Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How

"There are many people today who see that modern society is heading toward disaster in one form or another, and who moreover recognize technology as the common thread linking the principal dangers that hang over us."

"In specific contexts in which abundant empirical evidence is available, fairly reliable short-term prediction and control of a society's behavior may be possible. For example, economists can predict some of the immediate consequences for a modern industrial society of a rise or a fall in the interest rates. Hence, by raising or lowering interest rates they can manipulate such variables as the levels of inflation and of unemployment. Indirect consequences are harder to predict, and prediction of the consequences of more elaborate financial manipulations is largely guesswork. That's why the economic policies of the U.S. government are subject to so much controversy: No one knows for certain what the consequences of those policies really are. Outside of contexts in which abundant empirical evidence is available, or when longer-term effects are at issue, successful prediction – and therefore successful management of a society's development – is far more difficult. In fact, failure is the norm."

"Biological organisms, evolving through natural selection, eventually invade every niche in which biological survival is possible at all, and, whatever measures may be taken to suppress them, some organisms will find ways of surviving nonetheless. Within any complex, large-scale society, a similar process will produce self-propagating systems that will invade every corner and circumvent all attempts to suppress them. These systems will compete for power without regard to the objectives of any government (or other entity) that may try to steer the society. Our argument – admittedly impossible at present to prove conclusively – is that these self-propagating systems will constitute uncontrollable forces that will render futile in the long run all efforts to steer the society rationally."

"Proposition 1. In any environment that is sufficiently rich, self-propagating systems will arise, and natural selection will lead to the evolution of self-propagating systems having increasingly complex, subtle, and sophisticated means of surviving and propagating themselves."

"The principle of natural selection is operative not only in biology, but in any environment in which self-propagating systems are present. The principle can be stated roughly as follows: Those self-propagating systems having the traits that best suit them to survive and propagate themselves tend to survive and propagate themselves better than other self-propagating systems."

"Proposition 2. In the short term, natural selection favors self-propagating systems that pursue their own short-term advantage with little or no regard for long-term consequences."

"The world-system has been highly complex for a long time. What is new is that the world-system is now tightly coupled. This is a result of the availability of rapid, worldwide transportation and communication, which makes it possible for a breakdown in any one part of the world-system to spread to all other parts. As technology progresses and globalization grows more pervasive, the world-system becomes ever more complex and more tightly coupled, so that a catastrophic breakdown has to be expected sooner or later."

"Meanwhile, fierce competition among global self-prop systems will have led to such drastic and rapid alterations in the Earth's climate, the composition of its atmosphere, the chemistry of its oceans, and so forth, that the effect on the biosphere will be devastating."

"We will argue that if the development of the technological world-system is allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion, then in all probability the Earth will be left a dead planet – a planet on which nothing will remain alive except, maybe, some of the simplest organisms – certain bacteria, algae, etc. – that are capable of surviving under extreme conditions."

"As soon as some energy is freed up by conservation, the technological world-system gobbles it up and demands more. No matter how much energy is provided, the system always expands rapidly until it is using all available energy, and then it demands still more. The same is true of other resources. The technological world-system infallibly expands until it reaches a limit imposed by an insufficiency of resources, and then it tries to push beyond that limit regardless of consequences."

"But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence. When that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will favor systems that eliminate them-if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized."

"It's important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on an intelligent, non-technical conversation (the "Turing test"), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway. To make humans superfluous, the machines will only need to outperform them in making the technical decisions that have to be made for the purpose of promoting the short-term survival and propagation of the dominant self-prop systems. So, even without going as far as the techies themselves do in assuming intelligence on the part of future machines, we still have to conclude that humans will become obsolete."

"More importantly, the replacement of humans by machines in the military is proceeding apace. At the moment human soldiers and policemen are still necessary, but, given the accelerating rate of technological development, it is all too possible that within a couple of decades police and military forces may consist largely of robots. These presumably will be immune to subversion and will have no inhibitions about shooting down protesters."