Technology Need Not Divide Us From Ourselves

An all too common theme, is that technology may soon stand in the way of our ability to pursue meaningful and productive lives. Nevertheless, this imagined "cloud" has a silver lining, for technology need not mean the loss of autonomy or personal agency. Ultimately, it is within our power to broaden the means by which individuals and groups alike, can benefit from technology and societal innovation in general.

Only survey the historical means by which we have chosen to benefit from technology in the past. Recall how the rationale of society's earlier decisions to disperse productivity gains, occasionally backfires to some extent. For example, we lost potential economic time value, when we chose immediate monetary gains (higher wages) over the ability to coordinate learning patterns with working patterns in the same environments. Whenever education is formally separated from workplaces, the results aren't always as helpful as one might expect. In an article for Brookings, "How history explains America's struggle to revive apprenticeships", Greg Ferenstein observes:

The fall of America's apprenticeships began as a political compromise between labor unions and business executives over how much to pay young workers-in-training after the industrial revolution. 

Technology's latest transformation is extensive use of data. Is data somehow "failing" us as well? In a review of "New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future" (James Bridle), Niki Seth-Smith notes:

More information is supposed to lead to better decisions, a cultural logic that has dominated the Western World at least since the Enlightenment. The warning that this relationship is breaking down, or perhaps is already broken, is being flagged across multiple disciplines. What Bridle attempts to do is to bring them all together.

Niki Seth-Smith questioned whether's Bridle's suggestion to "embrace uncertainty" was a suitable response. Societal fears such as this, also play into attempts to refuse technology the "upper hand". Yet technology need not define every waking moment of our lives, and it might only gain the "upper hand" if we are reluctant to believe it can still help us. Even deep learning AI applies skill use patterns in far more limited settings than individuals with average intelligence are capable of, and this will continue to be the case. To the extent our knowledge based relationships have partially broken down, we have expected our present institutions to disperse knowledge in much the same ways societies were able to do, prior to the 20th century. However, today's institutions are limited in their capacity to do so - especially when our economic time is structured as residuals in other production processes.

We need to reclaim our economic time preferences, so that we can once again function as a direct part of wealth creation. By allowing time to function as short term symmetric loans for mutually held time preferences, we could better choose when we want to augment or reduce labour, in relation to other forms of capital. We would also have better institutional means, by which to carry the use and experience of knowledge forward through time. By approaching wealth creation more directly, the resulting "first mover" position this process creates, allows us to work side by side with AI and other technology at the outset.

Instead of trying to stop technology in its tracks, why not take a closer look, to see where it could best augment our own reciprocal economic relationships with others. When we give economic validity to our personal time preferences, we restore our potential for personal agency, which in turn can be further enriched through technology.