When Super-Chickens Started to Roost
Early warning of tech viciousness--and finally some resistance
In 2014 I was invited to speak at a California tech ‘summit’ comprised of the CEOs of young startup companies. I was no stranger to this kind of event; when I was the CEO of startups, we gathered regularly with our peers to help one another and share what insight we had into a new and confusing market. No longer running companies, I was intrigued to see what these gatherings had become.
The investor’s opening left me aghast.
“There is nothing wrong with healthcare that getting rid of doctors won’t fix.
There is nothing wrong with education that getting rid of teachers won’t fix.
There is nothing wrong with the legal system that getting rid of lawyers won’t fix.”
… and so on. The new world would be improved by eliminating human relationships.
The speech made me want to leave. But I honoured my commitment and stayed, mostly ignored by an audience of cocky young men who silently expressed their disdain for the idea that they could ever be susceptible to willful blindness—or had anything to learn from a middle-aged woman.
I had a friend in San Francisco I was eager to see, so thought of leaving again. Instead, I stayed to hear the lunchtime keynote: Tony Blair.
He could not have been more ingratiating. More than ingratiating, positively slavish in his sycophantic veneration of the brilliant young talent that sat before him. If he had his life to live over again, Blair insisted, he would long to have these brilliant men as his peers and allies: the brave young geniuses making the world anew. They had everything to win—and the world needed their giant brains and bravery, their steely and ambition. The oleaginous speech suggested these were Blair’s new Messiahs and oh, how he wished he were young enough to join their crusade.
That’s when I left.
Blair had not just drunk the Kool-Aid of Sili Valley; now he was peddling it—as he has continued to do so ever since. For 15 years he has attempted to foist digital IDs onto the British people, without any evidence anyone wanted them. Having watched ICE on the streets of America, that danger is now apparent, but Blair continues to insist that the digital state will set us free—the kind of paradox the Soviets used to call humour.
Looking back on this conference, that I was seeing the early signs of an emerging industrial/technology complex now seems as self-evident as the military/industrial complex was to Eisenhower in 1961. Like many of my generation, I’ve watched with increasing pessimism as the Internet we imagined would make a thousand flowers bloom has turned into a network of monopolistic companies vying for government control. ‘There’s nothing wrong with government that getting rid of democracy won’t fix’ might be the new opening gambit.
But just as dismaying is the long shadow cast by Musk and his ilk. I can’t help but be struck by business school students who arrive convinced that success for self is embodied by making others fail. I had hoped, when I wrote A Bigger Prize that this stereotype was fading; I was wrong. The super-chickens are now out and about, fighting to rule the roost and just as the evolutionary biologists demonstrated, the productivity of the few is achieved by suppressing the productivity of the rest.
The good news is that those biologists demonstrated that this doesn’t work. A flock, a team, a business, a society, genuinely thrives only when all are productive. Super-chickens may be out in force today but evolution suggests that their long-term future is constrained by their own viciousness.
So I’m heartened to see a gradual awakening, in Europe and many other parts of the world, to the danger implicit in surveillance capitalism. I also feel for Shoshana Zuboff whose treatise on the subject was published seven years ago, which suggests that it was being written just as that tech summit was promoting its gospel. We can’t say we weren’t warned. There’s a lot of catching up to do…
If You Want to Go Deeper
It isn’t too late to read Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It’s long but worth it.
For the Love of It
James Marriott’s BBC radio series How Reading Made Us is a terrific 3-part series about how the written word has changed our brains, our understanding of each other and our politics. Though it features a bit too much Steven Pinker for my taste, it is packed with insight, nuance and makes a powerful argument that ‘certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing.’ Marriott’s Substack is an apt accompaniment.
Ms. Heffernan,
I think your observations are largely correct, but I wonder whether they point to a deeper phenomenon than the character flaws of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
The comments you heard at that summit were indeed alarming. To suggest that medicine can be fixed by eliminating doctors, education by eliminating teachers, or law by eliminating lawyers reveals a profound misunderstanding of the role human relationships play in human institutions. Doctors do more than diagnose. Teachers do more than transmit information. Lawyers do more than process contracts. Human beings provide trust, mentorship, accountability, legitimacy, and meaning—functions that are often invisible until they disappear.
But I am not convinced that the central issue is arrogance, surveillance capitalism, or even the ambitions of a particular generation of technologists.
Rather, I think we are witnessing the consequences of a much larger historical force: the rapid expansion of intelligence itself.
Throughout history, intelligence has been scarce. Knowledge was difficult to acquire, expertise took decades to develop, and cognitive labor was limited by the capacities of the human brain. Today, for the first time, we are beginning to enter a world in which intelligence may become abundant. Artificial intelligence is not simply another technology. It represents the possibility that reasoning, analysis, design, and even creativity may become dramatically cheaper, faster, and more widely available than ever before.
Whenever intelligence increases, complexity increases with it. Complexity generates tensions within existing systems. Those tensions eventually drive transformation.
Seen in that light, the entrepreneurs you encountered were not merely promoting a business model. They were expressing, however crudely, the logic of a civilization entering a new phase of development. Intelligence discovers inefficiencies and immediately asks, “Why do we need this?” Only later do we discover that some apparently inefficient institutions were carrying indispensable human functions.
The danger, therefore, is not technology itself. Nor is it confined to Silicon Valley. If artificial intelligence succeeds, the same pressures will emerge in governments, universities, hospitals, churches, corporations, and activist organizations. The challenge is not that a few powerful people have become intoxicated by technology. The challenge is that humanity is acquiring unprecedented intellectual power without a corresponding increase in its understanding of what that power is for.
In that sense, I would argue that we are facing less an intelligence crisis than a wisdom crisis.
The task before us is not simply to preserve existing institutions against disruption. Some institutions genuinely need reform. Nor can we surrender to the belief that every human relationship is an inefficiency waiting to be automated away.
The deeper challenge is learning to distinguish between what is essential and what is merely traditional; between functions that can be automated and human capacities that must be cultivated; between intelligence and wisdom.
The super-chickens may be real. But I suspect they are not the story. They are among the first visible signs that humanity is moving from an age of scarce intelligence to an age of abundant intelligence.
Whether that transition leads to flourishing or catastrophe will depend less on how much intelligence we create than on whether we develop the wisdom required to guide it.
David Ellis
Hi Margaret - Super-Chickens indeed... I recently read British scientist Adrian Woolfson's On the Future of Species, about how harnessing the power of AI scientists such as himself are working to eradicate the 'flaws' of evolution. He writes in his introduction about how 'the blind, directionless process of evolution by natural selection may be augmented, perhaps even surpassed, by artificial evolution.' Whilst his goals of eradicating disease and hunger are admirable, the hubris of humans living hugely extended lives, or his vision of playing God and creating new life from scratch, set alongside the idea of the whole of creation being flawed, imperfect and needing to be fixed, is indeed as Pope Leo has recently written, a city built on 'a power that claims to dominate the heavens' that 'excludes God and reduces the other to means'. Mike Jones