Where we're going, we don't need people
There is an idea which recurs in many forms in the tech industry, which I summarise as: “where we’re going, we don’t need people”.
It is the idea that things would run better if we could remove people from the process. That human foibles and frailty are an impediment to some objective like efficiency or productivity.
Here are some examples of how this idea appears in specific tech projects:
Cryptocurrencies aimed to remove the need for trust from the financial system. If transactions could take place with no trust between parties, commerce could be entirely anonymous. Trust in human relationships is replaced by verifiable, mathematically provable trust in the system itself.
This is an extreme version of cash transactions. David Graeber described in Debt: the first 5,000 years how debt relationships need trust, but trade/barter transactions would take place between people who could not trust each other. For example, barter could be a ritual exchange between people groups who traveled and did not usually encounter each other.
Cash can enable trust-less transactions within a legal system that enforces its role as legal tender. Crypto aims to invent an entirely governance-independent system of tender, and suggests this would be better than a system that relies even on trust in government.
This is the ideology of technique: we should replace trust in humans with trust in automation.
Large language models and AI in general promise the ability to replace humans in contexts like therapy, companionship, even the kind of questions and conversations you might rely on a trusted friend for.
Often this is a well-intentioned appeal to scale: how can we possibly afford so much human time and attention that’s required for everyone’s needs?
Teachers, for example, can’t possibly be expected to attend to the needs of so many students, but AI can be fully attentive to every student. This is a way to sidestep the problem: that societies undervalue education, companionship, the caring professions of social reproduction. Society refuses to fund one teacher per five students, preferring instead one teacher per fifty students, augmented with AI to increase their productivity.
This is the ideology of scale: we should demand the maximum output with as few humans as possible.
The metaverse and other digital world concepts propose to replace physical interactions with digitally mediated experiences. Often this comes hand-in-hand with the idea that these experiences will be completely personalised and self-centred, tailored to each individual’s proclivities and weaknesses.
This reached its height during the worst of the COVID pandemic, with Facebook’s renaming to Meta and Apple’s launch of consumer VR wearables. The message was that we would all spend our days in virtual meetings and social events, every interaction with another mediated through the cloud. The vision never really manifested, but it has continued simmering in the background as tech companies continue to work on improved devices, now further integrated with LLMs.
This is the ideology of transcendence: that intelligence should be liberated from physical limits of any kind.
Venture capital demands returns on capital invested, and recent iterations of this culture since the 2000s have focused on speed of growth.
The firm Andreesen Horowitz summarises Uber’s end-run arund laws like so: “Uber won its battles, city after city, because they became essential to people so quickly that their social license with everyday citizens overcame the political and regulatory pressures to stop it.” (emphasis mine)
This world view sees society itself as a barrier to individual achievement. This is straightforwardly libertarian, but combined with the economic imperative to win at all costs to achieve the greatest return, it acquires an urgency that makes it actively rapacious.
This is the ideology of speed: we must not wait for deliberative processes that consider humans’ needs.
Fernando Borretti, who writes more eloquently than me, describes something similar in a recent post:
We see this with ordinary consumer products and services, where often the advertising seems premised on you being some kind of stylite who lives in a little human terrarium, probably in a building called something like “The Soho”, food arrives through a hole in the wall, and you have this sovereign, solipsistic existence that leaves no physical trace in the world.
Again and again, the problem is people. Not specific people, or groups of people–this is not necessarily a racist ideology.
But the very idea of people. Where we’re going, we don’t need 'em.