Against Technological Teleology

A fable and a rant

We travel back to 3000 BC. The god Thoth has just given humans the gift writing. Wise King Thamus convenes a council of advisers to speculate about the uses of this wondrous invention. But suddenly the convocation is interrupted.

"Wait!" shouts the magician Djedi, leaping up from his cushion at the rear of the assembly. "There's no need for discussion! I know exactly how the gift of writing will be used."

Excited chatter greets the announcement. "But how can you know what the future will bring?" says Thamus, tugging anxiously on his beard.

"By simple deduction!" crows Djedi. "Writing is an innovation, is it not?"

The assembled thinkers incline their heads in agreement.

"And all innovations are technologies," says Djedi, "for innovations give us new techniques for solving problems, and technology is nothing more nor less than the formalization of technique."

"So it is," says Thamus, "by common assent. But how then—"

"And the laws of technology are already known," cries Djedi, waving his fists in a fit of prophetic passion. "For the formalization of technique makes automatic what was formerly intentional, no? So it will always be through all time. Ergo, the future of this innovation, writing, is determined by laws that no man may change."

"But what, pray tell, is this future?" Thamus asks. "Instruct us, Djedi, if you see it so clearly."

"Quite simply this," says Djedi, "that writing foretells the death of thought. For previously men spoke, as it were, creatively, and the wisdom of ages was passed from mouth to mouth. But now all wisdom will be recorded, and men will have no need of either thought or speech. Culture will freeze wherever writing is used, like streams in the Hyperborean winter, and men will lose alike the faculties of persuasion and debate. In time they will lose as well their orneriness, submitting to be ruled by the written word, and disagreement will become unthinkable, for all thoughts worth thinking will be found in writing, not locked up inside men's heads. It cannot be otherwise."

"Surely you have envisioned one potential use for writing," Thamus says, "and your imagination is to be applauded. However, there may be other uses, which it is the purpose of this council to—"

"No, no!" shrieks Djedi, growing more impassioned. "There can be only one future: the one I have foretold. The power of technology is as inexorable as the sea. It wears down all before it; it triumphs by degrees. The death of thought is now upon us. Your only choice is to submit."

"Djedi," says Thamus, "control yourself. No man can trammel up in one vision the nature of all things. Other members of the assembly must have their say—"

"Vanity!" screams Djedi. "Vanity and superstition! Have I not proclaimed the imminent demise of speech and thought? What boots it a man to speak his mind, when thought itself is like the gleam of dewdrops in the sun? Can you not understand that the time of debate, of personhood itself, is at an end? Verily, I have said to you now the last words that ever need be spoken. All else is as the whimpering of children in the dark."

Here the assemblymen turn to other matters, doing their best to ignore Djedi, who skips around the perimeter of the chamber, waving his arms and heckling them like a magpie.

"Frivolity! Ignorance! Illusion! Delusion! Technology cares not a whit for your prattle. Technology is greater than laws, above gods. What are we to technology? Dust! All is dust! Here I have uttered a word, technology, that must perforce terminate all thought, yet still you chatter like monkeys while the tiger closes in. Can you not understand that the man who serves technology serves a force more potent than time itself? Submit! I tell you, you must submit to my prophecy. Logic compels you. Submit! Submit!"

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Here's data blogger Kevin Drum:

 "[I]ntelligent robots will eventually take over all human work. After a while, humans will finally be forced to accept that, yes, robots are so much smarter and more knowledgeable that we’ll never even come close to catching up with them. That literally leaves us with no purpose. Over time, we’ll get listless and depressed, stop having children, and eventually just die out of our own accord. This will take a little while, but probably only two or three hundred years."

Drum is known for his bold predictions about the future of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, including the claim that supercharged computers will soon put us all out of work. Few commentators on the subject are quite so cynical, but Drum's fatalism is shared by philosophers, physicists, theorists, and inventors who believe AI is all but destined to reach superhuman levels of capability within the next few decades. Their predictions have the airtight inflexibility of a mathematical proof: if the effects of intelligence can be reproduced through computation, and computation improves at a steady rate, you can plot the time it will take for computers to reach any given level of reasoning power. Human-level AI is only the start. The true potential is infinite.

What's notable isn't the plausibility of this prediction—I personally find it plausible—but the vatic certainty with which it's advanced. It’s as if people can’t get their heads around AGI without undergoing something like a religious conversion—either they pooh-pooh the notion entirely, or decide it’s destined to come about. The idea that the technology might be possible but improbable—like interstellar travel, or forwards time travel, or communism—is left on the table. Discussion proceeds on ontological terms: the fact that something could exist is taken to be proof that it must exist, at some arbitrary point in space and time.

This digital Platonism parallels a leftwing ethos that substitutes faith in moral progress for mystifications around technological advance. The members of the two camps, despite their disagreements, aren’t as different as they might at first seem. Both assume history obeys obvious laws—the arc of the universe bending towards justice, or the rating of invention trending towards a singularity. Both assume the relevant trends are knowable, clear to any unsentimental observer. And both argue that resisting the course of history will necessarily hurl us back into primitivism. Consequently, they arrogate to themselves the right to speak on behalf of an imminent utopia, arguing that history will have to proceed in line with their predictions if it proceeds at all. The only other possibility, in their eyes, would be for progress to halt altogether.

Many people point to such magical-seeming pronouncements and decide that these ostensibly secular pundits have reinvented religion. But these aren't religions. There are no liturgies, no gods. They're teleologies. The prognosticator of progress speaks on behalf of a sublunary future, not a supernatural world. His favored mode of speech isn't prayer, but prophecy. At times the prophecies are even falsifiable. There's nothing a modern prognosticator loves so much as pinning dates to his predictions--arguing that we'll all own self-driving cars by 2030, say, or that AGI will be invented before 2040, or that the global civilization will collapse if IPCC benchmarks aren't met within ten years. No matter if his predictions aren't met. New ones can be coined on the fly.

In many ways, this nerdy fortune-telling is the precise inverse of its supernatural antecedents. The new teleologist accuses his doubters of lacking reason, not faith. Where an oracle might point to tea leaves or cow guts as proof of supernatural claims, the teleologist presents his charts and graphs as windows into the natural world. The claim to authority, in either case, rests on putatively superior powers of inspiration. The haruspex sheds worldly attachments in order to open himself up to divine revelation. The modern teleologist claims to have eschewed human biases that blind us to the laws of historical change.

I've come to distrust these modern teleologies. Not just because the people who promote them are so arrogant, despite often being proven wrong, but because their prophecies depend on the very human dynamism they disdain. The teleologist tells us it's futile to try and change the course of progress. If people believed that, progress would stall, and the teleologist would be proven wrong. But he knows people won't believe it, so he remains smugly confident of being proven right. The whole thing's a cheat.

That's particularly true of a certain kind of technological optimist—Marc Andreesen comes to mind—who argues against constraining technological progress with rules and regulations. After all, haven't things always worked out in the past? Of course they have—but only because people experimented with useful rules and regulations! It's a bit ripe to tout the virtues of a high-tech society without mentioning the labor laws, workplace norms, civil rights, and ethical revolutions that helped give rise to it. At the dawn of the industrial age, children were worked to death in toxic factories. The arsenals of Earth are stocked with missiles that human beings decide, every day, not to use, in part because we've all been well instructed in the dangers of unconstrained technology. Our inventions have made us prosperous and pampered precisely because we put limits on their use. The history of progress entails both moral and technical innovations, but above all, it entails a slow process of adaptation—billions of people adjusting, day by day, to new challenges, customs, codes, and tools. There's no way to get around that process by charting its emergent properties, then trying to yank them loose of the world that gave rise to them, like a statistician arguing that forests would still be beautiful even in the absence of trees.

It's especially obnoxious to wax rhapsodical about progress while actively trying to obstruct the dynamics that bring it about—to argue that we can only have the fruits of civilizational advance if we actively give up the work of advancing. But that's the fate of the technological teleologist. One moment you're celebrating the historical forces that have lifted you higher, enabling you to see farther, than members of the common crowd. The next moment you decide the common crowd is dispensable, and tell them so—and they drop you on your ass.