The technology sector seems to be under unusually concerted political pressure, in financial services and elsewhere. Facebook’s plan to introduce a digital currency has achieved that rare feat of uniting Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the US Senate and the House Committee on Financial Services in opposition to its potential “immense economic power that could destabilise currencies”, in the words of Rep. Maxine Waters. Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel is pressuring Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google on various alleged offences.
Concerns over Libra, Facebook’s digital currency, also proved a lightning rod for general anxiety over the power of technology giants at a mid-July meeting of the Group of Seven finance chiefs. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire warned that “the sovereignty of nations cannot be jeopardised”.
And yet, in apparent indifference to all this animosity, star technopreneur and Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk unveiled his new company Neuralink, devoted to creating “ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers”.
So are the politicians simply knockers and Luddites obstructing progress and prosperity for all? I rather doubt it. The recurrent scandals over data security, account hacks, hate speech, fake news and other ills of modern technology give zero comfort that technology companies can be trusted to police themselves and be responsible stewards of our personal details and financial security, let alone our brains.
Those scandals demonstrate repeatedly that the pioneers and proponents of technology have earned suspicion and scepticism, rather than unquestioning trust and reverence, through their actions and priorities.
The moral and political defects of the engineering mentality appear so obvious and prevalent that they spawned a book, Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education, by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog in 2016. Its premise is that “a disproportionate share of Islamist radicals come from an engineering background” due in large part to “a particular mindset seeking order and hierarchy that is found more frequently among engineers”. The US, meanwhile, continues to deify its engineers. What could possibly go wrong?
When assessing the blandishments of a “visionary” like Elon Musk, it’s worth recalling that another groundbreaking pioneer in the auto business, Henry Ford, was a committed believer in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That’s the level of ethical enlightenment that comes with industrial innovation.
Silicon Valley-style over-entitlement is anything but the ideal moral and ethical gymnasium to foster legislators who can actually implement technology responsibly.
Science, discovery, and the intellectual challenge of the unknown are perennial goods and guiding lights of the human spirit. But the technological exploitation of the fruits of discovery for the sake of power or profit, regardless of the social and human consequences, is just more of the same old American prosperity gospel of individual success at any cost.
