by Al Gore
Similarly, the dominance of money in modern politics—particularly in the United States—has now led to what might be described as “quarterly democracy.” Every ninety days, incumbent officeholders running for reelection and challengers in political contests are required to publicly report their fundraising totals for the previous ninety days. At the end of each of these quarters, there is a flurry of fundraising events, email solicitations, and fundraising telephone calls to maximize the amount that can be reported—much as a puffer fish increases its perceived size in the presence of another puffer fish encroaching on its territory.
Our evolutionary heritage has made us vulnerable to numerous stimuli that trigger short-term thinking. Though we also have the capacity for long-term thinking, of course, it requires effort, and neuroscientists tell us that distractions, stress, and fear easily disrupt the processes by which we focus on the longer term. When elected officials are under constant systemic stress to focus intently on short-term horizons, the future gets short shrift.
This is particularly dangerous during a period of rapid change. Some of the trends now under way are so well documented by observations in the past that projections of those same trends into the future can be made with a very high degree of confidence. The rate of advancement in computer chips, to pick a well-known example, is understood more than well enough to justify predictions that computer chips will continue to advance rapidly in the future.
The speedy drop in the cost of sequencing DNA has occurred for reasons that are understood more than well enough to justify predictions that this trend too will continue to shape our future. The accumulation of greenhouse gases in the past and the rise in global temperatures they have caused is also understood more than well enough to justify predictions of what will happen to global temperatures if we continue to increase emissions at the same rate in the future—and what the consequences of much higher global temperatures would be.
Other changes, however, burst upon the world seemingly fully formed: a brand-new pattern that represents a sudden shift from an older pattern that persisted for as far back in the past as humans can recall. In our own lives, we are accustomed to gradual, linear change. But sometimes the potential for change builds up without being visibly manifested until the inchoate pressure for change reaches a critical mass powerful enough to break through whatever systemic barriers have held the change back. Then suddenly one pattern gives way to another that is entirely new. This “emergence” of systemic change is often difficult to predict, but does occur frequently both in nature and in complex systems designed by human beings.
MANY WHO WERE once fascinated and excited about the possibilities of the future are now focused solely on the implications of the future’s potential for the business, political, and security strategies of the present. As the Scientific Revolution accelerated in the last decades of the twentieth century, corporate planners and military strategists began to devote considerably more attention to the study of alternative futures, motivated by a concern that the potency of new scientific and technological discoveries could threaten the strategic interests—or even survival—of business models and the balance of power among nations.
What is our present conception of the future? How does our image of the future affect the choices we are making in the present? Do we still believe that we have the power to shape our collective future on Earth and choose from among the alternative futures one that preserves our deepest values and makes life better than it is in the present? Or do we have our own crisis of confidence in humanity’s future?
If the spectrum of past, present, and future were displayed as a long thin rectangle similar to that used to portray the electromagnetic spectrum, the birth of Planet Earth 4.5 billion years ago would be at the far left end. Moving to the right, we would see the emergence of life 3.8 billion years ago, the appearance of multicellular life 2.8 billion years ago, the appearance of the first plant life on land 475 million years ago, the first vertebrates more than 400 million years ago, and the first primates 65 million years ago. Then, moving all the way to the right end of the rectangle, the death of the sun would appear 7.5 billion years from now.
The narrow slice of time to the left of the midpoint in this spectrum—the one that represents the history of the human species—is an even narrower slice of the spectrum of time than is visible light of the electromagnetic spectrum. The thoughts we devote to these vast stretches of time in the past and future are often fleeting at best.
There are ample reasons for optimism about the future. For the present, war seems to be declining. Global poverty is declining. Some fearsome diseases have been conquered and others are being held at bay. Lifespans are lengthening. Standards of living and average incomes—at least on a global basis—are improving. Knowledge and literacy are spreading. The tools and technologies we are developing—including Internet-based communication—are growing in power and efficacy. Our general understanding of our world, indeed, our universe (or multiverse!) has been growing exponentially. There have been periods in the past when limits to our growth and success as a species appeared to threaten our future, only to be transcended by new advances—the Green Revolution of the second half of the twentieth century, for example.
So the positive and negative sets of trends are occurring simultaneously. The fact that some are welcome and others are not has an effect on our perception of them. The unwelcome trends are sometimes ignored, at least in part because they are unpleasant to think about. Any uncertainty about them that can be conjured to justify inaction is often seized upon with enthusiasm, while new hard evidence establishing their reality is often resisted with even stronger denial of the reality the evidence supports.
Just as naïve optimism can amount to self-deception, so too can a predisposition to pessimism blind us to bases for legitimate hope that we can find a path that leads around and through the dangers that lie ahead. Indeed, I am an optimist—though my optimism is predicated on the hope that we will find ways to see and think clearly about the obvious trends that are even now gaining momentum, that we will reason together and attend to the dangerous distortions in our present ways of describing and measuring the powerful changes that are now under way, that we will actively choose to preserve human values and protect them, not least against the mechanistic and destructive consequences of our baser instincts that are now magnified by technologies more powerful than any that those in previous generations, even Jules Verne, could have imagined. I have tried my best to describe what I believe the evidence shows is more likely than not to present us with important choices that we must consciously make together. I do so not out of fear, but because I believe in the future.
* * *
* The Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future had a very able executive director, Anne Cheatham.
For a larger version of the following image, click here.
1
EARTH INC.
THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS BEING TRANSFORMED BY CHANGES FAR greater in speed and scale than any in human history. We are living with, and in, Earth Inc.:* national policies, regional strategies, and long accepted economic theories are now irrelevant to the new realities of our new hyper-connected, tightly integrated, highly interactive, and technologically revolutionized economy.
Many of the most successful large enterprises in the world now produce goods in “virtual global factories,” with intricate spiderwebs of supply chains connecting to hundreds of other enterprises in dozens of countries. More and more markets for goods—and increasingly services that do not require face-to-face interaction—are now global in nature. Higher and higher percentages of wage earners must now compete not only with wage earners in every other country, but also with intelligent machines interconnected with other machines and computer networks.
The digitization of work and the dramatic and relatively sudden metastasis of what used to be called automation are driving two massive changes simultaneously:
1. The outsourcing of jobs f
rom industrial economies to developing and emerging economies with large populations and lower wages; and
2. The robosourcing of jobs from human beings to mechanized processes, computer programs, robots of all sizes and shapes, and still rudimentary versions of artificial intelligence that are improving in their efficacy, utility, and power with each passing year.
The transformation of the global economy is best understood as an emergent phenomenon—that is, one in which the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but very different from the sum of its parts in important and powerful ways. It represents something new—not just a more interconnected collection of the same national and regional economies that used to interact with one another, but a completely new entity with different internal dynamics, patterns, momentum, and raw power than what we have been familiar with in the past. There are limits to cross-border flows of people, of course, and trade flows are stronger among countries that are close to one another, but the entire global economy has been knit together much more tightly than ever before.
Just as the thirteen American colonies in North America emerged as a unified whole in the last quarter of the eighteenth century—and just as the ancient walled city-states of Italy eventually became a unified nation in the second half of the nineteenth century—the world as a whole has now emerged as a single economic entity that is moving quickly toward full integration. At least that is the reality in the world of commerce and industry, in the world of science, and in the rapid spreading of most new technologies to centers of commerce throughout the world.
In the world of politics and governmental policy, nation-states remain the dominant players. Psychologically, emotionally, and in the ways we frame our identity, most of us still think and act as if we are still living in the world we knew when we were young. In fact, however, where the economic realities of life are concerned, that world is receding from view.
This powerful driver of global change—sometimes loosely and inadequately referred to as “globalization”—marks not only the end of one era in history and the beginning of another, it marks the emergence of a completely new reality with which we as human beings must come to grips.
OUTSOURCING AND ROBOSOURCING have typically been seen as two separate and distinct phenomena—studied and discussed by different groups of economists, technologists, and policy experts. Yet they are deeply intertwined and represent two aspects of the same mega-phenomenon.
The tectonic shift toward robosourcing and IT-empowered outsourcing dramatically changes the ratio of capital inputs to labor inputs and weakens the ability of working people to demand higher wages in industrial countries.
The political battles over labor rights in the first half of the twentieth century were fought to determine the relative distribution of income from labor and capital in enterprises where workers were organized. But technology-driven changes are now playing a much larger role in determining the future of work and what people earn in return for it. Arguments that used to occur in a zero-sum context no longer seem as relevant or persuasive when employers have the readily available options to: (a) simply close the factory or business and replicate it in a low-wage country, or (b) replace the labor with robots and automated systems.
From the standpoint of factory workers in the United States or Europe whose jobs are eliminated, the impact of automation and outsourcing is essentially the same. From the standpoint of the factory owner, productivity figures typically go up as a result of both offshoring and robosourcing—whether the new technology is deployed in the existing facility or in some foreign country.
Policymakers often count the result as a success because increased productivity is regarded as equivalent to the Holy Grail of progress. Yet they are often blind to the full impact of this process on employment in the country where the companies credited with productivity growth are nominally located, even though the trend is now accelerating to the point where the fundamental role of labor in the economy of the future is being called into question.
One manifestation of how the accelerating interconnection of the global economy drives both outsourcing and robosourcing simultaneously is that robosourcing is also occurring more and more rapidly in emerging and developing economies, and is beginning to eliminate a growing percentage of the jobs that were so recently outsourced from the advanced industrial economies.
There is a big difference between the investment of money in an offshore factory to replicate the same jobs that used to be located in the West, and the provision of what economists are beginning to label “technological capital”—investments that not only increase the productivity of business and industry, but over time eliminate large numbers of jobs both in the countries that originally lose the factories as well as in the countries to which they are relocated.
The workers in lower-wage countries initially benefit from the new employment opportunities—until the improved living standards they help to produce lead them to demand higher wages themselves. Then they too become vulnerable to being replaced when the factory owners are able to purchase ever improved—and ever cheaper—robots and automated processes with the new profits they have freshly earned as a result of outsourcing from the West. One Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer, Foxconn, announced in 2012 that it would soon deploy one million new robots within two years.
A positive feedback loop has emerged between Earth Inc.’s increasing integration on the one hand, and the progressive introduction of interconnected intelligent machines on the other. In other words, both of these trends—increased robosourcing and the interconnectedness of the global economy driven by trade and investment—reinforce one another.
The impact of robosourcing on employment is sometimes misunderstood as a process in which entire categories of employment are completely eliminated when a technological breakthrough suddenly results in the replacement of people with intelligent interconnected machines. Far more common, however, is that the intelligent networked machines replace a significant percentage of the jobs while greatly enhancing the productivity of the smaller number of the employees remaining by empowering them to leverage the efficiency of the machines that are now part of the production process alongside them.
The jobs that remain sometimes command higher wages in return for the new skills required to work with the new technology. And this pattern reinforces our tendency to misunderstand the aggregate impact of this new acceleration of robosourcing and see it as part of the long familiar pattern by which old jobs are eliminated and replaced by new and better jobs.
But what is different today is that we are beginning to climb the steep part of this technology curve, and the aggregate impact of this same process occurring in multiple businesses and industries simultaneously produces a large decline in employment. Moreover, many employees lack skills (in decimal arithmetic, for example, which is necessary to operate many robots) that they need to fill the new jobs.
New companies have emerged to connect online workers with jobs that can be cheaply and efficiently outsourced over the Internet. Gary Swart, the CEO of one of the more successful online job brokerages, oDesk, said he is seeing increased demand across the board, including for “lawyers, accountants, financial executives, even managers.” And robosourcing is beginning to have an impact on journalism. Narrative Science, a robot reporting company founded by two directors of Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Laboratory, is now producing articles for newspapers and magazines with algorithms that analyze statistical data from sporting events, financial reports, and government studies. One of the cofounders, Kristian Hammond, who is also a professor at the Medill School of Journalism, told me that the business is expanding rapidly into many new fields of journalism. The CEO, Stuart Frankel, said the few human writers who work for the company have become “meta-journalists” who design the templates, frames, and angles into which the algorithm inserts data. In this way, he said, they “can write millions of stories as opposed to a single story at a
time.”
THE CUMULATIVE EFFECT of the accelerating introduction of machine intelligence and the relocation of work to low-wage countries is also creating much greater inequality of incomes and net worth—not only in developed countries, but in the emerging economies as well. Those who lose their jobs have less income, while those who benefit from the increasing relative value of technological capital have increased income.
THE GLOBAL WEALTH GAP
As this shift in the relative value of technology to labor continues to accelerate, so too will the levels of inequality. This phenomenon is not in the realm of theory. It is happening right now on a large scale. As technological capital becomes more and more important compared to the value of labor, more and more of the income derived from productive activities is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer elites, while a much larger number of people suffer the harm of lost income.
There is a growing concentration of wealth at the top of the income ladder in almost every industrial country and emerging nations like China and India. Latin America is the rare exception. Globally, technological offshoring has at least temporarily improved the equality of income, because of the massive transfer of industrial—and now service—jobs to lower-wage countries as a group. On a nation by nation basis, though, inequality of income distribution—and of net worth—is increasing even faster in China and India than in the U.S or Europe. And income inequality reached a twenty-year high in 2012 in thirty-two developing countries surveyed by the global NGO Save the Children.