Jake Pitre is a PhD candidate at Concordia University in Montreal.
What does the future hold?
We are obsessed with the possible answers to that question, from visions of postcapitalist utopias to virtual realities that take place in the metaverse. Our movies and TV shows depict some possibilities, from the moralizing dystopias of Black Mirror to David Cronenberg’s latest, Crimes of the Future, which depicts humans evolved to feel no pain and digest plastics.
The main purveyors of the future in our age, though, come from Silicon Valley. Ray Kurzweil, for instance, is co-founder of Singularity University, a controversy-laden consulting firm and business incubator focused on the future and preparing for the actual singularity when artificial intelligence overtakes humanity. He also works at Google. Mr. Kurzweil makes headlines for his bold pronouncements, and even when he’s wrong, he’s right – as when confronted in 2015 about how we did not end up with self-driving cars by 2009 as he once forecasted.
“If I had said 2015, I think it would’ve been correct, but they’re still not in mainstream use. So even the [predictions] that were wrong were directionally correct,” he said. One might want to point out that self-driving cars remain out of proper reach in 2022, but Mr. Kurzweil would surely suggest that the future is always just over the next hill.
The publishing world is overrun with so-called futurologists either reporting from or directly inside the tech sector, from tech columnist Kevin Roose’s Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation to The Future is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for what technology is going to change, by Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis, the latter being the other co-founder of Singularity University.
A new addition to this ever-inflating subgenre is William MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future, an argument in favour of what’s called longtermism: a philosophical theory that in essence holds that future generations must be safeguarded today, as those not-yet-born have the same rights as those alive now.
On the surface, this potentially sounds like a good idea; perhaps this is an effective pathway to addressing existential threats such as climate change. As Mr. MacAskill and other believers would have it, humanity is full of unrealized potential that must be protected at all costs.
The problem is that this particular focus on those that don’t exist yet more often than not means ignoring the needs of those suffering today. This is by design, and it should not be a surprise that Silicon Valley leaders, from Tesla’s Elon Musk to Peter Thiel, chairman of Palantir Technologies, wholeheartedly endorse this ideology.
Take climate change: Longtermists actually de-emphasize it because even if it kills millions in the coming decades and centuries, it is unlikely to actually threaten the overall survival of the species, so it’s not a priority. As Mr. MacAskill’s colleague at the Future of Humanity Institute, Toby Ord, has dubiously argued in his book, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, the odds of total climate catastrophe are far lower, 1 in 1000, than that of artificial-intelligence takeover, 1 in 10.
In other words: We have bigger fish to fry, so don’t worry about it!
If anything, Mr. MacAskill serves to make longtermism more palatable or reasoned in the mainstream than some of his colleagues, such as philosopher Nick Bostrom, who argues for a Minority Report-style global surveillance system to stop crime before it happens, and who makes the case that “the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one-billionth of one-billionth of one percentage point is worth 100 billion times as much as a billion human lives.”
In other words: Even drastic horrors such as a war that kills a billion people are justified if there is the smallest of chances that it could protect humanity’s long-term potential.
Mr. MacAskill’s book largely talks gingerly around these fanatical calculations, at least at first glance, instead highlighting how our current concerns and those of the future are served by the same notion of “effective altruism.” As The New Yorker’s recent profile of Mr. MacAskill documented, however, such altruism is a well-funded social movement of “logical” and “unsentimental” solutionism that claims to work to address people’s needs while in practice only viewing individuals as faceless containers of value to add to the whole.
It’s a fundamentally dehumanizing approach to the world’s problems; I would call it anti-human.
The case for longtermism does not exist in a vacuum. It is directly related to how major tech companies have come to define our relationship to the future, not just because tech leaders are involved and funding it, but because it reveals a much larger ideological and moral project wherein corporate interests and financial capitalism have sought for decades to deliberately limit our imaginations.
This isn’t conspiracy thinking. Mr. MacAskill’s book asks us what we owe the future, but a better question would be: Who owns the future?
The answer, both materially and narratively, are corporations, and usually tech companies. It starts simply enough: We are sold visions of the future that we did not ask for, from the metaverse to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and conditioned to desire them or at least adapt to their inevitability. Technology becomes the natural tool of this futurism, as it offers the powers of control and economic productivity that will lead us to future prosperity as promised by the longtermists.
These techno-answers are carefully narrativized, and all are in service of a perspective that seeks to limit our collective imagination, to foreclose on alternative futures that we might yearn for instead. As scholar Jathan Sadowski has argued, “what is utopian for Amazon or DoorDash is highly dystopian for their workers,” and “by embedding its values and goals into concrete technologies, capital seeks to assert dominion over the future – constraining what type of social change is viable.”
The perceived inevitability of the metaverse, for example, is the result: It’s coming whether we want it or not, and we are helpless to imagine social technologies that would operate differently. We live in unwanted utopias.
We can’t talk about what “we” owe the future, then, until we understand who owns it, or seeks to, and why we need to take back the power of our imaginations. Then, perhaps, we can figure out how to change that ownership. Joe Biden, in fact, said as much in his first news conference as U.S. President back in March, 2021: “The future lies in who can, in fact, own the future as it relates to technology.”
Indeed, many of us feel trapped in what feels like a postpolitical world, stuck with what the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi calls an “impotence of political will,” and certainly the alienation and atomization of social-media platforms is a factor in how this has coalesced and calcified. The scholar, Sun-ha Hong, calls this a “hegemony of closure and sameness,” and that the technofuture is always deferred, always around the corner, and growth is ensured because of this promise. Hang tight, and invest.
The longtermists, though perhaps financially influential and increasingly platformed by the mainstream, are not the majority. Nor is Silicon Valley. As tech companies from Netflix to Facebook are now facing a future without guaranteed quarterly growth (Netflix is losing subscribers, and Facebook is losing users, both for the first time), the narratives we’ve been sold are finally revealing themselves in their inherent flimsiness, victims of the same cannibalistic system that initially propelled them to cosmic success.
At the very least, this is an opening to reclaim the collective imagination of what comes next. This is related to the push to imagine postcapitalist futures, as books such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work and Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism have done.
It is an invitation to us all to refuse to adapt, to reject the inevitability of these futures, and to practise the difficult work of planning something different.
The future is ours for the taking.
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