Where we're going, we don't need people
There is an idea which recurs in many forms in the tech industry, which I refer to 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.
Some recent forms in which it has surfaced:
Cryptocurrencies aimed to remove the need for trust from the financial system. If the system could be designed such that transactions could take place with no trust between parties, commerce could be entirely anonymous.
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 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.
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.
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.