Emerging tech regulation fails AND no impact.

It is thus highly likely that the first implicit assumption of the dystopian perspective is correct: Things are indeed different today, and the difference is fundamental and qualitative, not simply one of degree. Emerging technologies are making everything from individual molecules, to the human, to the planet itself, design spaces. Moreover, it is also likely that technological evolution, and all the concomitant changes in coupled institutional, social, economic, and cultural systems, will be more challenging and complex than anything humans have yet experienced. The remaining two issues, then, are: First, what can we do about it; and second, is this the end of humanity?

What can we do about it?

Precisely because new technologies are disruptive, they inevitably call forth opposition, both by conservative social forces and by threatened economic interests. Historical examples abound. With railroad technology, for example, conservative states such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia resisted rapid deployment, in part because it was feared that railroads might create social unrest in the still somewhat feudal and highly stratified cultures that characterized such countries; the French held back because of concerns it would destroy rural culture. The predictable result was that modernizing states that realized the commercial and military potential of railroad technology, such as Prussia, rapidly overtook the laggards in building rail infrastructure, with an eventual shift in geopolitical stature. In the United States, railroads were bitterly opposed by river transportation interests; in fact, Abraham Lincoln, when still a practicing lawyer, argued and won the seminal case for the Rock Island Railroad.4 (River shippers at the time were arguing that any railroad bridge over a river was an unlawful obstruction of commerce; had they been successful, railroads would have been limited to operating between rivers and streams, but not crossing them.) A more recent example is provided by the thousands of people sued by the Recording Industry Association of America in its vain effort to defend a technologically obsolete business model for the distribution of music. There are plenty of reasons, in other words, why emerging technologies might be regarded as dangerous and disruptive, and thus worth stifling.

History, however, indicates that while local opposition can be successful, it will not halt the evolution of technology. Consider, for example, the Japanese attempt to limit gunpowder technology to preserve traditional Samurai culture; successful in the short term, it left Japan open to subjugation by Western naval forces with gunpowder technology. Similarly, environmentalists and governments in Europe have aggressively opposed genetic engineering (GMOs, or “genetically modified organisms”) in agriculture. Outside Europe, however, GMO technology has been one of the most rapidly adopted agricultural technologies in history. Efforts to regulate the proliferation of nuclear weapon technology have been somewhat successful, but it appears unrealistic to assume that the technology can be uninvented.

Especially given today’s globalized culture, and the strategic and military advantages that emerging technologies can provide, it is highly unlikely that meaningful constraints on technological evolution, whether derived from cultural, competitive, or religious foundations, will be successful. That is particularly true as all players in the global Great Game understand that leadership in science and technology domains is a necessary, if not sufficient, prerequisite for dominance. Moreover, given the complexity of many emerging technology systems, especially as they co-evolve with other natural, built, and human systems, it is unfortunately also likely that projecting their effects and evolutionary paths before they are actually adopted and become embedded in their social and cultural context is not just hard, but for all practical purposes impossible. One can, and should, generate scenarios. But exhortations that purport to elevate hypotheticals to predictions and implications of certainty about future states are misplaced.

In short, there is no certainty, and the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. However, that doesn’t necessarily imply that we can’t modulate future technological evolution, but that the way we think about it today may be too simple, and our institutions too slow and maladaptive, to be up to the task.

Beyond simplistic dystopianism

This analysis suggests that, as dystopians might argue, emerging technologies are indeed potent, and that, especially as the human is becoming an active design space, if AI doesn’t destroy humanity, something will. But this is a grossly incomplete perspective.

Humanity, as it appears at any particular time, is always doomed. Foragers and hunter-gatherers were doomed, as were the serfs of medieval Europe with their small plots and lives lived within a radius of a few miles of where they were born. And so, in our turn, are we. Doom is, in other words, evolution, and it is unlikely that we will stop it—or, really, that we should want to. In fact, the images that we cling to, personally and institutionally and culturally, are already obsolete. The ethics and values that we insist we will impose on the future are not only historically and culturally contingent, but already obsolete as well. We want the physical and cultural landscape we live in now to propagate into tomorrow, because we all unconsciously privilege the present, but that is not how complex systems work. They evolve, and indeed our world is evolving at a remarkable and accelerating clip.

The fallacy of the dystopians, then, is not in their analysis of the power of technology, or the accelerating and destabilizing rates of change. The fallacy is in equating evolution with dystopia, and, without admitting it, privileging the present over the promise and inevitability of the future. What is at risk is the limited mental model of “human” that all of us carry with us, not “humans” as an ongoing process. This is actually a common category mistake in modern discourse: Sustainability advocates and environmental activists often claim that “the planet is at risk,” but of course it is not. The planet is a large mass of rock and a film of various carbon compounds, and that is not at risk at all. What is at risk is a particular mental model of what the world should look like, a constructed snapshot. That does not mean that there aren’t many environmental issues that require attention; of course there are. But, as in the case of the emerging technology discourse, it does mean that existential catastrophe language is not only invalid, but can actually prevent seeking constructive adaptations to accelerating change.

Our only recourse is neither technological fatalism nor ethical relativism. It is true that we have not yet appreciated, much less begun to respond to, the challenge of a future that will indeed be more complex and difficult than anything we have experienced as a species. Nonetheless, we can already identify several important principles. For example, we need to stop thinking of “problems” with “solutions,” and think more in terms of “conditions” that will require long-term, adaptive management. Challenges such as ISIS and climate change will not be solved, but they can and must be managed in light of other relevant goals. In this, the experience with nuclear weapons is instructive: They are not a problem that can be unmade, but they are a condition that can be, and has so far been, relatively successfully managed.

We also need to focus on creating option spaces—portfolios of social, institutional, and technological choices that can be adaptively and flexibly deployed in complex environments. Similarly, we need to play with scenarios: If dystopian pronouncements are instead taken as scenarios—“What would you do if…?”—they are far more useful and informative than suggestions of doom.

Socially and institutionally, we need to become more agile and adaptive. This is uncomfortable for many, because it implies a degree of contingency and uncertainty, but that is precisely why such skills are necessary. The rate of technological change is unforgiving and has already decoupled to a large extent from traditional governance mechanisms. So we need to develop new ones.

Individually, we need to become far more humble about our ability to visualize and prognosticate on a complex and dynamic future. Cautionary scenarios and hypotheticals are welcome exercises in practicing to adjust to the unknowable that lies in front of us, but they are not appropriate foundations for policy or legal action in the present. Nightmares are seldom reality, and when bad things do happen they are seldom the ones we thought about. Fear and anger in the face of change are popular responses—witness the rise of far right and far left factions, and fundamentalisms of all stripes, around the world—but they are maladaptive, and those in responsible positions at least cannot afford such luxuries.