World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

It took vast new quantities of meat and corn to fabricate these dishes, a spike in demand that re-created the very essence of American agriculture and exacted a terrible environmental toll. A whole new system of industrial farming emerged, with penny-conscious conglomerates cramming chickens into feces-covered pens and stuffing them full of antibiotics. By the time we came to understand the consequences of our revised patterns of consumption, the damage had been done to our waistline, longevity, soul, and planet.

Something like the midcentury food revolution is now reordering the production and consumption of knowledge. Our intellectual habits are being scrambled by the dominant firms. Just as Nabisco and Kraft wanted to change how we eat and what we eat, Amazon, Facebook, and Google aspire to alter how we read and what we read.

Sixty-two percent of Americans get their news through social media, and most of it via Facebook; a third of all traffic to media sites flows from Google.

Even journalists of the highest integrity have internalized a new mind-set; they worry about how to successfully pander to Google’s and Facebook’s algorithms. In pursuit of clicks, some of our nation’s most important purveyors of news have embraced sensationalism;

As Fred Turner has written in his important book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, “[The catalog] helped create the conditions under which microcomputers and computer networks could be imagined as tools of liberation.”

Rolling Stone in 1972. The article was a vivid, energetic piece of New Journalism: “The most bzz-bzz-busy scene I’ve been around since Merry Prankster Acid Tests.”

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian academic turned pop icon.

McLuhan also passionately craved wholeness and then some, which he described rhapsodically: Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to bypass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by [twentieth-century French philosopher Henri] Bergson. The condition of “weightlessness,” that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace. Eternal life, eternal peace . . . the devoutly Catholic McLuhan had ventured beyond political prophecy to a more biblical form.

Technology enabled what H. G. Wells once called the World Brain, or what Wired editor Kevin Kelly called the hive mind.

Linus Torvalds, the engineer who created Linux, argued, “Money is not the greatest of motivators. It’s been well established that folks do their best work when they are driven by a passion.”

Each pathbreaking innovation promises to liberate technology from the talons of the monopolists, to create a new network so democratic that it will transform human nature. Somehow, in each instance, humanity remains its familiar self. Instead of profound redistributions of power, the new networks are captured by new monopolies, each more powerful and sophisticated than the one before it.

The personal computer came to be dominated by a single innovation-inhibiting firm (Microsoft). Access to the Internet soon required handing over substantial monthly sums to telecommunication toll collectors who carved up the map into zones of barely challenged supremacy (Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner). Meanwhile, one site (Google) emerged as the portal to knowledge; another (Amazon) as the starting point of all commerce. And even though we can talk about social networks in the plural, really only one (Facebook) encompasses nearly two billion individuals.

There are certain systems—the telephone and telegraph are classic examples—that simply never would have flourished in a competitive market. The costs of setting up a massive network are immense. Imagine the expense of laying down all those lines crisscrossing the continent. The inefficiency of rival networks is too great. We must, therefore, forgive the size of the firms that provide these essential services—and give them space to cooperate with the government and other big firms so that they can prudently eliminate waste and make disinterested strategic choices. This was what the visionary Theodore Vail, who built AT&T in the first decades of the last century, claimed: “Competition means strife, industrial warfare; it means contention; it oftentimes means taking advantage of or resorting to any means that the conscience of the contestants . . . will permit.” Even the railroad barons, the most conniving creatures that capitalism ever created, extolled the virtues of altruistic collaboration. J. P. Morgan himself sincerely believed this gospel. As the biographer Ron Chernow writes, “America’s most famous financier was a sworn foe of free markets.”

Peter Thiel.

Marc Andreessen, one of the Valley’s most venerable characters, is blunt about this tendency toward monopoly: “The big technology markets actually tend to be winner take all. There is this presumption—in normal markets you can have Pepsi and Coke. In technology markets in the long run you tend to only have one, or rather the number one company.” That is the nub of it: In Silicon Valley, everything is one; it’s always been one.

At the epicenter of Google’s bulging portfolio is one master project: The company wants to create machines that replicate the human brain, and then advance beyond.

Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the Web,

He posited that procedures contained in Robert’s Rules of Order, a late-nineteenth-century manual for running effective meetings, could provide the basis for building AI.

It is a testament to Carl Page’s teaching that his son went on to found the most successful, most ambitious AI company in history. Although we don’t think of Google that way, AI is precisely the source of the company’s greatness. Google uses algorithms, trained to think just like you. To accomplish this daunting task, Google must understand the intentions behind your query: When you typed “rock,” did you mean the geological feature or the musical genre or the wrestler-turned-actor? Google’s AI is so proficient that it can even supply the results for your query before you’ve finished typing it.

“Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.”

PAGE AND BRIN ARE CREATING a brain unhindered by human bias, uninfluenced by irrational desires and dubious sensory instructions that emanate from the body.

Over the centuries, mathematicians and logicians—Gottfried Leibniz, George Boole, Alfred North Whitehead—aspired to create a new system that would express thought in its purest (and therefore most divine) form. But for all the genius of these new systems, the prison of the body remained. Philosophy couldn’t emancipate the mind, but technology just might. Google has set out to succeed where Descartes failed, except that it has jettisoned all the philosophical questions that rattled around in his head. Where Descartes emphasized skepticism and doubt, Google is never plagued by second-guessing. It has turned the liberation of the brain into an engineering challenge—an exercise that often fails to ask basic questions about the human implications of the project.

Turing had “the gift for solitary thinking.” He was capable of intense concentration that blocked received wisdom and the orthodoxies of his colleagues from infiltrating his thoughts.

The mathematicians and engineers may have disavowed the existence of God, but they placed themselves in a celestial role of giving life to a pile of inorganic material. And it changed them.

Turing believed that the computer wasn’t just a machine, it was also a child, a being capable of learning. At times, he described his invention as if it were an English public-school boy, making progress thanks only to a healthy dose of punishment and the occasional rewards.

Yet, he never did doubt its potential to achieve: “We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.” He wrote those words in 1950, when computers were relatively impotent, very large boxes that could do a little bit of math. At that moment, there was little evidence to justify the belief that these machines would ever acquire the capabilities of the human brain. Still, Turing had faith. He imagined a test of the computer’s intelligence in which a person would send written questions to a human and a machine in another room. Receiving two sets of answers, the ...

Ray Kurzweil.

singularity.

In Kurzweil’s telling, the singularity is when artificial intelligence becomes all-powerful, when computers are capable of designing and building other computers. This superintelligence will, of course, create a superintelligence even more powerful than itself—and so on, down the posthuman generations.

Law of Accelerating Returns.

These developments will allow us to finally shed our “frail” and “limited” human bodies and brains, what he calls our “version 1.0 biological bodies.” We will fully merge with machines; our existence will become virtual; our brains will be uploaded. Thanks to his scientific reading, he can tell you the singularity will dawn in the year 2045.

Kurzweil puts it, “We will be software, not hardware,” and able to inhabit whatever hardware we like best.

The Age of Spiritual Machines

Robert Geraci studied Kurzweil and other singularitarians, he noticed how precisely their belief seemed to echo Christian apocalyptic texts. “Apocalyptic AI is the legitimate heir to these religious promises, not a bastardized version of them,” he concluded. “In Apocalyptic AI, technological research and religious categories come together in a stirringly well-integrated unit.”

PageRank.

Research is a pursuit Page cherishes, and in which Google invests vast sums—last year it spent nearly $12.5 billion on R&D and on projects that it won’t foreseeably monetize. The company has built a revolving front door through which superstar professors regularly cycle, joining the company’s most audacious ventures. If there’s tension between profit and the pursuit of scientific purity, Page will make a big show of choosing the path of purity. That is, of course, a source of Google’s success over the years.

Google abhorred MBA types. It stubbornly resisted the creation of a marketing department. Page prided himself on hiring engineers for business-minded jobs that would traditionally go to someone trained in, say, finance. Even as Google came to employ tens of thousands of workers, Larry Page personally reviewed a file on each potential hire to make sure that the company didn’t veer too far from its engineering roots.

We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have.”

a project called Google Brain, a moniker with creepy implications. (“The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it,” Eric Schmidt has quipped.)

Geoff Hinton,

Singularity University, housed on a NASA campus in Silicon Valley—a

There are parts of the world, even in the United States, where Facebook emboldens citizens and enables them to organize themselves in opposition to power. But we shouldn’t accept Facebook’s self-conception as sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation, but that’s a surface trait. In reality, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioral experiments. While it creates the impression that it offers choice, Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that thoroughly addicts them. It’s a phoniness most obvious in the compressed, historic career of Facebook’s mastermind.

They hated all the old ancient bastions of parasitic power—the feudal lords, the priests, and the warriors—but they also feared the chaos of the mob. To split the difference, they proposed a form of technocracy—engineers and assorted technicians would rule with beneficent disinterestedness. Engineers would strip the old order of its power, while governing in the spirit of science. They would impose rationality and order. This dream has captivated intellectuals ever since, especially Americans.

The Hoover experiment, in the end, hardly realized the happy fantasies about the Engineer King. A very different version of this dream, however, has come to fruition, in the form of the CEOs of the big tech companies. We’re not ruled by engineers, not yet, but they have become the dominant force in American life, the highest, most influential tier of our elite.

These companies can justify their incursions into our lives with the very arguments that Saint-Simon and Comte articulated: They are supplying us with efficiency; they are imposing order on human life.

With a turn of the crank in one direction the Stepped Reckoner could multiply, in the other direction divide. Leibniz had designed a user interface so meticulous that Steve Jobs would have bowed down before it.

“Let’s calculate!” There would be no need for wars, let alone theological controversy, because truth would be placed on the terra firma of math.

They began to describe their work as algorithmic, in part because it tied them to one of the greatest of all mathematicians—the Persian polymath Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmi, or as he was known in Latin, Algoritmi. During

In the hands of Google and Facebook, these algorithms grew ever more powerful. As they went about their searches, they accumulated more and more data. Their machines assimilated all the lessons of past searches, using these learnings to more precisely deliver the desired results. For the entirety of human existence, the creation of knowledge was a slog of trial and error. Humans would dream up theories of how the world worked, then would examine the evidence to see whether their hypotheses survived or crashed upon their exposure to reality. Algorithms upend the scientific method—the patterns emerge from the data, from correlations, unguided by hypotheses. They remove humans from the whole process of inquiry. Writing in Wired, Chris Anderson argued: “We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.”

Walmart’s algorithms found that people desperately buy strawberry Pop-Tarts as they prepare for massive storms.