Monster. Paul Roehrig
A Tough Love Letter On Taming The Machines That Rule Our Jobs, Lives, and Future
Copyright © 2021 by Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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1
HAVE WE CREATED A MONSTER?
In which we explore one of the great questions of our time: Have we inadvertently created technology that is hurting our society, our economy, and even our minds?
we love technology. Waze, Netflix, Shazam, Hotel Tonight, Spotify, the MRI that diagnosed Ben’s back problem, Gmail, Headspace, Alexa, even on occasion the corporate travel application. Technology is a miracle — something that has made billions of people’s lives around the world materially better. Including ours.
We — Ben and Paul — have worked in tech most of our professional lives, as IT analysts, management consultants, and technology practitioners, playing a small role in creating and shaping an industry that employs a significant percentage of the world’s working population and is now worth an eye-watering $4 trillion a year.1 We have unashamedly been technology evangelists. But recently something has changed, and now we’ve become worried. Why? Because we increasingly come across not as tech evangelists but as tech apologists.
“AI is the great story of our time!” we say (on stages around the world).
“Data is the new oil.”
“Everything that can be automated will be automated.”
“Hyper-personalization is key to competitive advantage.”
“Don’t be a bad robot — be a good human being.”
“Contact tracing is key to stopping the coronavirus.”
“Pre-digital dinosaurs roam the earth. Don’t be one.”
People nod, and often applaud, which is nice, but then the real questions start.
“How many jobs will AI destroy?”
“What should my kids study?”
“How can we compete against pure digital companies?”
“What will ordinary, non-tech-savvy people do in a world of brilliant tech superstars?”
“Will we need to sacrifice our freedom for our health?”
“How can I beat the robots?”
“What about Universal Basic Income?”
“Will the Fourth Industrial Revolution lead to a real revolution?”
“What scares you?”
Typically, we nod, pause, smile, and say, “That’s a very good question.” Then we try our best to convey a message that acknowledges the concern in the questioner’s mind but also provides a positive, hopeful point of view: “If we take the right actions now, things are going to be OK. Better than OK, in fact.”
Lately, though, we’ve started feeling less certain that things are going to be “better than OK.”
And it’s in that light that we attempt in this short book to ask and begin to answer perhaps the most important questions of our time:
Have we inadvertently built some kind of technology monster that is attacking our society, our economy, and even our individual psychology? If so, what should we do about it?
In our last book, What To Do When Machines Do Everything (published 2017), we didn’t shy away from the impact tech has had — and will have — on disrupting jobs or spurring other downsides of progress and innovation. We laid out a vision that artificial intelligence (AI) and other new technologies are simply the next generation of powerful productivity tools for us to use wisely. These tools will change our world, as new tools always have, by taking us to the next level of potential and achievement.
So far, overall, we’ve been largely right. While it’s true that the pandemic is clearly reshaping how and where we work, it’s also the case that forecasts of AI and robots causing a job apocalypse were overblown. Before the pandemic, employment numbers were at record levels in the Western world, and many sectors show signs of quick recovery. Being “pragmatic optimists” about technology has seen us stand out in crowds of doom-mongers and dystopians.
But concerns about technology’s negative