Deep into the era of the algorithm

It’s difficult to come to terms with the frenzied pace at which the human experience is being transformed, not least since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. Humanity has gone exponential in multiple dimensions, and single lifetimes are sufficient to see multiple paradigm shifts of the type that would take centuries not long ago. In just a few decades, we’ve seen the rise to the most consequential fractures in structural conditions probably since the nuclear era gave man the possibility to annihilate itself. The current, and quickly evolving, stage in the Artificial Intelligence race, together with a series of other developments that have come to be catalogued under the moniker of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” gives humanity unimaginable power, but also faces it with the possibility of losing control of our technology only to become dominated or exterminated by it. At the centre of these historic crossroads stand a handful of men who control a majority of the levers of the human socio-political-economic ecosystem, hoarding incomprehensible amounts of wealth and power. They appear generally motivated by personal business interests and have fully embraced the decision to influence the political field to secure their positions.

Last week, we published an interview with Jonathan Taplin, an intellectual who is critical of what he calls “the four horsemen” of Silicon Valley: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. In his view, we are on the verge of a social revolt in the United States to the tune of the revolutionary 1960s and 70s, as the tech oligarchs continue to push educated youngsters out of the virtuous circle of capitalistic wealth creation. The alternative is a major financial crash in the style of the Great Depression that would wreck havoc globally. “We’ve never had the situation where the plutocracy also held all the political power and much of the cultural power,” Taplin explained, adding that Donald Trump’s tactical alliance with them, and his method of power through fear, create a new set of structural conditions never seen before in the United States. In the context of mass surveillance and the era of the algorithm, Taplin asks whether society has become politically passive and increasingly stupid, and whether Artificial Intelligence will exacerbate those effects, leading us to a real life version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

The way in which society perceives the Silicon Valley elite has changed dramatically over the past few decades. They went from hippie nerds to goofy geniuses, eventually to become Machiavellian super-villains. The final metamorphosis happened like a flash in front of our eyes, only 15 years ago when the new generation of young, tech entrepreneurs took the world by storm. The Google guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were the epitome of this group of visionary computer programmers who had the grand vision of making all of the information humans had ever created instantly accessible, while connecting the entirety of the world virtually. They were young, wore hoodies, and built companies where employees could play pingpong or videogames, eat free hamburgers, and take naps on hammocks. It was the exact opposite of the corporate culture espoused by Wall Street and the oil giants that seemed to dominate the world a few decades before. The guy wearing the three piece suit was no longer the only one who could enjoy the spoils of a six and seven digit salary (in dollars), while the kids wearing shorts and a T-shirt were morally more deserving. Not only were the Silicon Valley nerds solving the world’s problems, they were creating massive amounts of wealth as they built gigantic companies whose stock price never stopped going up. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, Steve Jobs’ Apple, Bill Gates’ Microsoft, the PayPal mafia, Reed Hastings’ Netflix, and a few others disrupted the industries of the past using computer software, putting the markets on hyper speed.

The global financial crisis that started in the United States in 2007 and spread throughout the globe ended an era of irrational exuberance, a term famously coined by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, that lasted since the end of the Cold War. The United States as the sole super power, patrolling the world for good in order to spread capitalism and democracy. The crisis laid bare that behind those high-flying ideals there was also the exponential greed that characterised financial markets and the brutality of the War on Terror. It also made evident that despite the massive creation of wealth coming out of Silicon Valley, a majority of the population in high and middle-income countries hadn’t  seen their economic situation improve in decades. Wealth was increasingly concentrated and inequality was on the rise.

Out of the ruins, the tech titans came out relatively unscathed. Then came the rise of Trump, forcing them out of the relative comfort of the Obama-era political correctness of progressive values. Silicon Valley had crafted a working relationship with the Democratic Party after Ronald Reagan fatally weakened the unions, up until then their main funders, Taplin explained. But in reality most of these tech entrepreneurs were closer to libertarian ideologies, many of them schooled by reading Ayn Rand, pushing for the state to move out of the way and let them innovate. Trump, a master of attention who excelled in the social media age, turned their own tools against them. They ganged up against him after the infamous Capitol Hill riots that happened in 2021, when The Donald didn’t want to admit he’d lost the election. In his second term, they all rallied behind him, with perfect attendance at his inauguration and the official representation of Elon Musk within the administration. Covid-19 added further chaos and even greater dependency on their technologies.

Once they became Trumpian, all masks came off. They understood that they had to play the political game in the only way they know: monopoly control. They funded extreme-right parties across the globe and went full in on the anti-woke culture wars. Zuckerberg was pushed onto the spotlight in the context of the Cambridge Analytica scandal where his social media company was complicit in the use of personal data to try and manipulate voters. His robot-like appearances on Congressional testimonies confirmed the worst of what the character played brilliantly by Jesse Eisenberg in the film The Social Network portrayed. It contrasts completely with the current persona he’s created, hanging out with DJs, wearing gold chains and being the life of the party. No one doubts social media and personal data are used for political influence anymore. Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and gave himself a global platform from which to troll (or digitally provoke) wokeness in any of its forms, while pushing a pro-Musk, right-wing agenda. It also allows him to hype his companies and push up their stock prices. According to Taplin he’s also all-in as a government contractor, particularly of the military industrial complex, a game he’s taught Thiel and Andreessen as well. Musk’s SpaceX controls rocket launches for the US government, Thiel’s Palantir is the main player in the mass surveillance game, and Anduril is supplying drones to combat Iran, owned by Thiel and Andreessen.

Artificial Intelligence has turbo-charged an era of exponential change and cycles of innovation are now occurring in spans of months, even weeks. There’s a new generation of tech oligarchs that came with it, particularly Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic. The tools, under development for at least a decade, allow for the processing of massive troves of data in a fragment of time from what was possible before. It occurs in a moment in history in which a very substantial portion of our lives is plugged into the digital ecosystem, particularly given the proliferation of smartphones and devices worldwide. We can solve hugely complex problems much faster, leading many to predict the eradication of global suffering as most medical issues are tackled. Robots could replace the entirety of the human workforce, leading some to propose the ideal of a universal basic income as people are freed from the time restraints of a day-to-day job, to focus on whatever they please. Life can be stretched out far longer than imagined, while aging will be reversed leading to something much closer to eternal youth. These techno-optimist views of the near future contrast with the idea that mass surveillance will lead to a “Big Brother State” where our every move is watched and analyzed, potentially used to predict whether we had spurious intentions. Algorithms would be put in control of finding and punishing criminals, but also of fighting wars and deciding when to pull the trigger, or drop the bombs. Unmanned vehicles that spread the globe could become weapons used by other states against each other, or even an unknown digital race of robots. The Matrix films, starring Keanu Reeves, paint a terrifying picture.

The future is uncertain and the end is always near – Jim Morrison famously sang with his band The Doors in a song named ‘Roadhouse Blues.’ Predictions about the future are generally wrong and the pace of change is such that previous experience is less valuable to form views about the future. There are several troubling tendencies that will mark the future, particularly rising inequality and a massive concentration of riches at the top, coupled with economic stagnation of the middle and lower classes. The rise of extremist populists on both sides of the spectrum together with an erosion in trust in the institutions of democracy has become a reality. Geopolitical instability is on the rise as the United States’ power disparity eases, and China catches up. Technological innovation does create ample opportunity to tackle many of these issues, so the real question is whether humanity will be able to orchestrate a future where most are well off together, or only a few at the expense of the rest. Weirdly enough, it’s the same problem we’ve always faced.