Calling Tech Titans on their BS

Some additional notes on the profound limitations of untethered techno-optimism

Marc Andreessen looking very happy indeed

Leading up to my Triple R radio interview on this very topic, I wrote a Q&A. I did this in an attempt to explore what might happen during the interview. The interview itself didn’t perfectly align to my preparatory writings, but this activity was helpful nonetheless.

This is that Q&A:

Q: Nate, you wrote a critique of something called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which was written by the founders of Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Can you briefly describe what the manifesto covers and why you critiqued it?

A: Techno-optimism or techno-solutionism is a very large hammer looking for as many nails as it can find. It suggests that technological progress can solve every problem known to humans (even if technology was a major contributor to causing the problems in the first place). It's grounded in a very narrow, fairly mechanistic or computationalist view of how the universe works, which has many issues that we can’t possibly cover today . It fails to really account for complexity and emergence, the axiological nature of all, but especially modern technology, the reality of our agent-arena relations as organisms, systemic ecological overshoot and a bunch of other things that should be accounted for in a well thought out, well argued and therefore defensible philosophy of technology. It's actually pretty damn dangerous, especially given how this ideology impacts financial capital flows, then material flows, stuff that impacts how we see ourselves, how we treat each other etc.

In the essay, I spend a few thousand words laying some groundwork. I do this using an evolved version of a framework John Danaher, a legal scholar and moral philosopher, published. I help folks think about technology in a more nuanced way. I describe possible views of how we might live together in the future that is compatible with our understanding of material flows, earth systems and determinants of human wellbeing that also account for individual and collective agency. I describe some really interesting work in neuroscience that helps show how our attention seems to affect the probability of future states. Plus a bunch of other stuff. All of this critique is grounded in a normative claim, basically something I believe we ought to work towards because it's good and right. I say, "Humanity should actively work together to create a world where every person on this planet lives a healthy and dignified life, within biophysical limits." 

This is a very different value system from the one the Silicon Valley VC's are describing. 

Towards the end, I specify 7 themes from the manifesto that I believe are worth taking issue with:

1. Elitism

2. Misquoting and partial truths

3. Technology as panacea

4. Free market as god

5. Historical and philosophical inaccuracies

6. Bay area ideology, and

7. It's not compatible with how life within the biosphere actually works

There's a lot I've missed, but hopefully that leads us into interesting territory.

Q: There's a lot there. Perhaps we can pick up on the sustainability item. What do you mean when you say the ideology isn't compatible with how the biosphere works?

A: Well, I'm not an Earth Systems Scientist, so I'll approach this by referencing work from that and related communities.

To do this real justice I'd probably have to critique many traditional economic theories and how they’ve been interpreted, the way they effectively encourage the privatisation of gains and socialisations of losses, or the way they focus narrowly on making money, which leads to many negative externalities, such as soil erosion, global heating or the progressive build up of harmful chemicals in the human body. I don't think we've got time for that, so I'll use a specific example.

In the manifesto, the authors describe their desire to increase energy usage 1000x. But there's a little more to it than this. Basically they are saying that the rest of the world should catch up to America, which would be an approximately 5x energy increase. Then America should 1000x its energy usage, with the rest of the world following. Note the proposed sequence of events here and the very America first mentality. I'll leave that for now. What this would mean is that, relative to where we are now, we would be using 5000x more energy than we are using today. Thanks to Nate Hagens, in my opinion one of the better science communicators on these complex topics at present, I learned that this proposal, even assuming very 'low carbon' energy sources, such as solar, wind etc. would produce enough waste heat alone to almost boil our oceans. Now, our oceans have been systematically pillaged, and are frankly in pretty terrible shape as it is. So I don't really think there's a human alive today that believes such an outcome would be a good thing, even if they got wildly rich in the process. This is but one example. It powerfully highlights how dangerous ideology or dogma can be. 

Q: Wow! Okay, that's pretty alarming. I feel we could critique this stuff all day. So let's shift gears a little. Perhaps we step back and explore the broader state of things, as you see them, along with any ideas or proposals you have for how we might wisely and collectively respond to the big challenges of our time.

A: Happy to go there. I'm currently quite aligned to what is often referred to as the metacrisis. Basically this describes our total global ecosystem of interconnected and interdependent crises, such as rapid global heating, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, rampant wealth inequality, massively reduced fertility rates, lack of social cohesion, loneliness etc., and the way that these things have common underlying drivers. The big underlying driver being something like a wrong relationship to the process of life itself, which could also be described as something like a life eroding, rather than life affirming value system. That can get pretty technical, so I'll skip all the jargon. The basic gist is that we are in a unique time between worlds. The civilisation we were born into, the stuff we often value and take for granted unfortunately cannot continue. We do not have the capacity to continue using the amount of energy and resources that we do. That is an inherently unsustainable trajectory. And this is not wild speculation, nor even controversial. This is what the best available balance of evidence across these related scientific disciplines suggests. At the same time, the way we distribute the benefits of all this energy, material throughput etc. is pretty darn inequitable. So, if we value the quality of people's lives, if we value the earth systems that give us life, the other species that do so many things we cannot, sometimes called ecosystem services, then we have to really change how we collectively think, feel, relate to each other, govern etc. It's a monumental task that requires us to shift away from material obsessions towards a way of living that focuses on material sufficiency. At the same time as this happens, we have an opportunity to immaterially enrich everyone's lives, with more free time, more genuine leisure, more art, more music, more dancing, more laughter etc. such a shift requires us to basically change our value system. We have to say, capital accumulation isn't the ultimate good, living enriching lives that can be sustained for many generations is. There's incredible literature on all of these topics, so I'll leave that there and end this very long answer with the brief yet important statement that this shift would enable us to shift what good technology means. In this way, we could more wisely and safely steward technological development in ways that actually helps solve the real problems that matter, while also ensuring that there is real equity in how benefits are distributed.

Q: This is obviously huge, but not entirely unexpected given we read the essay. Can we get practical for a moment? How does this way of thinking show up in your work?

A: Well, as something like an applied / practical philosopher, I'm effectively trying my best to help create favourable conditions for deep reflection and introspection. Through this process leaders, teams and organisations at large can surface insights about what truly matters, what they really value and what we ought to value more broadly. This can then support a highly participatory process to start changing how we direct our energy and resources. In an organisational settling, like a big business, this will be reflected in the value system. We do work to establish a holistic value system. This then informs how we make decisions and govern the corporation. In effect, how we set strategy and think about the identification and mitigation of uncertainties or risks. This can then inform different experiments that explore how the organisation can service this post economic growth obsessed type world I am describing. Again, something that is hardly a controversial idea in many circles.

Over time and with real deliberate effort, we can start shifting the organisation away from solely focusing on capital accumulation, towards using resources, power, influence etc. to contribute to real betterment in this world.

I get into the nuances of this approach on my latest podcast.

Q: Okay, playing for the other team for a minute, don’t organizations already do this?

A: Yes and no. Organisations do have mission statements,. They do describe explicit values. But, according to some pretty interesting and useful research from Donald Sull and colleagues at MIT, there isn’t even a statistical correlation between corporate value statements and corporate conduct, or what we might think of as the culture or collective behaviour of the organisation. There are many reasons for this, but this basically tells us that we’ve got virtue signalling, ethics washing, green washing etc. all over the place. 

I don’t believe this is because most people are bad within these organisations. My experience is that these are mostly smart, caring and good people. They would love to leave the world in better shape than they found it, if they could. So these are largely constraints imposed by the system. Although there’s much we can do individually to live a little better, a bit more sustainably etc. in our daily lives, the real leverage, the real opportunity for change is in shifting the goals of the systems, changing what we choose to extract from the earth and produce, how much of that we can do without further contributing to ecological overshoot etc.

And again, it’s this type of thinking we need for technology. AI ethics is a classic example. Huge amount of talk, but a massive gap between what organisations say they want and what they’re really doing. We have research here in Australia that shows that big gap between ethical principles and the actual reality of things, something I’ve reviewed, published and given talks about.

Q: Alright, I know we need more time, but lets’ cover some takeaways.

A: In a general sense, be caring, critical and reflective. Try not to fall into believing the loudest or most powerful voices. One of the incredible things about being human is that we can parse different information sources, stress test various ideas, and over time build up a better picture of what makes most sense to really believe. This is kind of what philosophy and science can and should do. They don’t always, but critiques of this whole endeavor are out of scope today. Specifically on the manifesto, please don’t buy into the idea that technology will just magically solve all of our problems. It will not. Technology is part of the biosphere and cannot defy what we understand as the fundamental laws of nature. But, if we approach this with real care, wisdom and togetherness, our development, use and relation to technology can play an important role in transforming civilisation towards real betterment. 

Lastly, I’ll just say that you can think of optimism as the belief things will be better. Pessimism as the belief that things will be worse. Hope as belief in the possibility of better. And active hope as a way of living your life based on belief in the possibility of better. This framing differs a little from my essay, mostly because we wanted to play with the title of the manifesto and turn it around. But what I’ve just described is what I’ve found to be the most generally useful framing of these ideas.

I believe we should be actively hopeful. We should believe that better is possible. And we should believe in our ability to exercise agency and affect different kinds of change so that better becomes more likely.

Many of the problems we face are really the result of ideas and how they’ve been implemented and scaled. The future hasn’t been written. We can come up with new ideas, thoughtfully implement them, and weave them into our lives for many generations to come. Good luck everyone. I believe in us. I hope you do too.

If you listened to the whole interview, you’ll note I was light on big words and technical concepts. Big thanks to my partner for reminding me of this before we went live. The hosts gave me great feedback on accessibility, which was something I was really proud of (because I don’t always do a good job of translating technical stuff for more general audiences).

Anyways, I hope this further supports your critical reflection relating to these dangerous, biophysically illiterate and terribly elitist ideologies.

With love as always.