Technology

We're not sure exactly when humans mastered fire and started using it to cook. We may have started as far back as 2 million years ago, though cooking likely wasn't widespread until around 200,000 BCE.

But we do know that cooking increased the calories we got from our food, and those calories likely fueled the evolution of our brains, turning us into Earth's most intelligent creatures.

This is widely considered one of our greatest accomplishments. Fire — and technology as a whole — is a big part of what makes us human.

But learning to control fire also exposed us to the dangers of fire. Without proper precautions, knocking over a single candle can level entire neighborhoods.

Every new technological advance since fire has come with its own benefits and risks. And with each invention, we've reoriented our societies around that advance to minimize the downsides and better leverage the upsides. We owe much of our modern existence to things like building codes, nuclear treaties, and seat belts — all of which made new technologies safer.

Today, we're on the cusp of what may become one of the most significant technologies we've ever created: artificial intelligence.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the World Economic Forum last year, "Al is one of the most profound things we're working on as humanity. It's more profound than fire or electricity."

We don't know yet what risks AI will bring. If it ever reaches human levels of intelligence, AI may be capable of improving itself. And because computers can work much faster than us, a human-level AI might be able to transform itself into something much smarter than us virtually overnight.

What happens when an entity at least as smart as us, but without the same rationality and ethics that we take for granted in humans, becomes ubiquitous? And how will we navigate a world where we are no longer the smartest beings?

That world is fast approaching: Computers are already better than us at games like Chess and Go, and GPT-4 scores in the top 15% on many standardized exams.

History tells us that we'll continue to adjust and find ways to offset the risks. If Pichai's promise holds true — that AI will be more profound than fire — it will help us unlock the universe's secrets, generating new knowledge at an unprecedented scale and unleashing our creativity as a species.

It will make us smarter. And more human.

When I was in elementary school, we participated in a series of workshops designed to help us navigate bullying. We'd participate in skits to act out what confronting a bully on the playground might look like and discuss strategies for intervening.

In one of these classes, we talked about the difference between being an ally and a bystander. We used a chart like this one to plot the different roles you might play when encountering conflict:

The purpose of this table, of course, was to illustrate the fact that it is impossible to be a passive ally. You can be an active ally by confronting the bully or an active bystander by egging them on. But if you are standing on the edge of a fight, silently supporting the recipient of bullying, you are not a passive ally — you're a passive bystander.

As adults, this is perhaps obvious when spelled out so explicitly. But there are many places outside of bullying where this framework is useful.

Consider social networks, for example: In the beginning, these networks tried to argue that they were simply neutral channels. In the same way an ISP doesn't prevent you from seeing racist content or harassing behavior online, social network execs argued they were simply promoting free speech — that they were not in the business of making editorial decisions about which content gets amplified or suppressed. (There were exceptions, of course, for things like nudity and illegal speech.)

Over time, however, we discovered that this neutrality was a mirage, because misinformation and inflammatory content typically get higher engagement. And algorithms aren't objective arbiters free of the biases that affect their creators.

Social networks were trying to be passive bystanders. And even as they've evolved to play heavier moderator roles over time, these "neutral" platforms continue to struggle with harassment, which disproportionately alienates women and minorities — exactly the voices that the internet should be amplifying.

The internet (and technology as a whole) magnifies human — both the good and the bad. But we can design and use technology in ways that reward the former.

That process starts with us serving as active allies for the world we want to live in — not passive bystanders to the status quo.

Some YouTubers intentionally add typos to their videos in order to extend their reach. By subtly stoking outrage over minor "mistakes," creators can boost their engagement.

The internet gives marginalized voices a platform, breaks down barriers, and ultimately makes us more human.

But what happens when the platforms that run on it incentivize us to deliberately lower the quality of our work? That's a signal it's time to reimagine how the work we create gets prioritized and shared.

In 1939, Hitler's invasion of Poland marked the beginning of the most devastating war in human history. It started on horseback, and concluded with the invention of nuclear fission only six years later.

When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1958, the US responded by forming NASA and landing a man on the moon in just over a decade.

And when a novel and deadly virus started spreading rapidly in Wuhan in December of 2019, scientists sequenced and published its genome online mere days after its discovery.

Fear is a powerful motivator. It may not always be the most effective at inspiring action in those you lead, but it's a major catalyst for technological innovation.

And even on the individual level, sometimes a little bit of fear can help us rise to the occasion.

Hat tip to Morgan Housel for sharing these examples.

If you turned on the radio in 1948, you could listen to anything you wanted, as long as what you wanted was being broadcast by your local station.

It was probably Bing Crosby.

Until recently, most of the media you had access to was created for a mass audience.

The internet turned this on its head. As a creator, your work no longer needs to appeal to the largest possible audience, because sharing is free and discovery is easy.

Instead, you can create for the long tail, which refers to the wide range of smaller niches that are now accessible. Here's a graph of what that distribution looks like:

The long tail refers to the yellow part above — the tail-like extension of lower frequency phenomena.

Though the term has been used in statistics for decades, Chris Anderson popularized it in a 2004 Wired article. He writes:

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

Today, in a world of nearly infinite information sources and entertainment options, you can find and listen to exactly what you want.

If you need the perfect soundtrack for sitting on your porch, look no further than Spotify's front porch playlist.

Need something for the back porch instead? They've got you covered there too.

The implications of this access to entertainment and information go far beyond music. By enabling niche communities to assemble online, the web allows people to find those who are similar.

For example, transgender teens living in rural communities can discuss their experience together. COVID long haulers can compare symptoms with people who have related issues. And if you need help building a hurdy-gurdy, a hand-cranked, 10th century fiddle, then you're in luck.

By connecting us with the long tail of communities that fulfill niche needs and interests, the internet shapes our identity and helps culture and knowledge flourish.

In other words, the internet makes us more human.

Throughout history, each development in the storage and distribution of information has caused considerable consternation.

Socrates worried about the invention of writing:

The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

And he was not alone! Plato was more succinct in expressing his fear:

Writing is a step backward for truth.

These concerns only increased when the printing press came along centuries later. Here's German polymath's Gottfried Wilhelm reaction in 1680:

The horrible mass of books that keeps growing might lead to a fall back into barbarism.

And, of course, the 20th century's rise of mass media is not exempt from these issues.

U.S. Senator Clyde L. Herring railed against radio in the 1930s, proposing that the FCC should review transcripts of broadcasts to ensure that they were not against public interest. He wrote:

Radio invades the sanctity of the home.

And Neil Postman, who published Amusing Ouselves to Death in 1985, captured some of the concerns about television:

[T]elevision is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.

Replace "television" with "social media," and Postman's quote captures today's concerns about the internet.

There is certainly cause for concern: We've never before had information that algorithmically adjusts to users' preferences.

But when we look at the precedents, we can see that we've successfully adjusted to every other shift in how information is distributed.

As I was writing this, Twitter suspended congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene's personal account for spreading COVID misinformation and violating its policies for a 5th time.

We're adapting.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

As society becomes increasingly digitized, the way we work is fundamentally changing.

This is most obvious in the gig economy, where workers often don't have a manager they report to. They have an app.

15 years ago, cab drivers needed a local dispatcher to instruct them where to go. Now, programmers' code pairs them with a rider and even provides a specific route to take.

Peter Reinhardt pointed out this stripping away of middle management back in 2015. Jobs increasingly fall into one of two categories: Either you tell computers what to do for a living or they tell you what to do.

Reinhardt describes this stratification as "above and below the API," which stands for "application programming interface." It refers to the software layer between two applications that allows them to talk to each other.

APIs are powerful, because they're part of what enable us to abstract away problems, making future innovation easier.

But when a human is effectively on the other side of that API, not another piece of software, the fabric of our society starts to change on a foundational level.

What happens when computers are given increasing levels of autonomy? And when you pair that autonomy with "real-world APIs," what happens to our communities when more and more of our jobs are managed by instructions we've given to a computer?

These questions will remain unanswered for quite some time. But significant change is coming, and there are two ways we can approach it.

On the one hand, we can dig our heels in and resist this evolution in labor. Certainly, some caution is merited, given the inherent risks involved in such profound change and the unknowns surrounding artificial intelligence.

But we can also see it as a generational opportunity to rethink how work gets done, how resources get distributed, and what kind of world we want to live in.

In other words, we have a chance to reprogram society — hopefully for the better.

Let's not waste it.