Doombusters
A Manifesto by Stratford Sherman
WE CAN’T CONTROL WHAT WE CREATE
Do you sense a ticking clock, an appointment with destiny, a reckoning due, a point of no return somewhere just ahead? The signs are everywhere: hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, mass extinction of species, the Amazon on fire, Mark Zuckerberg, microplastics, surveillance cams, 5G, SIM swapping, school shootings, e-cigarettes, Donald Trump, spotted lantern flies, 737s, disinformation bots, Kardashians, quantum computing, and, any minute, AIs vastly smarter than us — not to mention daily threats to our self-esteem, unity, science, civil discourse, decision-making, democracy, and truth itself. A pal of mine defines the root problem: “We don’t live long enough to see the consequences of our actions.” Unintended consequences, accumulating for millennia, now threaten to destroy everything we know and love.
Humans are inventive toolmakers, and have been since our ancestors first sparked fire with flint. Tools evolved into tech. Think of “technology” as anything and everything made by humans, from a basket woven of palm fronds to a box of Frosted Flakes to the CERN particle accelerator. Most people see overwhelming arrays of tech challenges — global warming, invasions of privacy, and so on — but they all boil down to one: We can’t control what we create.
Every generation, in middle age, complains that things are going to hell. Are today’s anxieties about Tech Apocalypse any different? They are, in three important ways: On August 6, 1945, the detonation of a bomb cutely named “Little Boy” over Hiroshima revealed the human capability to destroy ourselves and our planet. The commercialization of computers, starting with the IBM 701 in 1953, launched a radical acceleration in human invention. The digitization-of-everything has since boosted invention into hyperdrive.
Steep declines in the cost of computing power — by 1,000,000% over 35 years — and data storage, from nearly $200,000 per gigabyte in 1980 to less than two cents, have driven a similarly steep increase in invention: from fewer than 50,000 U.S. patents granted in 1960 to nearly 340,000 last year.
The reality we face now is depressing, and there aren’t enough episodes of Game of Thrones to make it go away.
Some human inventions have destructive potential. Some are intentionally lethal, like nukes, weaponized viruses, and the VX nerve-agent used to assassinate Kim Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur. Some are accidentally damaging, as a by-product of something useful, like the pesticides in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, ozone-eating chloroflourocarbons, or asbestos in Johnson & Johnson baby powder.
Getting depressed? Me too. It’s normal to find reality depressing; we’d rather re-watch Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, the reality we face now is depressing, and there aren’t enough episodes of GOT to make it go away.
TOWARD A GLOBAL SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
Asked about the fate of the world, Bill Clinton once said that what we need is a global spiritual awakening. Something like that — I wasn’t there. Doesn’t matter whether Clinton actually said it or not: A global spiritual awakening is just what we need. The idea is not as fruity as it sounds. This is not about the Age of Aquarius — it’s cold logic. Facing doom, we need options. A global spiritual awakening may be the only way to answer the root question: How can humans learn to control what we make?
You’re probably wondering: Who the hell am I to be telling you this? I grew up by a river alive with pickerel, tadpoles, and ducks. The defining event of my life occurred in 1965, the year of the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” and the Supremes’ “Come See About Me.” My father took me to his study and opened a suitcase full of evidence he’d collected as an investigator for the Nuremberg Trials. Fifty-four years later, I most clearly remember the photographs, weirder and more horrific than any I’ve seen since. Young Nazi soldiers, grinning with arms around each other’s shoulders, posing before gallows from which hanged men limply dangled. A large indoor swimming pool filled to the brim with severed human limbs. Naked women running down a hillside, some already fallen to machine-gun fire. Dad showed me implements of torture, too: an elegant, pearl-handled thumbscrew and a varnished-wood eye-gouger, the first few inches of its tip darkened, presumably by blood.
This vivid introduction to the dark side of human nature forced me, at 13, to contemplate its potential within us all. Decades later, after an undergraduate experience of LSD had pointed me toward meditation, I discovered that awareness of evil can enable one to more fully experience the good. My conclusion: good and evil, like any pair of opposites, are ends of a continuum, only the whole of which truly defines us. I spent two decades as a business reporter for Fortune, wrote a widely-read book about large-scale organizational change, and since have served leaders, mostly in tech, as a confidential consultant and coach. Clients have included OpenAI, Google, and Y Combinator; I serve as an advisor to the Center for Humane Technology. Like any human, I’ve done my pattern-matching on the data I possess.
My father took me to his study and opened a suitcase full of evidence he’d collected as an investigator for the Nuremberg Trials.
ASYMMETRICAL THREATS
Key to understanding how we got into this mess are asymmetries of one kind or another. There are asymmetries of time and perception, in which events accumulate so slowly they go unnoticed — like a lion creeping imperceptibly through the grass before overwhelming its prey in a sudden, fatal lunge. There are asymmetries of information, in which one party knows more than the other: This is how swindlers make money from suckers. Such asymmetries can obstruct observation and understanding. Had the factors been in synch, humans might have noticed and solved the problems of technology as they arose. But history didn’t happen that way.
There can be little doubt that the threat presented by the sum of all human technology is unprecedented, severe, and increasing at an astonishing rate. Consider the data set that Google, now a subsidiary of Alphabet, has accumulated since its founding two decades ago. At an estimated 15 exabytes¹, including copies and backups, it roughly equals the total digital storage on earth in 1993. Say one-third of that is the primary data. That includes: an index of the Internet, plus the web searches, emails, documents, and appointments of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of us. Some 75% of websites contain hidden Google pixels that track our browsing. Google’s announced acquisition of Fitbit will add data on our pulse rates and sleep. Through Project Nightingale, Google secretly gathered unto itself health records of 50 million people, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company now plans to offer checking accounts, presumably with the surveillance thrown in for free. Rare is the human about whom Google knows nothing. Imagine all that information in the hands of a hostile state, a home-grown dictator, or even a CEO with bad values — such as Larry Page, for instance — and you can understand why some people regard Google’s database, among many others, as a potential weapon of mass destruction. Note that the Chinese already have hacked Google at least once.
You can understand why some people regard Google’s database, among many others, as a potential weapon of mass destruction.
The more we invent, the more we build. As each increment of potential danger becomes actual, the whole house of cards of the human enterprise gets tippier and more vulnerable to collapse. We’re unlikely ever to stop building. As Edward Teller, a remorseful builder of the atom bomb, said, “If the development is possible, it is out of our powers to prevent it.” If Coke doesn’t do it, Pepsi will. If not America, then France, Israel, China, Pakistan, or Bashar al-Assad. To be sure, human competition drives innovation and progress, but morally speaking, it can be a fast race to the bottom. At some point the accumulation of hazard reaches a tipping point and then… We may prefer not to think about that.
WHAT, ME WORRY?
The risk of self-inflicted doom crept up on us unnoticed due to an asymmetry of time. Homo Sapiens has been working on deforestation for some 10,000 years, since hunter-gatherers turned to farming. We began burning carbon-based fuels at scale during the 1800s, as the coal-fired Industrial Revolution took hold. During the centuries since, humans have expanded our exploitation of natural resources while degrading the environment in a “What, me worry?” state of mind. The term “climate change” didn’t appear in print until 1952 — the equivalent of five seconds ago in geologic time. Meanwhile, we still subsidize carbon-based fuels, to the tune of $649 billion annually, while burning them so furiously that Saudi Aramco alone posted annual profits of $111 billion last year. Our cognition fails us when threats develop slowly over long periods, particularly those extending far beyond our individual lifetimes. Such perceptual bugs advantage the dangers that would destroy us.
The same bug stupefies us even during time periods shorter than an I.R.S. depreciation table will allow. Commercial exploitation of the internet began some 26 years ago with the introduction of MOSAIC, the first popular web browser. Facebook has been collecting user data since its founding, and began monetizing it via ads in 2007. While their data fueled Facebook’s almost unprecedented profitability and Zuckerberg’s rise as one of the world’s richest men, Facebook users have continued to hand over their most precious personal information for free. That is asymmetry at work: both information asymmetry and asymmetry of common sense.
Until last year, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, the loudest voices of serious concern were outliers, such as EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager. Then, suddenly, mass freak-out about Facebook. But the damage was done. Facebook had become a global-scale holocaust of irresponsible decision-making and unintended consequences, facilitating election manipulation in the U.S., genocide in Myanmar, and an astonishing array of harms in between. The Wikipedia entry on “Criticism of Facebook” recently extended to 563 citations, from “Open letter urges Facebook to strengthen privacy,” in 2010, to “Gut für die Welt, aber nicht für uns” last year. Nevertheless, nearly one third of all humans remain users of Facebook, not to mention its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp.
As a species, we may suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.
As a species, we may suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. We’ve become inured to systematic invasion of privacy, near-constant surveillance, being commoditized in advertising rackets, being bombarded by institutional lies (We’re experiencing unusually heavy call volume right now) and blatantly manipulated (Want to sign up for Apple Pay? Choose Yes or Not now). Since the hacks of Equifax (148 million people affected) and Anthem (37 million), I get several emails daily from bots such as RecordedYou88@5029.com blackmailing me with nonexistent sex videos. As a dying man once told me, “You can get used to anything.”
On balance, any clear-eyed assessment of the capacity of human governance to save us from doom is likely to give you a panic attack, or a stroke. Sure, we’ve avoided nuclear war so far, and yes, we’ve tidied up the environment some. For millennia, though, humans mostly have kept their heads down and hoped for the best. The more cynical among us saw opportunity and exploited it, expecting to be dead before the bill came due. In fairness, humans generally did not intentionally drive the accumulation of hazard. No, people largely were innocent, unaware of the asymmetry between the hectic accumulation of risk and a capability of control that barely has budged since Samuel Pepys roamed London.
Example: In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, Section 230 of which provides immunity from liability for any “interactive computer service” (such as YouTube, Facebook, or the The Daily Wire) regardless of what it publishes. Since conventional publishers, such as newspapers, are subject to liability, Section 230 amounts to a government subsidy of the social media companies that have devastated legitimate journalism. Section 230 also amounts to government sponsorship of the social-media companies’ thoroughly documented irresponsibility. Talk about unintended consequences.
THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE
We can’t evolve our way out of this mess. It takes centuries for a genetic mutation to spread across a population, whereas Artificial General Intelligence, the threshold at which AIs truly can think for themselves, could arrive as early as 2030. If that doesn’t scare you, watch the movie “Soylent Green.” But thanks to the plasticity of the individual human brain — still, for now, smarter than any AI powered by hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of servers — we needn’t wait for evolution to start brainstorming effective responses. Minds good enough to get us into this mess are our best hope of finding our way out of it. Moreover, history demonstrates the fast-response capability of human society, for better or worse, especially when provoked by grave threat or mass trauma. The War to End All Wars, fast followed by World War Two, gave us the United Nations. The Great Depression generated the New Deal. 9/11 led America to state-sponsored torture.
The limiting factor is human nature. Unwitting agents of species-level imperatives, we compulsively seek to survive and reproduce. With such energy as remains, we indulge our hard-wired lust for dopamine. This is a neurotransmitter of pleasure, whose evolutionary value is to motivate nourishment, comfort, and sex. In addition to reinforcing addictions, dopamine motivates us to pursue the rewards of self-interest.
My experience as a change consultant taught me how highly humans value comfort. We tend to be phobic about threats, real and perceived, to personal security — which can expand to include threats to the status quo in general. Resistance to change may be expressed as avoidance, denial, or passive resistance. What I’ve observed at the scale of business organizations seems to apply, in fractal manner, at the scale of our species as a whole. And yet, at the other end of the continuum, there is much good in us. You can tell by the people we admire, celebrities aside: Not Mike Milken or Bernie Madoff, but Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr..
Central to the error of our ways has been alienation from nature. Human exceptionalism seems even more idiotic than American exceptionalism. Back in 1620, when Francis Bacon was popularizing the scientific method, humans took their subordination to nature for granted. Educated Londoners of the day walked on muddy stone streets filthy with animal droppings. The product of their own bowel movements went into stinking latrines and chamber pots. Death was a conspicuous aspect of life. In context, it’s not surprising that Bacon understood science as “the interpretation of nature” rather than something superior to it. The most important work of science ever since has been the discovery of natural laws that existed long before science, human beings, or Earth itself.
A few of us, notably the billionaires Larry Ellison and Dmitry Itskov, are investing in serious efforts to evade mortality itself.
This spirit of subordination to nature contrasts with another notion deeply embedded in Western culture: dominion. From the book of Genesis: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” That idea celebrated the power of the human technology flourishing when it was written: agriculture. As science gave humans additional powers over the centuries, people built layer upon layer of technology, much as early humans built new settlements atop the old. By now, residents of a megalopolis such as Shanghai, Tokyo, Delhi, Jakarta, Mexico City, or New York can spend entire lives in environments almost entirely human-made. Even those of us who treasure connection to nature are to significant degree divorced from it. A few of us, notably the billionaires Larry Ellison and Dmitry Itskov, are investing in serious efforts to evade mortality itself.
DIG IT TO DIG IT
So what are we to do? Let’s return to the idea of global spiritual awakening.
The basic theory of how people change, individually and collectively, starts with awareness of the need to change. As Thelonious Monk put it, “You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?” Clearly, our challenges are global. So awakening at global scale, however aspirational, seems obviously essential. What’s tricky is the “spiritual” part.
Conscious evil intent is so rare among us that it counts towards a diagnosis of mental disorder.
I don’t use that word in reference to religion or systems of faith. Rather, “spiritual” points to the profound moral challenge of accepting responsibility, first individually, then en masse.
In a global spiritual awakening, it may be necessary for each of us, as individuals, to take responsibility for fixing a dire situation that we ourselves did not cause. That is a radical assumption of responsibility. It’s one that — not coincidentally — characterizes our spiritual heroes, from Mother Teresa to Dr. King. Indeed, such radical responsibility is found in many traditions that emphasize individual moral development, such as the bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism. Implicitly, it seems to underlie the spirit of service admired in cultures worldwide. Seen from the perspective of evolutionary biology, radical responsibility now may be a requirement for survival.
(Wikimedia Commons)
Even so, accepting the burden of vast problems and consequences not of our making is a hard-to-swallow idea, utterly counter-intuitive. What kind of sucker would willingly pay debts incurred by strangers? Yet that is what must happen, since the original big spenders have skedaddled, and the debt collectors are banging on our doors.
What’s distinctive about this mess is that no one takes responsibility for it. In fairness, it’s no one person’s fault. Conscious evil intent is so rare among us that it counts towards a diagnosis of mental disorder. Surely Zuckerberg, the human face of dystopia, didn’t intend to wreak havoc on earth. In all probability, he was just following his impulses, like the rest of us. Moreover, given the huge time spans over which the unintended consequences of technology have accumulated, most of the perps are long dead. The odds of any of those actors even being directly related to you or me are remote. So as we consider the question of responsibility, there’s no one to blame. Them is us.
The Gita propounds an absolute human obligation to live within the limits of dharma, or right action.
Western morality and the Anglo-American legal system have long recognized a clear distinction between murder with intent, which can get you the chair, and unintentional manslaughter, which may result in no punishment at all. Action with intent generates responsibility. Action without intent wins a Get Out of Jail Free card. That type of distinction may now be obsolete. Intent may not matter. Consequences do.
GODZILLA RISING
Speaking of jail, my understanding of responsibility was transformed by the experience of teaching the Bhagavad Gita, a masterwork of the Hindu tradition, to inmates at a maximum-security state prison in Florida. The Gita propounds an absolute human obligation to live within the limits of dharma, or right action. The seriousness with which those sinners absorbed the idea inspired me to take it to heart.
Playing Monopoly — the game, I mean — may be why the founders of Facebook and Google, along with so many other tech and business superstars, have shown zero sign of taking responsibility for the harms their actions have caused. They bring to mind the plaintiff who pleads, Golly, your honor, I sure didn’t mean to kill her. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon collectively have amassed fortunes totaling nearly $294 billion, according to Forbes. Given the personal control they exercise over their enterprises, their reluctance to step up makes one wonder if their characters are flawed. On the other hand, Bill Gates, who didn’t evidence much social conscience as a young man, has matured into a striking counter example.
So is there hope? Beats me.
And let’s acknowledge that I may be just another grumpy old man. Could be that humans will muddle through today’s challenges as we have for some 300,000 years. Besides, it may not matter, in the end: At some point, scientists predict, the sun will incinerate all life on earth. In the event that life exists only on earth — something not yet proven to the contrary — then the animating spark of life itself may vanish, another passing experiment of nature. Indisputably, destruction is an aspect of nature. So why worry? Things aren’t all that bad today, and we might be dead before they get too much worse.
Should we commit, for the first time in history, to action as a species, we might informally network ourselves into some sort of giant, wetware supercomputer.
Those of us who’d prefer to avoid doom must act. Godzilla does seem to be risen, after all. And the Boomers who contributed so richly to the mess must consider what they leave behind for younger people and those yet to be born.
This is a human challenge, which only humans can solve. The scale of the challenge is unprecedented, requiring response on an unprecedented scale. One useful thing technology has given us an infrastructure of instant communication connecting the overwhelming majority of humans on earth. Each of us has a brain capable of rapid neural rewiring and the dopamine to motivate us to action. If a critical mass of us grok the situation and behave in ways that others recognize as committed and responsible, we may have a shot at inspiring others to join in.
A GLOBAL HUMAN SUPERCOMPUTER
An urgent enough sense of shared crisis conceivably might cause consciousness-raising at the species level. We can count on future catastrophes to remind us that action is needed. At some point, maybe, the whole thing could go viral, like that picture of an egg that has attracted nearly 54 million likes on Instagram.
Should we commit, for the first time in history, to action as a species, we might informally network ourselves into some sort of giant, wetware supercomputer. With that kind of cognitive power, combined with our innate inventiveness, who knows? We might come up with something.
The good news is that we already have playbooks for making things happen. An obvious example is startups: Begin with an idea clear enough to fit on a cocktail napkin — Doombusters, for instance. Recruit a few people you like and respect as co-founders (In this example, that might be you). Define the problem to solve. Brainstorm solutions. Once you’ve got a product, sell it. Y Combinator’s program has this down to a science.
Later on, we can worry about how to fund, scale, and network our solutions together. For now, the best strategy may be no strategy. Let’s have faith in the creativity and ingenuity of our species — after all, that’s what got us into this mess.
In the meantime, each of us needs to figure out what we can do day to day. We can’t all be Gandhi, yet there must be something more impactful than avoiding plastic straws. I’m no expert, but here’s my two cents about how anyone can become a Doombuster:
Start With What’s Practical
Should you sort your garbage and compost your scraps? Recycle plastics or try to boycott them altogether? Should you drive an electric car? Give up beef? Go vegan? Why not do as much of that rudimentary stuff as you can? Avoid advertising. Shun any commercial product or service that pretends to be free: They’re lying to you. My son, an Eagle Scout, introduced me to the ideal: Leave no trace. It’s useful to try, and failure builds awareness. I boycott Facebook yet can’t escape WhatsApp overseas. I go to annoying lengths to avoid Google products yet Googled like crazy for this article. I try and fail to resist Amazon, and still struggle with such basics as driving at the speed limit.
Beware the mistake my wife and I still make: Year after year, we send microscopic amounts of money to a gazillion charities. As my business clients have taught me, if you want an impact you’ve got to focus. Do like Archimedes: Plant your lever where the leverage is best.
Get your hands dirty. Service work is great for that. I try to go to a village in India every year, where I mop floors in a holy place during the quiet hours before dawn. It’s not that the floors specifically need me to mop them. The devotional work does me good.
Pay Attention to Politics
Ideology is a distraction. Spin is garbage. Virtually none of the solutions currently being promoted by politicians anywhere are big enough, or practical enough, to get us where we need to go.
If what we need is a global spiritual awakening, we must start thinking at the scale of our entire species, worldwide. Logically, that means we need leaders who can help us unite with the most people possible. Watch out for dividers, especially those whose policies appeal to you. Assess leaders on their ability to face reality and help others accept it.
During the 1980s I met plenty of empty-suit, big-desk CEOs who weren’t equal to the emerging challenges of global competition, discourteous financiers, and technological disruption. Over time, the rigors of the marketplace threw most of those bums out. I pray that most of today’s politicians will meet the same fate and be replaced by their betters. Ultimately, we may need to rethink our governance from the ground up.
Walk and Chew Gum
Nice as they may be, eating hummus and voting for competent leaders isn’t going to get the job done. With doom on the horizon, we’re in a binary situation: Either you’re part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. Taking responsibility for your own life, and for your share of the common challenge, is table stakes for becoming part of the solution. If so, we must confront the fruity part: our own spiritual development. To be of any use, we’ve got to do the practical stuff, become active citizens and work on ourselves.
Speaking as a coach, I claim that this work starts with a good hard look in the mirror. Ask yourself: Am I part of the solution or part of the problem? Try to be honest — nobody’s looking. If you decide you’ve got some work to do, welcome to the club. Start doing the work.
Don’t worry too much about methodology, or what path to take. Once you’re working on yourself, all roads lead to Rome. But be practical. As the I Ching says, “Self-knowledge doesn’t mean preoccupation with one’s own thoughts; rather, it means concern about the effects one creates.”
Cultivating a spirit of gratitude for the ephemeral gift of life seems to be helpful; it certainly makes living more fun. And if you need inspiration, look to 16-year-old Greta Thunberg as an example of what one person can do.
Learn From Wise Teachers
Here’s advice from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, which I’ve found particularly useful: “The key practice is transforming unfavorable circumstances into favorable ones.”
Over the millennia, human civilization developed many of the answers most essential to our needs today. Our global human supercomputer, if ever it comes into being, will have to come up with the rest. Unfortunately, the collected wisdom of humankind is fast fading from view, overwhelmed by bright screens and a deluge of junk. The Library of Congress, a fair proxy for the sum of human knowledge, is one billionth the size of what’s on the Internet, and more influencer videos are being posted every day.
Worse, in our zeal to optimize returns on our investment in education, we are abandoning philosophy, literature, and history in favor of STEM: science, technology, engineering, and math. What’s getting lost is the ability to think and communicate well about non-technical matters. My friend Paul Muller-Ortega, a scholar of Tantric scriptures written in Sanskrit, warns that just as there are traditions of wisdom, so there are traditions of ignorance. The humanities help people discriminate between substance and spin.
Having explored my share of esoteric teachings, I assert that you don’t need them. All the important guidelines are right there for everyone to see: Love your neighbor. Know yourself. And, as Spike Lee sez, Do the right thing.
We can do this. Or not. You tell me.
Footnotes
- An exabyte is one quintillion bytes, or about 4 million times the capacity of a 250-gigabyte hard drive.
