When Technology and Humanity Cross

Gerd Leonard - His book “Technology vs. Humanity: The coming clash between man and machine”
Digital atomic bombs
We have not thought through what AI, IoT, big data, social media, cloud, ICT, genome editing, could possibly
do. He compares it to the invention of the atomic bomb. Things were a lot less fast in those days. We are
dealing with a digital nuclear bomb, and it might explode before we realise what we have gotten ourselves into.
Exponential technology could soon trigger a chain of “A-bomb challenges” or “digital Hiroshimas”
Dark trends
As Peter Diamandis’ 6Ds, he identified a number of effects. Call it the dark side of the 6Ds.
 Dependency — Leaving our thinking to software and algorithms because it’s just so much more
convenient and fast.
 Confusion — Not knowing if it was the intended human who replied to my emails, or her AI assistant.
Or even not knowing if I made my own decision or if I was manipulated by my IDA.
 Loss of control — Not having a way of knowing if the AI’s anticipation was correct or not, as we could
not possibly track the system’s logic or even comprehend the workings of a quantum computing-fueled,
machine-learning system. In other words, we would need to either trust it completely or not at all,
similar to the dilemma that some airplane pilots are already facing with their autopilot systems.
 Abdication — Being tempted to leave more tasks to systems that would handle them for us, whether it
is coordinating personal schedules, making appointments, or answering simple emails. Then, of course,
it would be very likely that we would simply blame the cloud/bot/AI if something went wrong.
More dark trends
Other dark trends he identifies are:
 Social autism (we love our screen more than we love people).
 Addiction to technology (“mobile devices are the new cigarettes”).
 Digital obesity. Every consumer in developed countries unwittingly ingests an estimated 150 pounds of
additives — mostly sugar, yeast, and antioxidants, as well as truly nasty stuff such as MSG. Thus
consumers are strung along by cleverly engineering a “need-for-more” so that it becomes very hard to
find the exit from that kingdom of endless, happy consumption. If this sounds like Facebook or your
smartphone, you are getting my drift. The food industry actually calls this cravability or crave-ability. In
the world of technology, marketers call it magic, stickiness, indispensability, or more benignly, user
engagement. Craving and addiction as tech’s business model. Think 2020 and imagine billions of
hyperconnected consumers becoming digitally obese, hooked on a constant drip of information, media,
and data — and their own feedback loops.
 Digital feudalism (winners, ie platform winning it all).
 Security, because with virtualisation comes decentralising with many fewer points of physical control.
 Software soon eating biology,” and the increasing temptation to virtualise humans via brain-uploading
or cyborgism — the dream of many transhumanists.
 Forgetting ourselves exponentially and sleepwalking through digital life, opening the door to a kind of
global digital feudalism — where the overlords of technology rule us in ways that are beyond our
understanding.
 Treating people in a social security environment just by the numbers, as disembodied data sources
  The development of digital egos as a true copy of ourselves thanks to a combination of fast, cheap, and
ultra-powerful tools, including mobile cloud technologies, personalization, voice and image recognition,
mood analytics, and sentiment analysis. Eventually, we will be constantly connected to machines, and
they are getting better and better at reading our minds. It will lead to the end of free will.
 How our choices will be shaped if what we see and hear about each other is determined purely by
algorithms that are designed to make you stay and view ads as long as possible, rather than by
people? What if these tools are not publicly controlled, supervised or regulated…? As Taleb said “The
difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free”.
 Software no longer just “eating the world” but increasingly “cheat the world.”
 Everyone and everything becomes a data beacon, generating thousands of gigabytes per day,
collected, filtered, and analyzed in the cloud by armies of IBM’s Watsons and Google’s DeepMinds
applying their hungry, self-learning global AI brains every second.
 Low-cost, ubiquitous digital technologies have made it possible for us to outsource our thinking, our
decisions, and our memories to ever-cheaper mobile devices and the intelligent clouds behind them.
These “external brains” are morphing quickly from knowing-me to representing-me to being-me.
 In its darkest variation, the IoT could be the climax of machine thinking — the most perfect spying
operating system (OS) ever devised, the largest real-time surveillance network ever contrived,
enforcing total human compliance and killing off all remaining semblance of anonymity.
Sitting ducks
We will become sitting ducks for manipulation and undue influence by anyone who knows how to use the
system. As biology gives way to technology, our biological systems will become increasingly optional,
replaceable, and finally even vestigial.
Internalisation of technology
Technology is going internal — separating us from the world, increasingly disconnecting us from human
experiences. We are already starting to confuse the magic of the tools with the drug-like effect of constant
connectivity, mediasation, screenification, simulation, and virtualisation. The magic is already becoming manic
— addictive, tempting, nudging, demanding — so what will happen when the magic quotient reaches 1,000,
when technology becomes infinitely more powerful, cheap, and inseparable from us? At some point in the not-
so-distant future we may have to consider the ultimate question: Do we now live inside the machine, or does
the machine live inside of us? Data is the new oil: pay or become the content.
The gap
We are facing an enormous gap between what technology can do (the answer seems to be pretty much
anything), and what it should do to result in overall human happiness. To safeguard humanity’s future, we must
invest as much energy in furthering humanity as we do in developing technology. Algorithms can measure or
even simulate everything except for what really matters to humans. Misdefining what human flourishing means,
will only empower machines.
Humanity is at risk
The risk with that is that we will be losing humanity. Automation is exploding because it’s abundantly clear that
humans are expensive, slow, and often inefficient, whereas machines are cheap, fast, ultra-efficient, and
becoming exponentially more so.
Debug humanity
We are in danger of debugging humanity. Debugging mystery, mistakes, and serendipity, and debugging slow,
tedious human behaviours like discussion, pondering, and emotions. Being human is just too cumbersome.
Automation is exploding because it’s abundantly clear that humans are expensive, slow, and often inefficient,
whereas machines are cheap, fast, ultra-efficient, and becoming exponentially more. Will we eventually be a
species completely devoid of consciousness, mystery, spirituality, and soul, simply because there’s no room
for these androrithms in this coming machine age? Zoom forward another ten years, and we may indeed end
up 95% automated, hyperconnected, virtualised, uber-efficient, and much less human than we could ever
imagine today.
Human rights
He suggests five new human rights for the Digital Age
1. The right to remain natural, i.e. biological — We must have the choice to exist in an unaugmented
state.
2. The right to be inefficient if and where it defines our basic humanness
3. We must have the choice to be slower than technology.
4. The right to disconnect — We must retain the right to switch off connectivity, to “go dark” on the
network, and to pause communications, tracking, and monitoring.
5. The right to be anonymous — In this coming hyperconnected world, we should still have the option of
not being identified and tracked,
Rules
And some rules:
 We shall not empower machines to empower themselves, and thereby circumvent human control.
 We shall not seek to minimise human flaws just to make a better fit with technology.
 We shall not attempt to abolish mistakes, mystery, accidents, and chance by using technology to
predict or prevent them, and we shall not strive to make everything explicit just because technology
may make it feasible to do so.
 We shall not create, engineer, or distribute any technology with the primary goal of generating addiction
to it.
 We shall not confuse a clean algorithm for an accurate picture of human reality
 We must not pursue efficiency over humanity
Could or should?
What can we do about technology taking over where it should not? How can we protect ourselves from merely
becoming the objects of bot-fueled hyper-efficiency, feeding a giant AI that in turn dictates our lives and tells us
what we can no longer do? In the very near future, it will no longer be about whether technology can do
something (the answer will almost always be yes) but whether it should do. He is concerned that we may soon
become completely useless without technology — slow, incomplete, dumb, deskilled, lazy, and obese.
Erosion of humanity
Imagine what would happen if we continued to chip away at and ultimately erode quintessential human
qualities such as privacy, mystery, anonymity, emotions, spontaneity, surprise, intuition, imagination, and
spirituality — just so that we can keep up with the machines.