"What is the Internet and What Will It Become?"

Our guest today, David Eaves, shared some interesting and expert opinions on how the government is using (or trying to use) technology to work more efficiently and successfully. In particular, I thought his emphasis on the importance of non-technological skills like practicing empathy, understanding how the government works, and negotiating was surprising and intriguing. The fact that someone so deeply involved in the implementation of technology in government didn’t come from a technological background and wasn’t a coder was eye opening in the sense that it shifted the emphasis of the conversation from a technological perspective to a more political one.

Another interesting takeaway from the conversation was the relative degree to which government use of technology is all over the place. Government, after all, appears to be a large and powerful actor with control over the population. Having grown up in the age of the internet, it’s surprising to me that the government is so behind in implementing the kind of technology that is used with such ease in the private sector, and that there are no universal technologies that state and local governments make use of across the board. Moreover, government seems to have not only a control over, but also an awareness of who the population is, where they live, and bits of personal information about them. After all, the amount of times we write down our name and address on a government form is quite high. Nevertheless, the government doesn’t actually have a universal database where all these things can be found. Instead, each department and local government has to keep track of all the information. I guess that this shouldn’t be so shocking, but it comes as a surprise and leaves me with a perception of our government as heavily fragmented (and inefficient).

This perception of government inefficiency was reinforced for me a little bit after class. I had to go to the post office to mail in a request for an absentee ballot to vote in New York. It seems very inefficient and more difficult that every single person requesting an absentee ballot needs to go to the post office to send in a handwritten request, and that those requests then need to be individually read, processed, and responded by real people. The ease of submitting a request by computer and then receiving a ballot digitally is just so much greater. Even if that ballot would then need to be printed out and mailed in order to preserve the security of my vote, the process would still be down to one letter being sent from three. On the whole, it is a little bizarre how far the government has to go before technology is implemented to a stronger degree in governance, and there seems to be a lot of opportunity in the field of technological integration in government.

This week, we talked about the implications of the internet on voting patterns and the potential future effects of the internet on how we actually vote and what that might mean. I thought this discussion was pretty interesting because it related directly to my introductory political sociology class. In sociology, we’ve been thinking a lot about how societal forces shape the way people vote and also about what causes people to participate in politics at all. Essentially, with a sociological perspective in mind, the internet is largely affected by the way people vote, but it also has the potential to affect the way way people vote and to change elections.

The aspect of the internet that I am most interested in here is the interaction between individuals and websites, social media platforms, and internet political platforms that feed them information. When I see a political story on the internet, am I seeing it because : A) the internet has analyzed my behaviors and political interests and targeted me for this political story because there is a strong likelihood that I will be interested and click on it -or- B) the internet (or more accurately the people in charge of platforms and other entities with power on the internet) are attempting to shape my preferences by sneakily showing me only certain political stories. My suspicion is that A is mostly correct, but B is probably true to a limited extent as well.

The reason that I am more of an A guy is because our conception of democracy as a system where informed voters make informed decisions about government is largely untrue. In reality, nearly all people know extremely little about the policymaking process, the history of certain policies, the effects of policies on life, or what the majority of government policy even is. When people vote for a candidate, they choose him or her because they identify with him or her best, and/or because he or she is the candidate of the voter’s party. This is not to say that only educated or well informed people are clued in about politics and can make informed choices. In fact, the people who are most politically informed are actually generally least open to rational lines of argument because their political involvement is strongly entrenched in party positions. The educated, moreover, are no more likely to be making informed choices than any other people; it’s not like doctors and lawyers and teachers are spending their free time pouring over thousands of pages of policy briefs and proposals and considering which ones are right for the country and which ones are supported by which candidate. We all just vote based on how we feel, who we identify with, and how our parties tell us.

The result of this is that voting patterns are, for the most part, quite stable. People vote for their party’s candidate nearly every single time (that’s why even Donald Trump will likely get at least 40% of the vote). Elections, as a result, are very close and depend on swing voters, who are generally even less informed and politically involved than the general public, and on trends such as incumbency (advantageous for the president after 1 term, but not for his party after 2) and extremely recent economic conditions. When I see a political news story on the internet, it is quite likely that the internet and the powers that be have placed it there based on an understanding that my identifiers-who I am, where I live, my race, age, and education, what I am interested in-shape my political interests in a pretty stable way. The result is that I am more likely to click on certain kinds of stories, so in order to make money off my internet use and to keep me using the internet more, the internet shows me stories I am likely to click on.

That said, however, although voting preferences and political identities are largely stable for the majority of the population, there are a select few swing voters for whom preferences are quite changeable and who typically decide elections. The possibility of B-that the internet attempts to manipulate voter preferences by showing certain headlines-is certainly real for these select few. If companies are able to figure out who has truly malleable preferences and is vulnerable to propaganda and targeting, then the internet represents a new arena for election changing ground game. The internet may not have the potential to shape how most of us lean politicall, but it does have the potential to decide elections by affecting how a limited few of us vote.

This week, we spoke about the coming of the Singularity-a time in the future when artificial intelligence will become stronger than human intelligence, allowing machines to improve the power of technology at exponentially increasing rates and thereby leaving human intelligence obsolete. The Singularity requires machines to become more and more like humans, and such mechanical behavior is hard to fathom. But of even greater interest to me (at least for now) is considering what it is about human nature/intelligence that is different from artificial intelligence and behavior, and if machines will be able to imitate and enjoy the things that make us human.

Personally, I think that machines will forever be a different kind of entity, unable to enjoy the meaning or experience of life in the same way that humans do. Humans, at the end of the day, are animals with an inner wildness that is never fully tamed, but must be sacrificed in part in order to enjoy the benefits of living in society. As Adam Gropnik writes in his essay about the children’s book Babar (connection to my expos class), “the pleasures of civilization come with discontent at its constraints…there is allure in escaping from the constraints that button you up and hold you; there is also allure in the constraints and the buttons.” This simultaneity-the allure of wildness and autonomy coupled with the allure of civilization which is fueled by the power of loving relationships and happiness-is something artificial intelligence simply cannot understand. Indeed, AI is geared completely towards order and efficiency; it has no urge for wildness, no fascination with escaping from the order it both encounters and creates. Without such a wildness, the sacrifice of living in society, in the midst of order, is meaningless. Nothing is truly sacrificed by the machine to exist in civilization, and having lost nothing, it cannot appreciate the meaning of the things that hold civilization together: loving relationships and happiness.

Moreover, artificial intelligence also lacks another essential human experience that is central to experiencing meaning in the world: struggle. Bruno Bettelheim writes: “Only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.” It is through, struggle, not success that humans are able to experience meaning in life. Computers, on the other hand, are completely focused on results. Artificial intelligence is interested only in outcomes.Can you imagine a computer finding delight in the struggle to complete a task? Of course not, computers simply load…and load…and load. The beauty of a machine is its ability to concentrate on a task and to achieve a success that a human could not. (Think of Allan Turing’s computer in the Imitation Game) We might take pleasure in the machine’s process or in our own struggle to design and correct the machine, but the machine itself is interested in merely the result, a phenomena that humans have found time and again is quite useless as a source of meaning in life.

The Singularity, with all this in mind, might be frightening in an unexpected sense. We think of the Singularity as having arrived when the machines become like us; in reality, the Singularity may be signaled by a change in humanity, by a time when we become like the machines. Of course, we won’t ever achieve the power of computers once their intelligence has surpassed ours. But we may become robotic as our concerns grow ever closer to the concerns of machines, as we forget about the beauty of the process and of struggle when everything we might need is available at the press (or non-press) of a button.

Today we talked about the Internet of Things and the future of interconnected accessories designed to make our lives easier and more convenient. Of course, there is a lot to be gained by such a network: more free time, fewer mundane household tasks, and increased convenience, security, safety, and efficiency across the board. If the Internet of Things can really be worked out to perfection, we won’t have to do anything at all…and that’s kindof a problem. Although the possibilities of leisure and ease that The Internet of Things promises are incredibly tantalizing, it’s very sad to consider what we might lose in exchange for all this change: if this new internet is a success, we will no longer have to interact with our things. It might sound bizarre, but-painful as they might be sometimes-there is actually something to be said for mundane activities like cooking, cleaning, driving, shopping, and making coffee. We maintain our contact with the world through these little activities. We inject little bits of ourselves-our style and flare-into everything we do, and part of who we are is formed by our ability to find enjoyment and fulfillment in the little things in life.

It might be said that the Internet of Things will free us from many frustrating and unnecessary tasks to do more of the things we love. I would say that it will actually eliminate the little activities we need in our lives in order to do nothing at all. With the constantly increasing role of technology in our lives, it feels like there is an ever increasing divide between work and leisure: work is difficult, painful, and boring, while leisure is easy, simple and fun. In our ever bussier lives, we look forward, more and more, to our opportunities to do nothing at all, to post up on the couch and watch a little netflix, kill time on youtube, play videogames, or for many people, to use (and abuse) substances as a means of escape. When we are not working, we feel, we shouldn’t be facing challenges or pushing ourselves. I would venture to say that such a divide between work and leisure is unhealthy, and an Internet of Things will only make it wider. Work and free time should be more connected, they should have more “flow” (https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202 I haven’t read this but I’ve heard its good).

Backtracking a little bit to our discussion: Another thing that interested me today was professor Waldo’s point that Plato once argued against teaching people to read because they would lose their ability to memorize. It sounds insane today considering the history of literature and the written word, but considering the merit of Plato’s point actually does inspire an imagining of an old skill that we as people lost during the development of society. Imagine for a second that you cannot read, and that your education is based entirely in memorization. You would memorize entire books, formulas, scientific facts and much more, and you had better internalize it all quite well otherwise you won’t have any access to what you forget. It would be a total pain and you wouldn’t be able to memorize nearly as much as you could one day read, but imagine how well you would know a text, how deeply you would understand a formula. Your education would be the pinnacle of the liberal arts in the sense that you yourself would be truly changed and educated, a better thinker dependent on nothing. It’s hard to fathom what that would even look like, but it’s worth a thought. It also inspires an imagining for all the skills that people have stopped bothering to master as technology has progressed over the centuries- from memorization to cursive handwriting-as well as all the skills that will become esoteric within our lifetimes as technology continues to improve. Who knows, maybe in ten years children won’t even need to learn how to write by hand anymore.