Looked at in a certain light, Adrian Hon’s History of the Future in 100 Objects can be seen as giving us a window into a fictionalized version of an intermediate technological stage we may be entering. It is the period when the gains in artificial intelligence are clearly happening, but they have yet to completely replace human intelligence. The question if it AI ever will actually replace us is not of interest to me here. It certainly won’t be tomorrow, and technological prediction beyond a certain limited horizon is a fool’s game.

Continuing the IEET's 2014 editor's choice award to three articles for their outstanding writing and conceptual analysis contributing to transhumanism and technoprogressivism we are proud to announce #2.

The #1 article by hits was Ramez Naam's “2014 Was a Good Year: Better Than You Remember”

The following piece was first published here on Oct 26, 2014 and is the #2 pick for the IEET editor's choice award.

In this exceptional review of Tyler Cowen’s book, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation, Rick Searle articulates the need for people to seriously think about living beside intelligent machines and perhaps an Ayn Rand super-greedy like human-AI future.

In 2014 Searle has written close to an article a week on topics ranging from human rights, surveillance to AI ethics. This article stands out because of its extraordinary relevancy to the IEET’s mission of critiquing science and technology and how people will use them in a technoprogressive future.​

Nevertheless, some features of the kind of hybrid stage we have entered are clearly apparent. Hon built an entire imagined world around them from with “amplified-teams” (AI working side by side with groups of humans) as one of the major elements of 21st century work, sports, and much else besides.

The economist Tyler Cowen perhaps did Hon one better, for he based his very similar version of the future not only on things that are happening right now, but provided insight on what we should do as job holders and bread-winners in light of the rise of ubiquitous, if less than human level, artificial intelligence. One only wishes that his vision had room for more politics, for if Cowen is right, and absent us taking collective responsibility for the type of future we want to live in, 2040’s America might look like the Britain found in Dickens, only we’ll be surrounded by robots.

Cowen may seem a strange duck to take up the techno-optimism mantle, but he did in with gusto in his recent book Average is Over. The book in essence is a sequel to Cowen’s earlier best seller The Great Stagnation in which he argued that developed economies, including the United States, had entered a period of secular stagnation beginning in the 1970’s. The reason for this stagnation was that advanced economies had essentially picked all the “low hanging fruit” of the industrial revolution.

Arguing that we are in a period of technological stagnation at first seems strange, but when I reflect a moment on the meaning of facts such as not flying all that much faster than would have been common for my grandparents in the 1960’s, the kitchen in my family photos from the Carter days looking surprisingly like the kitchen I have right now- minus the paneling, or saddest of all, from the point of view of someone brought up on Star Trek, Star Wars and Our Star Blazers with a comforter sporting Viking 2 and Pioneer, the fact that, not only have we failed to send human visitors to Mars or beyond, we haven’t even been back to the moon. Hell we don’t even have any human beings beyond low-earth orbit.

Of course, it would be silly to argue there has been no technological progress since Nixon. Information, communication and computer technology have progressed at an incredible speed, remaking much of the world in their wake, and have now seemingly been joined by revolutions in biotechnology and renewable energy.

And yet, despite how revolutionary these technologies have been, they have not been able to do the heavy lifting of prior forms of industrialization due to the simple fact that they haven’t been as qualitatively transformative as the industrial revolution. If I had a different job I could function just fine without the internet, and my life would be different only at the margins. Set the technological clock by which I live back to the days preceding industrialization, before electricity, and the internal combustion engine, and I’d be living the life of my dawn-to-dusk Amish neighbors- a different life entirely.

Average is Over is a followup to Cowen’s earlier book in that in it he argues that technological changes now taking place will have an impact that will shake us out of our stagnation, or at least how that stagnation is itself evolving into something quite different with some being able to escape its pull while others fall even further behind.

Like Hon, Cowen thinks intermediate level AI is what we should be paying attention to rather than Kurzweil or Bostrom- like hopes and fears regarding superintelligence. Also like Hon, Cowen thinks the most important aspect of artificial intelligence in the near future is human-AI teams. This is the lesson Cowen takes from, among other things, freestyle chess.

For those who haven’t been paying attention to the world of competitive chess, freestyle chess is what emerged once people were able to buy a chess playing program that could beat the best players in the world for a few dollars to play on one’s phone. One might of thought that would be the death knell for human chess, but something quite different has happened. Now, some of the most popular chess games are freestyle meaning human-machine vs human-machine.

The moral Cowen draws from freestyle chess is that the winners of these games, and he extrapolates, the economic “games” of the future, are those human beings who are most willing to defer to the decisions of the machine. I find this conclusion more than a little chilling given we’re talk about real people here rather than Knight or Pawns, but Cowen seems to think it’s just common sense.

In its simplest form Cowen’s argument boils down to the prediction that an increasing amount of human work in the future will come in the form of these AI-human teams. Some of this, he admits, will amount to no workers at all with the human part of the “team” reduced to an unpaid customer. I now almost always scan and bag my own goods at the grocery store, just as I can’t remember the last time I actually spoke to a bank teller who wasn’t my mom. Cowen also admits that the rise of AI might mean the world actually gets “dumber” our interactions with our environment simplified to foster smooth integration with machines and compressed to meet their limits.

In his vision intelligent machines will revolutionize everything from medicine to education to business management and negotiation to love. The human beings who will best thrive in this new environment will be those whose work best complements that of intelligent machines, and this will be the case all the way from the factory floor to the classroom. Intelligent machines should improve human judgement in areas such as medical diagnostics and would even replace judges in the courtroom if we are ever willing to take the constitutional plunge. Teachers will go from educators to “coaches” as intelligent machines allow individualized instruction , but education will still require a human touch when it comes to motivating students.

His message to those who don’t work well with intelligent machines is – good luck. He sees automation leading to an ever more competitive job market in which many will fail to develop the skills necessary to thrive. Those unfortunate ones will be left to fend for themselves in the face of an increasingly penny-pinching state. There is one area, however, where Cowen thinks you might find refuge if machines just aren’t your thing-marketing. Indeed, he sees marketing as one of the major growth areas in the new otherwise increasingly post-human economy.

The reason for this is simple. In the future there are going to be less ,not more, people with surplus cash to spend on all the goods built by a lot of robots and a handful of humans. One will have to find and persuade those with real incomes to part with some of their cash. Computers can do the finding, but it will take human actors to sell the dream represented by a product.

The world of work presented in Cowen’s Average is Over is almost exclusively that of the middle class and higher who find their way with ease around the Infosphere, or whatever we want to call this shell of information and knowledge we’ve built around ourselves. Either that or those who thrive economically will be those able to successfully pitch whatever it is they’re selling to wealthy or well off buyers, sometimes even with the help of AI that is able to read human emotions.

I wish Cowen had focused more on what it will be like to be poor in such a world. One thing is certain, it will not be fun. For one, he sees further contraction rather than expansion of the social safety net, and widespread conservatism, rather than any attempts at radically new ways of organizing our economy, society and politics. Himself a libertarian conservative, Cowen sees such conservatism baked into the demographic cake of our aging societies. The old do not lead revolutions and given enough of them they can prevent the young from forcing any deep structural changes to society.

Cowen also has a thing for so-called “moral enhancement” though he doesn’t call it that. Moral enhancement need not only come from conservative forces, as the extensive work on the subject by the progressive James Hughes shows, but in the hands of both Hon and Cowen, moral enhancement is a bulwark of conservative societies, where the world of middle class work and the social safety net no longer function, or even exist, in the ways they had in the 20th century.

Hon with his neuroscience background sees moral enhancement leveraging off of our increasing mastery over the brain, but manifesting itself in a revival of religious longings related to meaning, a meaning that was for a long time provided by work, callings and occupations that he projects will become less and less available as we roll through the 21st century with human workers replaced by increasingly intelligent machines. Cowen, on the other hand, sees moral enhancement as the only way the poor will survive in an increasingly competitive and stingy environment, though his enhancement is to take place by more traditional means, the return of strict schools that inculcate victorian era morals such as self-control and above all conscientiousness in the young. Cowen is far from alone in thinking that in an era when machines are capable of much of the physical and intellectual labor once done by human beings what will matter most to individual success is ancient virtues.

In Cowen’s world the rich with money to burn are chased down with a combination of AI, behavioral economics, targeted consumer surveillance, and old fashioned, fleshy persuasion to part with their cash, but what will such a system be like for those chronically out of work? Even should mass government surveillance disappear tomorrow, (fat chance) it seems the poor will still face a world where the forces behind their ever more complex society become increasingly opaque, responsible humans harder to find, and in which they are constantly “nudged” by people who claim to know better. For the poor, surveillance technologies will likely be used not to sell them stuff which they can’t afford, but are a tool of the repo-man, and debt collector, parole officer, and cop that will slowly chisel away whatever slim column continues to connect them the former middle class world of their parents. It is a world more akin to the 1940’s or even the 1840’s than it is to anything we have taken to be normal since the middle of the 20th century.

​I do not know if such a world is sustainable over the long haul, and pray that it is not. The pessimist in me remembers that the classical and medieval world’s existed for long periods of time with extreme levels of inequality in both wealth and power, the optimist chimes in that these were ages when the common people did not know how to read. In any case, it is not a society that must by some macabre logic of economic determinism come about. The mechanism by which Cowen sees no sustained response to such a future coming into being is our own political paralysis and generational tribalism. He seems to want this world more than he is offering us a warning of it arrival. Let’s decide to prove him wrong for the technologies he puts so much hope in could be used in totally different ways and in the service of a juster form of society.

However critical I am of Cowen for accepting such a world as a fait accompli, the man still has some rather fascinating things to say. Take for instance his view of the future of science:

Once genius machines start coming up with new theories…. intelligibility will seem like a legacy from the very distant past. ( 220)

For Cowen much of science in the 21st century will be driven by coming up with theories and correlations from the massive amount of data we are collecting, a task more suited to a computer than a man (or woman) in a lab coat. Eventually machine derived theories will become so complex that no human being will be able to understand them. Progress in science will be given over to intelligent machines even as non-scientists find increasing opportunities to engage in “citizen science”.

Come to think of it, lack of intelligibility runs like a red thread throughout Average is Over, from “ugly” machine chess moves that human players scratch their heads at, to the fact that Cowen thinks those who will succeed in the next century will be those who place their “faith” in the decisions of machines, choices of action they themselves do not fully understand. Let’s hope he’s wrong on that score as well, for lack of intelligibility in human beings in politics, economics, and science, drives conspiracy theories, paranoia, and superstition, and political immobility.

Cowen believes the time when secular persons are able to cull from science a general, intelligible picture of the world is coming to a close. This would be a disaster in the sense that science gives us the only picture of the world that is capable of being universally shared which is also able to accurately guide our response to both nature and the technological world. At least for the moment, perhaps the best science writer we have suggests something very different. To her new book, next time….