๐ฎ๐ค๐ซ 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,' a quarter century later
The landmark Wired magazine essay shows there's nothing new about Down Wing decelerationism, even in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately.
Quote of the Issue
โThe twenty-first century will be different. The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems of need, if not desire, and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a post-biological future. โฆ The result will be far greater transformations in the first two decades of the twenty-first century than we saw in the entire twentieth century.โ - Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised
"James Pethokoukis' The Conservative Futurist is essential reading on what made America great, how we lost it, and how we might reachieve it once again. Students of history, technology, economics, and the American dream should all read this compelling vision of our possible future."- Tyler Cowen, economist, George Mason University
The Essay
๐ซ 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,' a quarter century later
The goal of my conservative futurism is to nudge America into becoming a more perfect Up Wing society. Full stop.
(Interregnum: Up Wing thinking emphasizes rapid economic growth and technological advance to solve big problems and to enhance prosperity and opportunity. The arch-nemesis: Down Wing perspectives that focus on the risks and limitations of innovation. Better safe than sorry. Up Wingers like me advocate for embracing calculated risks and creatively destructive innovation as crucial for human progress. That, while also promoting an optimistic vision centered on human creativity and potential.)
Weโve done it before, you know. As I write inย The Conservative Futurist, Up Wing 1.0 was the period of historical techno-optimism that stretched from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s: the Space Age, Atomic Age,ย Star Trek, and a powerful productivity boom. I mark Up Wing 1.0 as decisively and statistically ending in 1973 with the Great Downshift in labor productivity growth, as seen in this chart:
As you can also see in the above chart, the long pause in productivity growth temporarily ended in the mid-1990s, then resumed in the mid-2000s. Still, I date Up Wing 2.0 as only lasting through 2000.
Hereโs why: Up Wing is about more than productivity stats (necessary but not sufficient). Fromย The Conservative Futurist:
Although Up Wing America made it past the Y2K โmillennium bugโ threat without the dystopian consequences some had fearedโall the power didnโt go off at midnight on January 1โthe year 2000 marked a turn away from 1990s Up Wing optimism and future orientation. The Nasdaq peaked in March and then began a long decline, not returning to that old high until 2015.ย The economy weakened in the second half of 2000, falling into recession in early 2001.ย In the 1999 film The Matrix, humanity is trapped in a computer simulation based on what the master program considers the zenith of human civilization: life in the late 1990s. More than two decades laterโafter 9/11, the Iraq War, the global financial crisis, the Great Recession, the not-so-great recovery, and the Great Pandemicโa lot of us in this reality might agree.
And the symbolic inflection point that signified an Up Wing to Down Wing shift? I think it just might have been when on April 1, 2000, Wired magazine published what has become among its most famous articles, โWhy the Future Doesnโt Need Us.โ Despite its publish date, the apocalyptically Down Wing essay by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy was a dead serious warning about the existential dangers of emerging twenty-first-century technologies, including AI, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology (where tiny, self-replicating robots could run amok in a Sorcerorโs Apprentice scenario and cover the planet in a โgray gooโ of themselves).
Joy:
The 21st-century technologies are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.โฆI think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.
โWhy the Future Doesnโt Need Usโ returns to our collective consciousness from time to time, serving as a handy example of the persistence of gloomer ideology โ even in Silicon Valley โ and as a go-to-text for todayโs conspiracy theorists, right up there with the Ted โUnabomberโ Kaczynski manifesto. Recently, social media has again rediscovered the piece. Hereโs a recent X microblogging post from Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan:
Now remember: Wired back then was the leading forum for a new wave of techno-optimists โ including the just-passed sci-fi author Vernor Vinge, technologist Ray Kurzweil, and Wired editor Kevin Kelly โ who replaced the futurist intellectuals of Up Wing 1.0 such as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Wired not only documented Silicon Valley's rise but also promoted the techno-optimistsโ promised future. The magazine's inaugural issue in 1993 proclaimed a โDigital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoonโ unleashing โsocial changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.โ
Wired often featured profoundly Up Wing essays such as the July 1997 piece โThe Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980โ2020โ by futurist Peter Schwartz and entrepreneur Peter Leyden. (The accelerating US economy was just the beginning of a twenty-five-year economic boom fueled by rapid innovation and an increasingly open global economy, they argued.) And in September 1999, Kelly himself wrote โThe Roaring Zeroes,โ which offered this promise: โThe good news is, youโll be a millionaire soon. The bad news is, so will everybody else. โฆ What if the Dow doesn't fall to 3,000, but zooms to 30,000 in four years? What if we are just at the beginning of the beginning of a long wave of ultraprosperity?โ
Wiredโs strong techno-optimist ethos at the time makes Joyโs essay a notable needle drop. A 2009 update by Wired described the essay as a โa hair-raising intellectual trip from Kurzweil to Kaczynski that left the lifelong technologist terrified of tomorrow.โ
Predictions are hard, especially about the future. A quarter century later, nanomachines of the sort Joy imagined are still nothing more than a science fiction clichรฉ (โโฆ an all-purpose magic substitute for soft science fiction and sci-fi-flavored fantasy โฆ [that] supplies a myriad of exciting powers with a satisfying patina of plausibility,โย accordingย to the TVTropes website); genetic editing seemsย more promising than scary; and AI has only recently advanced to the point where it looks to be a powerful digital technology worthy of serious debate about its potential societal impact and whether the future really wonโt need us โ well, at least as workers.
Rather than being prescient, Joyโs essay is more of a reminder of just how confident we were during Up Wing 2.0 that the tech boom wasnโt going to end anytime soon, if ever. Indeed, that confidence is one reason those years fully merit the Up Wing appellation.
That said, Joyโs essay may have played a role in accomplishing his admonitory goal. Eric Drexler's 1986 book Engines of Creation described the potential of molecular manufacturing as potentially revolutionizing everything from rocket engines to medical treatments. The super-small self-assembling machines would allow humanity to โbuild almost anything that the laws of nature allow to exist,โ Drexler writes.
In the 2022 essay โNanotechnologyโs spring,โ Eli Dourado gives a sense of the possibilities:
Mature nanotechnology would solve climate change, end hunger and poverty, create unfathomable abundance, enable large-scale space colonization, and, yes, even make flying cars practical. It would end the Great Stagnation with plenty of margin to spare. Even if nanotechnology had a mere one percent chance of only doubling world GDP โ and both of these numbers seem dubiously small โ it would be worth about a trillion dollars to accelerate its arrival by one year.
But the sort of real-world nanotech weโve actually gotten is primarily a branch of material science, with nanoparticles being used in various commercial products like waterproof fabrics, scratch-resistant coatings, and engine lubricants. The National Nanotechnology Initiative, started in 2000, was originally hyped as pursuing Drexlerian nanotech but never actually did, possibly due to concerns about the potential dangers of the technology as alarmingly outlined in Joy's essay.
โWhy the Future Doesnโt Need Usโ is a powerful example of how dystopian images of the tomorrow undercut efforts at tech progress in the present. Those visions are what the future doesnโt need, or at least not so darn many of them versus the utter paucity of Up Wing images showing a future worth building.
Micro Reads
โถ Business and Economics
The AI Device Revolution Isnโt Going to Kill the Smartphone - Bberg
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Says AI Will Boost Productivity, Worker Pay - Bberg
The Creativity Decline: Evidence from US Patents - St. Louis Fed
The rise of the chief AI officer - FT
โถ Policy
What Senator Rubio Gets Wrong about Manufacturing and Industrial Policy - Cato
โถ AI
What will humans do if technology solves everything? - The Economist
How Spotify AI plans to know whatโs going on inside your head, and find the right track for it - CNBC
โถ Health
Should We Change Species to Save Them? - NYT
โถ Clean Energy
Your Plug-In Hybrid SUV Wonโt Save the Planet - Bberg Opinion
The EV Battery of Your Dreams Is Coming - WSJ Opinion
The Home-Solar Boom Gets a โGut Punchโ - WSJ
90-GWh thermal energy storage facility could heat a city for a year - New Atlas
How new tech is making geothermal energy a more versatile power source - Ars
โถ Space/Transportation
The case for stopping efforts to contact aliens -Big Think
โถ Up Wing/Down Wing
The New Civil War Movie Is Eerily Right About How the Country Could Split Apart -Politico
Teamsters Continue to Fight Autonomous Vehicle Bills That Kill Jobs, Endanger Public - Teamsters