Best
Business Books 2016: Technology
The Human Function
Ian
Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance (St. Martin’s Press, 2016)
Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance (St. Martin’s Press, 2016)
Greg
Milner
Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds (W.W. Norton, 2016)
*A TOP SHELF PICK
Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds (W.W. Norton, 2016)
*A TOP SHELF PICK
Books about technology tend to fall into one
of two categories: wide-eyed boosterism or gloomy dystopianism. And although
both utopian tracts and bleak jeremiads have their uses, the most compelling,
like this year’s best books on technology, are keenly aware of the two-sided
nature of new technologies. On the one hand, they expand our range of
possibilities, create new opportunities, and sometimes dramatically improve our
everyday lives. On the other, they often bring with them unforeseen negative
consequences, concentrate power in the hands of those who own or control the
technologies, and disrupt the existing order in unsettling ways.
At
first glance, Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our
New Renaissance, by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna, might look like a classic
utopian text. At a time of profound skepticism about globalization and doubt
about the prospects for future innovation, Goldin and Kutarna are unabashed in
their advocacy of the benefits of globalization and convinced that technology
is transforming the world. The book is structured on the idea that our current
era (which they define as beginning in 1990, with the end of the Cold War) is a
“new Renaissance,” which is in important respects similar to the first
Renaissance. As a result, the authors begin their chapters with a look at that
earlier era (which they date from 1450 to 1550), and use the historical
comparisons to illuminate the current state of the world.
Age of
Discovery is a useful reminder of the
extraordinary gains that have been reaped by much of the world’s population
over the past 25 years, including a precipitous decline in the number of people
living in extreme poverty and a sharp rise in global life expectancy. The fact
that the lion’s share of those gains have come as a result of China’s steep
economic ascent doesn’t make the gains any less real. Goldin, a former World
Bank official who is director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of
Oxford, and Kutarna, a fellow at the Martin School, also make a strong case
that the sciences, in particular, are seeing what they call “Copernican
revolutions” in fields such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and
computing. They also show how technological progress is being spurred by
greater connectivity, which has enabled the harnessing of the collective
intelligence and effort of large groups of people in enterprises as varied as
translating texts, mapping the surface of Mars, and solving complex scientific
problems.
So far, so optimistic. What saves the book
from being a Pollyannaish look at the world is its keen awareness and
articulation of the problems that we currently face, problems that in some
respects have been amplified by globalization and the massive increase in
connectivity. Goldin and Kutarna remind us that in addition to being a period
of extraordinary invention across myriad disciplines, the Renaissance was a
time of tremendous tumult. Our time is no different. The most powerful chapters
of the book may be those that diagnose the dangers of the new world order,
including rising inequality, both within and among countries; a far greater
threat of global pandemics; decentralized terrorist activity; financial contagion;
and, of course, climate change. On top of those individual dangers, the more
connected the world becomes, the easier it is for problems in one part of the
world to percolate through the system as a whole. And to do so with startling
speed and severity — as with, for example, the financial crisis of 2007–08 and
the Zika virus. As these systemic risks have increased, our ability to deal
with them has not caught up. Institutions such as the World Health Organization
are woefully underfunded, and the lack of meaningful global governance forces
us to rely on ad hoc solutions.
In the
end, Age of Discovery is as much prescriptive as it is
descriptive. In arguing that we’re living in a new Renaissance, Goldin and
Kutarna are trying to ensure that the Renaissance continues. So they urge
businesses, which are currently sitting on trillions of dollars in unused cash,
to invest heavily in the future. Governments, too, they say, should pump up
spending on basic research, and in particular look to fund blue-sky projects,
rather than succumbing to the logic of austerity. And individuals need to
embrace change, rather than seeking to hold on to a past that’s already gone.
It’s hard to argue with their hopeful vision and policy wish list, which
includes such varied items as substantive measures to remedy inequality, the
loosening of intellectual property restrictions, the abolition of energy
subsidies, and the imposition of a carbon tax. But the authors might have said
more about why implementing these kinds of policies has proven so difficult for
the U.S. and other governments. And the question remains as to whether their
plan is too hopeful for the present moment.
The
Control Function
Some
of the backlash against technology comes from people’s understandable fears of
a hard-to-envision future. But in The Ethics of Invention: Technology
and the Human Future, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and
technology at Harvard University, finds another culprit: our tendency to
delegate power to technological systems, rather than asserting democratic
control over them. As Jasanoff points out, the operations of any technology
reshape the way we behave, often without us noticing it. And technologies have
consequences far beyond the obvious intended ones. The introduction of the automobile,
after all, gave drivers enormous freedom. It reshaped travel patterns and
supply chains, and altered the landscape of city and suburb alike. It also led
to more than a million traffic deaths in the U.S. alone, poisoned generations
of people with lead, increased asthma rates, and made a major contribution to
climate change. What’s fascinating, and troubling, is that the introduction and
spread of the automobile took place without much, if any, consideration of
those long-term societal costs.
Jasanoff convincingly argues that the future
of a technology is shaped not only by the technology itself, but also by the
decisions we make about how to use it, how to regulate it, and how to modify
it. And those “decisions” can be either passive or active: Simply allowing a
technology to develop without any meaningful democratic input is itself a
decision, even if we don’t think of it that way. She argues that the question
of how we manage new technologies is especially important today, because we’re
confronting a host of new technologies that give those who use them enormous
power. These include many of the same technologies Goldin and Kutarna
celebrate, such as synthetic biology, gene therapy, cloning, and genetically
modified foods.
We’re also facing new surveillance
technologies that effectively make it possible for the government and private
companies to track us 24/7, listen to our phone calls, and read our emails and
text messages as a matter of course (how, after all, does Google serve up ads
pegged to what’s in your emails?). The nature of patent law (in the case of
science) and network effects (in the case of information) means that a very
small number of companies could end up exerting a tremendous amount of control
over these technologies. (In the case of what Jasanoff calls the data
oligarchs, such as Facebook and Google, they’re already exerting it.) If we are
going to give CRISPR, a genome editing technique, the ability to reshape with
enormous ease the very building blocks of life, it seems sensible to find
mechanisms that allow a broad-based, democratic discussion about the risks and
benefits of new technologies — as well as what values we want to govern the use
of those technologies.
Such
talk raises the hackles of many entrepreneurs, who think the only “governance”
we need is to throw things out into the world and let the workings of the
market sort them out. But although that process works fine in the case of, say,
a new razor, it seems somehow inadequate for dealing with something like
CRISPR. More important for business, Jasanoff correctly argues that if you
don’t allow the public some voice at the beginning, you will end up having to
deal with the public after the fact. She tells the story of golden rice, a
genetically modified rice that includes elevated levels of beta-carotene (many
children in the developing world are deficient in Vitamin A, which can lead to
blindness; and beta-carotene is a precursor to Vitamin A). Golden rice seems
like a genuine boon to the developing world — an easy and cheap solution to a
serious problem. Yet its introduction in those markets has been slowed, and in
some cases blocked altogether, by the backlash against companies such as
Syngenta and Monsanto and their role in pushing genetically modified seeds and
crops. One obvious, and understandable, response is simply to label the
opposition to GMOs irresponsible and scientifically illiterate. But The
Ethics of Invention makes a convincing case that creating formal ways
to analyze and assess technologies and their proper use will offer us the best
chance of finding a path between “unbridled enthusiasm and anachronistic
Luddism.”
Location,
Location, Location
Finding
that path is precisely what journalist Greg Milner does in his remarkably
engaging book Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and
Our Minds, which takes what might seem to be a mundane subject — the Global
Positioning System — and uses it to tell an intricate story about the
relationship between technology, the economy, and human ability. GPS, like many
other technologies we use today, was built by the U.S. Defense Department. It
was conceived as a tool to make military targeting, and in particular bombing,
more effective and efficient. In Milner’s words, GPS was invented by those who
wanted to “bring death from above.” The U.S. government maintains GPS to this
day, which means that, as Milner writes, “when an ISIS terrorist gets a GPS
reading, the process is enabled by the United States military.”
GPS was released for civilian use in the
1980s (the U.S. government originally maintained two versions of the system,
with civilians using a more degraded and less accurate version, but the
distinction was erased in 2000). But it wasn’t until the emergence of the
Internet and widespread mobile connectivity that the true value of GPS emerged.
Nowadays, it allows companies such as UPS and FedEx to route packages far more
efficiently; enables planes to land more safely; abets precision agriculture,
in which automated tractors are able to perfectly till, sow, and harvest
fields; places personal navigation systems in cars; and facilitates the
tracking of criminals and terrorists. And now, with Pokémon Go, it allows
people to chase virtual creatures through the real world, in the most vivid
example yet of augmented reality.
As Milner shows, though, the same things that
make GPS so enormously valuable also make it dangerous. Because the state can
track criminals and terrorists, it can also track any citizen with a
smartphone. Our reliance on GPS makes us vulnerable to anything that could
disrupt the system, which might be hacks that spoof GPS (sending false location
signals) or solar flares. GPS also gives businesses access to information that
consumers don’t even know they’re disclosing.
Our dependence on GPS may also be reshaping
our minds. Humans’ ability to navigate and orient themselves in space is
remarkable, which is why Milner begins his book with the story of Polynesian
sailors who managed to sail thousands of miles of empty ocean without losing
their way. Although those sailors had seemingly superhuman navigation skills,
we all rely, to some degree, on “cognitive maps” that help us understand and
navigate complex environments. Those maps may be degenerating in the face of
GPS, because we no longer need them to get from one place to another. The
extreme consequence of this is what’s called “death by GPS,” as drivers
blithely follow their mapping app into the desert or the ocean. But more
subtly, GPS seems to transform our relationship to the landscape around us. One
Cornell University study found that using GPS made drivers more “detached” and
“eliminated much of the need to pay attention.” In other words, it may make us
simply see less of the world around us.
Pinpoint, the best business book about technology this year,
showcases both the upsides and downsides of GPS. It also implicitly makes two
crucial points about the nature of technological innovation. The first is that
public investment in new technologies can create enormous spillover benefits
for the economy as a whole. (The Internet and the World Wide Web, of course,
show the same phenomenon on an even wider scale.) GPS would not exist, after
all, had it not been for the Cold War, which spurred the U.S. government to
invest heavily in technologies that were then repurposed for civilian use,
including the transistor, lithium batteries, the microprocessor, and GPS.
Indeed, as Italian economist Mariana Mazzucato argues in her important
book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private vs. Public Sector
Myths (Anthem, 2013), just about every piece of technology in your
smartphone can be traced back to the Department of Defense in one form or
another.
The second essential lesson is that the value
of powerful new technologies isn’t always apparent at the time they’re
introduced. The U.S. Air Force, for instance, kept trying to kill funding for
GPS, because it felt that navigation systems were already accurate enough. It
didn’t recognize how useful pinpoint guidance might be, and it couldn’t, of
course, envision how powerful the combination of mobile connectivity and GPS
would become. Milner shows that civilians grasped the real usefulness of GPS
long before most of the military did, in fact. That’s why long-term, patient investments
— whether on the part of the government or in the private sector — are so
essential to technological progress, even if many of those investments will go
bust, and even if successful technologies will often end up looking very
different from what their creators initially envisioned. To paraphrase Alan
Kay’s famous line, you can’t really hope to predict the future. So the best
thing to do is try to invent it.
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