A Revolution Is Underway. What Does It Mean, and What’s Next?

Make a short mental list of things you wish you had more of.

If you lived before the agricultural, industrial, or digital revolutions this list would likely include food, land, and money, respectively. These resources were among if not the dominant scarcities of their times.[1] There have of course been many other revolutions — personal favorites include the sexual and American — but those above shifted the prevailing resource scarcity and driver of the economy.

Now that we live in the information age your list likely includes some form of the developed world’s current principal scarcity: attention. The term “attention economy” gets thrown around a lot instead of “time economy” for good reason; it’s not necessarily time that is limited, but time when you’re motivated, focused, and energetic enough for a given endeavor. For example it’s unrealistic to say that every day you’ll wake up at 5am, exercise for one hour, work for ten, write for three, and then read mind-expanding nonfiction for two. Although there is technically enough time, most would be unable to maintain such a schedule for very long due to lack of sufficient attention. Hence the explosion of coping mechanisms: the productivity/life hacking culture, mindfulness meditation, Adderall, Soylent, everything-as-a-service, etc. We now spend significant sums of the prior era’s scarcity—money—trying to acquire more attention.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Due to the exponential nature of technological progress the time between these major technological revolutions shrinks. The (first) agricultural revolution was hundreds of thousands of years after the emergence of Homo sapiens. The industrial revolution began about 12,000 years after that. And the digital revolution started something like 150 years after that. Continuing along this curve, the next one is already happening: the algorithmic revolution. [2]

The present and coming role of algorithmic software and hardware controlled by this software has been written about ad nauseam. Let’s just say I agree with Sapiens and Homo Deus author Yuval Noah Harari when he says that “‘Algorithm’ is arguably the single most important concept in our world.”

These algorithms help us deal with the tsunami of digital information, but as they are able to outperform humans at not just what has traditionally been considered work but also creative pursuits, the preeminent scarcity will shift once again. But to what? Let’s interview some candidates.

• Privacy: This is already increasingly scarce in the panopticon we now inhabit, and will become even more so as we fully enter the data-hungry algorithmic age. China’s terrifyingly dystopian Social Credit System is Exhibit A. However, privacy is something humans only acquired relatively recently, and its absence—while regrettable—is not new.
• Freedom: Our minds already get hijacked by the algorithms underlying social media, and the winner-take-all economic outcomes of algorithm-driven network effects will leave consumers with fewer online choices (though there are forces at work here other than algorithms). Longer term the picture may seem somewhat paradoxical. If we play our cards right and end up in a world of abundance we’ll have more free time and attention than ever before, but it will come with fewer options for how to spend it. This is because of the societal control we’ll have necessarily ceded to algorithms and their physical extensions in order to create such a world. Just like privacy though, a dearth of freedom is not something with which most people throughout history would be unfamiliar.
• Meaning: Religion and work are two leading sources of meaning for many people. In developed countries the prospects are grim for anything resembling religion in its traditional form given the heightening assault it’s been under since another revolution: the scientific. It’s even sharply declining in America, which has always been an outlier. Globally the picture is more complicated, but given that religiosity generally has an inverse relationship with education and development, there is a scenario where technology-driven abundance takes secularism worldwide. Work will face a similarly intense onslaught from algorithms, and you can see the likely effects in the increased rates of suicide, opiate addiction, and populism in places with poor job prospects. Indeed, I purport that our new scarcity is a coming crisis of nihilism.

Sound bleak? Perhaps. But if this meaningless future gets you down, don’t worry; the algorithmic age is not likely to last long before it’s superseded. Continuing along the exponential curve, the next technological revolution is already on the horizon.

Blue Genes, Baby

These scarcities have existed because although the pace of technological revolutions is becoming breakneck, the pace of human evolution is sluggish. The amount of food needed, labor that can be provided, and attention that can be granted by a human body and mind has not significantly changed even as the world has radically transformed. Our genes, which are solely concerned with their propagation through survival and procreation, have not equipped us well for contentment. But what if—for the first time—we could change them?

Take your pick of fancy terms for this revolution when gene editing and related technologies mature—biological, synthetic-biological, cyber-biological, or biotechnological—but it’s likely to be the final revolution on this curve that we can comprehend. [3] I dislike the term singularity, but there is in fact an event horizon here beyond which it is impossible to predict.

The beauty of accepting that given all available data there is no objective meaning to life is that you can create your own. I’d argue this is far preferable to a universe where one has already been decided for you. Determining what is meaningful to you—or what you want to want, to again invoke Harari—will take on an entirely new character in this brave new world. Even if it’s algorithms that are achieving our goals for us (or minimizing their loss functions in technical jargon), we will have control over what these goals are in a way that is quite literally impossible to imagine. A defining characteristic of humanity is that we’ve used technology—going all the way back to fire and stone—to help define us. It may be possible to engineer new desires and ecstasies as powerful and real as survival and sex have been for millions of years.

This will be the end of scarcity as we know it, and have known it in one form or another ever since our species arrived.

What will be on your list then?

Notes

[1] Albert Wenger expounds upon this well in World After Capital.

[2] Though related, I don’t find the concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution very useful as it seems to be a catch-all for myriad disparate technologies.

[3] I would classify something like Elon Musk’s Neuralink as a loosely related technology; it could help alleviate a scarcity of meaning both by keeping humans in the workforce (if they choose), and by giving us unprecedented power and control over the brain.