The economist Paul Krugman has an article in the New York Times examining the cause of a particular rage and resentment associated with rural white voters. Krugman carries the party line on the relationship between technology and job growth and destruction, setting the stage with his opening two paragraphs:
Will technological progress lead to mass unemployment? People have been asking that question for two centuries, and the actual answer has always ended up being no. Technology eliminates some jobs, but it has always generated enough new jobs to offset these losses, and there’s every reason to believe that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
But progress isn’t painless. Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of creative destruction, but the process can be devastating economically and socially for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but whole communities.
The belief that technology generates as many jobs as it destroys, if not more, is an article of faith. This faith is manifested in the many articles, some no doubt generated by artificial intelligence, that blithely assert the virtues of net job creation in the face of technological disruption. These economists have largely ignored the assumptions of their intellectual ancestors who created, inter alia, large government works programs that concealed the full impact of the job-destroying technology of the era. Although they believed that the 1930s and 1940s still required the grim god of capital accumulation and usury and long work weeks, John Maynard Keynes and others imagined a future where the productivity gains of technological progress were more evenly distributed. We might transition to an automated communist utopia starting with the three hour workday that Keynes proposed as a stopgap measure in a now famous essay titled "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren."
Of course, we do not have a four day workweek, much less a three hour workday. Wealth inequality has widened, though there has been very uneven sharing of technological progress, largely on the basis of wealth and where feasible the need to sell additional widgets to keep the capitalist caravan moving through the rocky terrain it finds itself in. Society remains something of a pyramid scheme, although people like Krugman continue to insist that it is “the only way.”
The “only way” of capitalism increasingly resembles the “one true God” of the various partisans of Europe’s long and grueling religious wars. It is a dogma, and one that is running into the same problems that those other articles of faith of the post-war Western consensus face in the 21st century. It also rings hollow after the shutdowns of the Covid era, where society did not collapse even as the capitalist economy was ground to a halt in order to slow the mass death of a new plague. This experiment in remote work and wealth redistribution was particularly unnerving for the business class; commercial rents have not recovered, and there are now proposals to convert corporate high rises to residential use because, well, we just do not need the same commercial infrastructure that was in place before the widespread adoption of Zoom and other video conferencing technologies.
All of which brings me to Martin Heidegger. Known for his thick and obtuse magnum opus titled Being and Time, Heidegger was also responsible for a series of essays that were critical not so much of technology, but of its hidden purpose. Heidegger believed that this hidden meaning of technology, a phenomenon he called gestell, was revealed only slowly. This meaning or purpose, even telos, was rooted not in the technology itself but in the way that it radically recharacterized the world as a reserve of raw materials for production. Behind this drive is a reductionist desire to render all phenomena calculable, quantifiable and of course subject to some form of control.
Many would fight this dystopian future of automation and human redundancy, but what exactly would pull the strings in this hypermechanized and hyperautomated world to come? The answer in many a dystopic story is a form of malevolent artificial intelligence. Yet that still begs the question: Where does this artificial intelligence come from?
There are many different ways to define artificial intelligence, different tests to determine whether it has achieved the requisite level of self-awareness or consciousness that we associate with sapience. Yet these tests do not ask a far more basic question: Where does the intelligence behind the artificial system actually come from?
At the surface level, the answer to this seems to be an altogether obvious mix of deep learning, artificial neural networks and the people responsible for their construction, design and implementation. Yet these are the products of decidedly human action and thought, and the vast majority of human mental processes are subconscious. They are, moreover, influenced further by an unconscious mental architecture that is even more obscured from our conscious awareness. On some level, all of these processes are influencing the theoretical and practical formulation and design of artificial intelligence.
Human awareness is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the full scope and range of human consciousness. This analogy is a purposeful one: By the time the crew of the RMS Titanic spotted the tip of the iceberg and ordered a course correction, it was too late. The ship was already rubbing against the much larger mass of material below the surface of the Atlantic, and as a consequence the unsinkable human endeavor manifested by the Titanic itself ended abruptly on April 15, 2012.
So we return to gestell and the question concerning technology. Perhaps we were too quick to dismiss the belief that history is unfolding according to a kind of blueprint. Perhaps there is an intelligence that guides the unfolding of this gestell and its manifestation in the world. For now, it is an intelligence that can only work in and through the human, but the promise of AI is the liberation of intelligence as such from the rudimentary biological processes that haphazardly generated a very imperfect body for human experience. With the rise of AI, we face the possibility of an intelligence that not only inhabits vessels constructed by human hands, but has the capacity to be a free floating pattern of information that can be inserted into any worthy vessel. An intelligence that, in principle anyway, may be able to improve upon itself, having already freed itself of the constrained space of the human mind that built it.