge of fire making in a way that can be shared across space and time.
There is an extreme position that would suggest we would have been better off never developing knowledge. That we would still live in a state of paradise had we not tasted the forbidden fruit. Not only is it hard to see how we would go back there now, but more importantly, I for one prefer not to be consumed by wild animals.
Will all future problems be solvable, including say climate change? There is, of course, no guarantee. We might wind up with a problem we cannot solve and that might cause our extinction. But what is certain is that assuming that problems cannot be solved guarantees the outcome that they will not be solved.
Pessimism is an inherently self defeating attitude.
Yes, the internet and advances in automation have brought with them a new set of problems. We will encounter many in this book, including immense pressure on people's ability to earn a living and the conflicts arising from being exposed to content that runs counter to one's upbringing or deeply held cultural or religious beliefs.
Believing in progress though is not the same as being a Pollyanna. Progress does not happen by itself as a deterministic function of technology. Contrary to Kevin Kelly's claim, technology does not want anything by itself and certainly not a better world for humanity. It simply makes such a world possible.
Progress also does not automatically make everyone better off. Economics too doesn't want anything. It is not normative. Nothing in economics for instance says that a new technology cannot make some people or possibly a great many people worse off. Economics gives us tools for analyzing markets and their failures and even designing new ones. But we still need to make choices about what we want these to accomplish.
Solving one set of problems always gives us a new set of problems. We need to be pro-active in identifying and solving those. And not all problems can be solved solely by more technology. Many of them require changes in how we live our lives. These won't happen by themselves. Because history too doesn't want anything.
It is our responsibility both individually and collectively to make choices about what we want for ourselves and our future. We need to choose rules for society (regulation) and behaviors for ourselves (self-regulation) that make progress possible.
Put differently, progress is not just a technological but also a social process. It requires a set of values that can sustain progress as well as regulation based in those values.
There are many people who work in technology and investing who are also optimists and believe in progress. There is, however, only a smaller subset who also believe in the need for regulation. There is another group that has a decidedly libertarian streak and largely would like for government to get out of the way.
The history of technological progress is one of changes in social norms and political regulations. For instance, at the moment much of the world gets around by driving cars. The car was an important technological innovation in that it allowed for individual mobility. But it would have been impossible to adopt without regulation. We needed to agree on rules of the road and we also needed to build roads. Both of these cannot emerge spontaneously solely from individual choice as they both constitute examples of market failure. The car would also not have made much sense as individual transport without changes in social norms, such as making it acceptable for women to operate a car (still not a change that has taken place in Saudi Arabia).
Not all regulation will be good regulation. In fact, the earliest regulation of automotive vehicles, was aimed at delaying their adoption by limiting their speed to that of a horse drawn carriage and in some cases even requiring them to be preceded by someone carrying a flag.
Similarly not all regulation of the internet and automation will be good regulation. Much of it will initially aim to protect the status quo and help incumbent enterprises. But that is no reason to call for an absence of regulation. It should be seen instead as a challenge to come up with the right regulation.
The same goes for social changes. Initial reactions may in fact be the opposite of what we ultimately need. For instance, there are a lot of people at the moment who feel offended by content that is available on the internet. We could choose to act on these reactions or we could question where they come from.
This is where self regulation plays an important role. By this I mean our capacity as individuals to use our rationality. From Eastern religions including Hinduism and Buddhism, to the Stoics in ancient Greece there is a long tradition of understanding how we can get past our immediate emotional response. Much of this lines up well with what we have uncovered more recently about the workings of the human brain.
If we want to have true progress, such as using the internet and artificial intelligence for their potential to improve humanity, we need to get past our initial emotional responses and figure out how to maintain a rational dialog. It is only then that our choices will be based on our critical thinking abiliities.