The invisible architecture: technology's slow rebuilding of the world
Success often follows where business thrives, shaping both community progress and personal achievement. From tiny shops to corporate giants, each fuels the economy, opens jobs, pushes fresh ideas into motioif you didn’t, you touched a colossal thing: the network of wires, satellites, data centers, and algorithms stretching across the globe. Within one human life-span it is rapidly becoming as fundamental to the human narrative as the road, electricity, and language; we aren't consuming, we are using it to build and understand the world.
THE SPEED TO WHICH NOBODY VOTED.
In fact, maybe the most surprising part of the digital revolution isn't so much what has been built, but how it's been built so fast. Smart phones have only been around for less than twenty years and already more than half of adults in the world own a smart phone; more than half of adults around the world own one already! and yet over half of adults worldwide already own one. Social networks, with the capacity to overthrow governments, poison our collective public health and dictate our every trend did not exist in 2000; and large language models able to pass the medical licensing exam have only existed for a few years, having previously been a purely theoretical concept.
While our institutions, our laws, and perhaps even our psychologies are still scrambling to catch up, the notion that technology will be so polite as to wait for us seems to have little to no likelihood whatsoever; our laws lag behind, our ethics by even further, and even those who build the technologies do not have a full understanding of the direction in which they will take us. We are an empire eternally indebted to a system of innovation that we neither fully control, nor necessarily truly understand but it must be said that this is not entirely new.
The printing press challenged the church’s monopoly before the idea of a free press.The industrial revolution changed cities and families while the law had yet to fully catch up to its effects. Today, the speed, scope and closeness of the revolution is changing not only where we labor but also how we think, remember, love and mourn.
THE DATA WE LEAVE BEHIND.
Every interaction with machines creates data. The concept of this is as cliched as it is difficult to conceptually grasp: when your GPS reroutes you through obscure side streets, that is because a significant number of people, yourself included, are feeding real-time data. When a website plays you the next video, it’s because millions of people clicked on a related video or searched for a similar query; and when an AI can predict early disease onset, it is because humans painstakingly label thousands of medical images.
Like iron was during the industrial revolution, data has become the new raw material; but unlike iron, it’s been argued that the raw material is anything but passive or inert; within our data lies a portrait of who we are and who society is; the inequalities it mirrors; the biases it represents; our own blind spots: Algorithms that determine who gets interviewed for a job make choices that are seemingly neutral, but they replicate existing human prejudices through the reinforcement of stereotypes. Facial recognition systems that struggle to detect darker skin tones are simply poorly designed due to imbalanced training data
Algorithms that favor outrage over nuanced thought, because it’s what gets more ad revenue, will necessarily exacerbate the problem of tribalization and anger; these are all indictments of not our , but of ourselves.
Rethinking Intelligence.
Of our technologies, AI is arguably the most consequential to how we think. It challenges many deeply held notions of what it means to be human-that we are alone in our ability to think, to create and to communicate. AI is now composing symphonies, writing poetry, diagnosing cancer and conversing in near human indistinguishable forms. Conversely it lies (and hallucinates) is unaware of its own meaning or impact and its rapid development is outpacing even the most ambitious projections from five years prior.
Its economic consequences are almost certain to be revolutionary. The nature of jobs will shift through elimination and augmentation and, as calculators were to mathematicians, computers will complement humans allowing for capabilities and discoveries unimagined by a 1995 human (or data scientists, and social media managers). Across our societies and how we understand ourselves it all asks: What do we mean by "human creativity," if machines can generate paintings and sonatas? What do we mean by "human compassion" when machines can perform it? These are no longer theoretical musings but practical political and economic questions.
THE UNEQUAL REVOLUTION.
Like every revolution before it, AI is being presented as a great equalizer; and to an extent it may be, allowing farmers the use of instantaneous commodity prices and expert advice that a decade ago would require a team of consultants. However the beneficiaries of this newest revolution are not so equal at all. We often take the availability of reliable internet, the very framework on which all of this exists, for granted, and billions still lack it. It is a massive source of wealth concentrated in small sectors in China, the US, and the EU where the engineers that produce it do so under the direction of the rich, at air-conditioned desks removed from the indignity of physical work
Our digital revolution is not by default inherently levelling, and replicating, rather than challenging, the existing capital structures, infrastructure, political, moral intentions and social biases of the societies from which it grows.
LIVING WITH WHAT WE HAVE BUILT.
Indeed, this revolution has moved at such speed that technology feels like something that is happening to us, not by us, a force akin to the weather...