When Superman reached a certain point in his life story, he had to decide whether to use his powers for good or ill. He chose good, of course. It’s a fundamental element of many classic stories, from Star Wars to Kung Fu Panda. And rightly so, thinks storytelling scholar1 Christopher Booker, as all such stories serve us as handed-down reminders, about how to become true heroes we need to reach inside ourselves and discover our innate humanity. From the depths of time the principle, that love conquers all and the hero and heroine live happily ever after, remains a constant.
Back in the real, yet now digitally augmented world, it is clear that the reduction of technology thresholds such as cost, space and power, mean we are merely scratching the surface of what will become possible over the next few years. Technology is becoming inexorably smaller and more powerful, reaching places we have not previously considered. We’ve seen the creation of world-crossing networks and processor clouds, of super-robots and tiny, bee-sized drones. Where will it all take us, you might well ask. And us take it — as technology would not exist without humanity, to drive its progress, to innovate, to create, to use technology in ways our predecessors did not even imagine. We are gaining cyber-powers — with technology, we really can jump tall buildings or make ourselves heard on the other side of the planet. We are, in a number of ways, becoming superheroes, and even as we learn to use our new-found skills we are becoming even more powerful.
While we can all conjure examples of what might happen, nobody has a clear crystal ball. What we do know is that technology is the great leveller, as the Law of Diminishing Thresholds make it — and therefore, what it brings — more accessible, more usable, lower cost, giving connected peasants a path out of poverty even as it creates new opportunities for exploitation and control. Technology is the ultimate democratiser, uncaring as it is about who uses it for what. All the same, what the information revolution has not yet done (and so far has not shown any potential to do) is change what it means to be human. Its indifference to the human propensity to both good and ill is its greatest strength, and its biggest weakness. The human factor is all too important, not least because we are acting as individuals and collectives in the face of global technological change. We’ve already seen how we can act collaboratively with technology, at the same time as becoming corporate — we have the capacity for, and are likely to do, both. Our innate characteristics will drive the future — our desire to make a better world, to strive for success and look after our own, as well as to get ahead of everyone else, to beat the competition, to take more than our fair share of the pie.
Technology-based knowledge brings power: as we have seen the bad guys are likely to continue to do bad things, even as the good guys get new capabilities for dealing with them. Technology enables us to develop relationships which would otherwise be impossible, in businesses and as a society as a whole, while simultaneously threatening our abilities to structure and deal with the world around us. Whole new branches of therapy are now devoted to dealing with the psychological fallout caused by technology.
Should we worry about where technology is taking us? Sometimes it seems that we can only hang on, enjoy the ride and see what they think of next. But as humans we are above all adaptive: as a majority we seem to have a propensity to run with such changes, indeed given what we have dealt with over the past few decades, it is unlikely that another order of magnitude will make any difference. It is as if we can think logarithmically, or indeed in terms of octaves — the song will remain the same, even if it is playing at a higher frequency.
Against this well of new capability, like Superman, we all have to take choices. Some believe we will need to embrace our cyber-powers — “The more likely scenario, however, is a glide path to extinction in which most people adopt a variety of bionic and germ-line modifications that over-time evolve them into post-human cyborgs,” says this article2. Indeed, others have even postulated that we already exist within some huge, Matrix-like simulation. While we may not be headed towards such absolute futures, we nonetheless need to be prepared. Just as Superman found to his chagrin, even as we create such huge potential, we also inject the keys to its own destruction. Technology is not perfect, nor could it ever be in all its complexity. But all it takes is one flaw — a race condition in an algorithm, a loss of power or of a data connection, a mistyped variable or a software bug — for the whole, technologically enhanced house of cards to come tumbling down. As we see with blockchain mechanisms, the digital revolution also has its Kryptonite: with so much to go right, there is also a great deal that could go wrong.
This means we need to incorporate such realities into our thinking about the future. With such inordinate power comes great responsibility, about how we ensure that our superpowers are used for good, and how they can avoid being subverted by those who would exploit them — not only cybercriminals but, sometimes, our corporations and institutions. At the same time we need to think about the kinds of failures that might exist — technological and human — how to mitigate them, and how to protect against their potential consequences.
There is no going back to an un-globalised, non-technological world, how ever attractive it might sometimes appear. So, if the only way is forward, we need to build a new understanding of our responsibilities. In the next section we consider what form these responsibilities need to take.