The Internet Is Not the Answer

by Andrew Keen

  A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. And if the people of Rochester knew the value of anything, it was that of a picture. As the global headquarters of the Eastman Kodak Corporation, pictures were to Rochester what cars once were to Detroit or what the Internet is today to Silicon Valley. Known as “the World’s Image Center” and “Snapshot City,” Rochester had built its prosperity on the many millions of “Kodak moments” captured by all of us over the last 125 years.

  “You press the button, we do the rest,” Kodak’s founder, George Eastman, promised when he introduced his first handheld camera in 1888. And that’s exactly what we all did throughout the industrial age—press the button on our Kodak cameras and rely on high-quality Kodak film and Kodak imaging and processing services to do the rest. We paid for all this, of course—exchanging cash for the developed photographs that then became our property. And so for more than a century, millions of Kodak moments had made Rochester wealthy and famous. But now a darker kind of Kodak moment had transformed Rochester from the World’s Image Center into a picture of failure.

  Paul Simon sang about Kodak’s bringing us lovely “bright colors” in his 1973 hit “Kodachrome.” The song was Simon’s tribute to what David Wills, the author of Hollywood in Kodachrome, described as the “spectacular” Kodak color film first introduced in 1935, a stock, Wills says, “synonymous with sharp detail and brilliant color” that produced “crisp” images and had “minimal grain.”9 For seventy years, Kodachrome accurately captured the world’s moments. It was used to take many of the twentieth century’s most detailed and memorable pictures—from Neil Armstrong’s 1968 snaps of the lunar landscape to the official images of many Hollywood stars.10 But Simon’s lyrics could equally apply to Rochester, where Kodak’s control of the global picture business had enriched the city with the brightest colors of all: a thriving local economy and tens of thousands of well-paying jobs.

  We haven’t stopped taking pictures. The problem is actually the reverse. We took 350 billion snaps in 2011 and an astonishing 1.5 trillion in 2013—more than all the photos ever taken before in all of history. “Pictures are more sexy than words,” explains Joshua Chuang, the curator at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography.11 “I snap therefore I am,”12 adds the Wall Street Journal’s Ellen Gamerman, about a culture in which we are using our camera phones so obsessively that if just the 125 billion photos captured in the United States in 2013 were turned into four-by-six prints, they would extend to the moon and back twenty-five times.

  The saddest thing of all about Rochester is that the more photos we take, the fewer jobs there are in Snap City. Don’t take my Kodachrome away, pleaded Paul Simon in his song. Since then, however, the digital revolution has taken away not only Kodachrome, but most of Kodak, too. When Simon wrote “Kodachrome,” Kodak controlled 90% of the film sales and 85% of the camera sales in the United States.13 Twenty-five years later, Kodak halted the manufacture of its Kodachrome film, ending a seventy-four-year history of production. And in September 2013, a few months before my arrival in Rochester, an emaciated Kodak emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy having sold the vast majority of its assets and laid off most of its employees.

  Things look a lot worse in black-and-white, Paul Simon sang. Yes, much, much worse. “An entire city,” cultural critic Jason Farago writes in an epitaph for Rochester, “has lost its center.”14 The Kodak collapse was “a tragedy of American economic life,” mourned the US judge who presided over the company’s exit from bankruptcy. The real tragedy, this judge explained, was that up to fifty thousand Kodak retirees, many of whom had worked their entire lives at the company, would either completely lose their pensions or, at best, get a payout of four or five cents on the dollar.15 To borrow a word from Sequoia Capital chairman Michael Moritz, life has indeed become “tough” for Rochester’s old industrial working class.

  Another bankruptcy judge, whose grandfather had actually worked for Kodak, put the tragedy in even more somber terms. “The bankruptcy proceeding has been a sorrowful thing,” he explained, “like losing a family member.”16

  I had come to Rochester in search of Kodak. I wanted to see for myself this broken place, this epic fail that had torn the heart out of the city. But even with the help of the latest networked mapping software from Google and Apple, failure can sometimes be hard to track down.

  Coming to an Office Near You

  “In a half a mile, turn left onto Innovation Way,” the voice instructed me.

  If only finding innovation were that easy. In my search for Kodak, I was navigating a rental car around the “Rochester Technology Park”—a cluster of low-rise office buildings next to a freeway on the outskirts of the city. And my driving directions were being broadcasted from my iPad by an automated female voice.

  “In a quarter of a mile, turn right onto Creative Drive,” the voice of the Google Maps algorithm continued in her mechanically unflappable way. “Then, in eight hundred yards, turn right onto Initiative Drive.”

  Rochester Technology Park had been carved up into identical-looking, hopefully named streets like Initiative Drive, Innovation Way, and Creative Drive. But as I drove up and down looking for a Kodak research laboratory that, I’d been told, was located in the complex, I realized that it wasn’t just Kodak that was hard to find. Initiative, innovation, and creativity were equally elusive. The sprawling technology park contained a lot of flat office buildings, but it seemed to be missing the most essential ingredient of all: people. In my search for Kodak, I barely saw a living soul. Nobody seemed to be there. It appeared hopeless, in a greatly dismal William Gibson kind of way. As if Silicon Valley had been transported to Rochester but somebody had forgotten to bring the humans. As if human workers had been replaced by robots.

  Perhaps they had. “It is an invisible force that goes by many names. Computerization. Automation. Artificial Intelligence. Technology. Innovation. And, everyone’s favorite, ROBOTS,” wrote the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson in 2014 about our increasing concern with the elimination of jobs from the economy.17 As if to mark (or perhaps mourn) the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Web, it seems as if 2014 is the year that we’ve finally fully woken up to what the Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Akst dubs “automation anxiety.”18 The cover of the one business magazine that I’d read on the flight from Chicago to Rochester, for example, featured the image of a deadly tornado roaring through a workspace. “Coming to an office near you . . .,” it warned about what technology will do to “tomorrow’s jobs.”19

  Many others share this automation anxiety. The distinguished Financial Times economics columnist Martin Wolf warns that intelligent machines could hollow out middle-class jobs, compound income inequality, make the wealthy “indifferent” to the fate of everyone else, and make a “mockery” of democratic citizenship.20 “The robots are coming and will terminate your jobs,”21 worries the generally cheerful economist Tim Harford in response to Google’s acquisition in December 2013 of Boston Dynamics, a producer of military robots such as Big Dog, a three-foot-long, 240-pound, four-footed beast that can carry a 340-pound load and climb snowy hiking trails. Harford suspects 2014 might be the year that computers finally become self-aware, a prospect that he understandably finds “sobering” because of its “negative impact of . . . on the job market.”22 He is particularly concerned with how increasingly intelligent technology is hollowing out middle-income jobs such as typists, clerks, travel agents, and bank tellers.

  Equally sobering is the involvement of dominant Internet companies like Google and Amazon in a robot-controlled society that the technology writer Nicholas Carr foresees in his 2014 book about “automation and us,” The Glass Cage. Carr’s earlier 2008 work, The Big Switch, made the important argument that, with the increasingly ubiquity of cloud computing, the network has indeed become a giant computer, with the World Wide Web thus being “The World Wide Computer.”23 And with automation, Carr warns in The Glass Cage, the World Wide Computer is now designing a society
that threatens to discard human beings.

  “The prevailing methods of computerized communication pretty much ensure that the role of people will go on shrinking,” Carr writes in The Glass Cage. “Society is reshaping itself to fit the contours of the new computing infrastructure. The infrastructure orchestrates the instantaneous data exchanges that make fleets of self-driving cars and armies of killer robots possible. It provides the raw materials for the predictive algorithms that inform the decisions of individuals and groups. It underpins the automation of classrooms, libraries, hospitals, shops, churches, and homes.”24

  With its massive investment in the development of intelligent labor-saving technologies like self-driving cars and killer robots, Google—which has imported Ray Kurzweil, the controversial evangelist of “singularity,” to direct its artificial intelligence engineering strategy25—is already invested in the building and management of the glass cage. Not content with the acquisition of Boston Dynamics and seven other robotics companies in the second half of 2013,26 Google also made two important purchases at the beginning of 2014 to consolidate its lead in this market. It acquired the secretive British company DeepMind, “the last large independent company with a strong focus on artificial intelligence,” according to one inside source, for $500 million; and it bought Nest Labs, a leader in smart home devices such as intelligent thermostats, for $3.23 billion. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is even working with Foxconn, the huge Taiwanese contract manufacturer that already makes most of Apple’s products, “to carry out the US company’s vision for robotics.”27 With all these acquisitions and partnerships, Google clearly is, as the technology journalist Dan Rowinski put it, playing a game of Moneyball28 in the age of artificial intelligence—setting itself up to be the dominant player in the age of intelligent computing. In the future, then, the origins of that deadly tornado “coming to an office near you” will probably lie in the Googleplex, Google’s global headquarters in Mountain View, California, where the automated data feedback loop of Sergey Brin’s “big circle” is coming to encircle more and more of society.

  And then there’s Google’s interest in Travis Kalanick’s Uber—another play that may turn out to be a massive job killer. In 2013, Google Ventures invested $258 million in Uber, the largest ever outside investment by Google’s venture arm. It’s not hard to figure out why. As the Forbes columnist Chunka Mui suggests: “Google Car + Uber = Killer App.”29 And as T. J. McCue, Mui’s colleague at Forbes, adds, Google’s interest in Uber may lie in Kalanick’s transportation network becoming the infrastructure for a revolutionary drone delivery service. Google could, in the not too distant future, take on UPS, FedEx, DHL, and postal services and replace the jobs of hundreds of thousands of delivery drivers and mail carriers around the world with networked drones. Given that UPS and FedEx alone employed almost 700,000 people in 2013,30 the impact of this drone revolution on middle-class jobs threatens to be particularly corrosive. “FedEx needs Amazon more than Amazon needs FedEx,” the New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller notes about Amazon’s ability to negotiate its own special rates with FedEx.31 And this power asymmetry will become increasingly pronounced as Amazon develops technology and services that directly compete with independent delivery services like FedEx and UPS.

  For some, the idea of automatic drones replacing UPS and FedEx drivers is a science fictional fantasy, more suited to 2114 than 2014. But not for Jeff Bezos, another early investor in Uber. In a December 2013 interview with Charlie Rose on the CBS News show 60 Minutes, Bezos actually floated the idea of deploying drones to deliver packages. Calling this service “Prime Air,” Bezos said, “I know this looks like science fiction. It’s not.”32 And just as Amazon may one day go robot-to-robot with Google in the delivery drone business, it is also competing with Google in the war of the one percent to eliminate the jobs of everyone else in our economy. In July 2014, Amazon even wrote to the US Federal Aviation Administration asking for permission to test Prime Air. The delivery drones could travel at up to 50 miles an hour and deliver packages of up to 2.3 kilograms.33

  The Amazon theater of this automation war is as strategically significant as the Google front. Yes, Amazon may be hiring low-income, hourly, nonunionized laborers for its rapidly growing number of warehouses. But, like Google, Amazon is also massively investing in automated labor technology, with Jeff Bezos telling his investors in May 2014 that he expected to be using 10,000 robots in its fulfillment centers by the beginning of 2015.34 Thus in 2012 Amazon paid $775 million for Kiva Systems, a maker of robots for servicing warehouses. Kiva robots—which, by the way, are already being used by the Amazon-owned online shoe store Zappos (in Zappos’s hierarchy-free holacracy, all robots are presumably equal)—can retrieve and pick 200–400 items an hour. As George Packer warns in a 2014 New Yorker piece, “Amazon’s warehouse jobs are gradually being taken over by robots.” The chilling end result, Packer forecasts, is that Amazon will have “eliminated the human factor from shopping, and we will finally be all alone with our purchases.”35 The Everything Store is, in truth, turning out to be the nobody store. It’s an automated echo chamber—a store in which we are surrounded by algorithmic mirrors and all we see are our own buying histories. The algorithm knows what we want before we enter the store and then a robot fulfills our order, which, if Jeff Bezos has his way, will be delivered by our own personalized drone.

  Like Google and Amazon, Facebook is also aggressively entering the artificial intelligence business. In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR, a virtual reality company, and British-based pilotless drone company Ascenta.36 Mark Zuckerberg has also co-invested with Tesla Motors’s CEO Elon Musk and the Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher in an artificial intelligence company called Vicarious, which mimics human learning. According to its founder, Scott Phoenix, Vicarious’s goal is to replicate the neocortex, thus creating a “computer that thinks like a person . . . except that it doesn’t have to sleep.”37 Phoenix told the Wall Street Journal that Vicarious will eventually “learn how to cure diseases, create cheap renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings.”38 What Phoenix didn’t clarify, however, is what exactly human beings will do with themselves all day when every job is performed by Vicarious.

  The threat of artificial intelligence to jobs is becoming such a huge problem that even Eric Schmidt, Google’s normally glib executive chairman, now acknowledges its seriousness. “The race between computers and people,” Schmidt declared at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos, will be the “defining one” in the world economy over the next twenty-five years.39 And “people need to win,” he said. But given their massive investment in artificial intelligence, can we really trust Google to be on our side in this race between computers and people over the next quarter century? If we “win” this race, won’t that mean Google—having invested in artificial intelligence companies like Boston Dynamics, Nest Labs, and Deep Mind—will have lost?

  Rather than focusing on “winning,” our networked automation anxiety is really all about identifying the losers, the people who will lose their jobs, the failures in our networked economy. Citing a paper by Oxford University’s Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne that predicts that 47% of all American jobs might be lost in the next couple of decades,40 the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson speculates on “which half” of the workforce could be made redundant by robots. Of the ten jobs that have a 99% likelihood of being replaced by networked software and automation over the next quarter century, Thompson includes tax preparers, library technicians, telemarketers, sewers in clothing factories, accounts clerks, and photographic process workers.41

  While it’s all very well to speculate about who will lose their jobs because of automation, Thompson says, “the truth is scarier. We don’t have a clue.”42

  But Thompson is wrong. The writing is on the wall about both the winners and the losers in this dehumanizing race between computers and people. We do indeed have more than a clue about its outcome. And that’s what reall
y is scary.

  The Writing on the Wall

  Not everything about our automation anxiety is speculative. Indeed, when it comes to photographic process workers, there’s a 100% certainty that they lost the race with computers for jobs. That was why I had come to Snapshot City. Rather than speculating about the destruction of tomorrow’s jobs, I’d flown into Rochester to understand how networked technology is killing today’s jobs.

  I’d begun my search for Kodak’s remains earlier that morning at Visit Rochester, a run-down building at ground zero of the city’s decimated downtown, on the corner of Main and East Streets, where I did, at least, manage to find a live person.

  “Could you tell me where I can find the Kodak offices?” I asked the gray-haired old lady, who was volunteering her labor at the center. Judging by the distraught look on the kindly woman’s face, I might have brought up a recent family bereavement. Perhaps I had. Her husband, she told me, had worked at Kodak for more than forty years. “A lifer,” she called him, ruefully shaking her head. I wondered if he was one of the fifty thousand retirees who’d lost all his benefits after the bankruptcy.

  The woman unfolded a map of Rochester and spread it on the counter between us. But rather than a local geography lesson, she gave me an introduction to her city’s troubled history. “Well, there used to be a factory here and labs here and here,” she said, not bothering to veil her nostalgia for a city that no longer existed. “And here, and here, too.

  “But now,” she added, lowering her voice, “now, I’m not so sure.”

  Twenty-five years ago, of course, it would have been a quite different story. In 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee made his revolutionary breakthrough at CERN, Eastman Kodak employed 145,000 people in research laboratories, offices, and factories all over Rochester. Even in the mid-nineties, the publicly traded company had a market value of more than $31 billion. Since then, however, Kodak’s decline has been even more precipitous than that of the global recorded music industry.