The Symbiotic Future of Humanity and Technology: Utopian or Dystopian? | by Gang Su | Nov, 2021

One

It was July the 4th. Driving against the traffic of merry crowds gathering towards the fireworks, my heart was racing fast with each boom. My daughter was having a pretty bad diarrhea and vomiting, losing liquid fast but refusing to drink anything. After talking with a nurse frantically on the phone, I was instructed to buy some Pedialyte to rehydrate her immediately. Many stores already closed early, with only one 24hr CVS nearby. I pulled in the dark and derelict parking lot, and a bit of apocalyptic feel started to brew — what if the store is closed already, or they don’t have the medicine in stock?

I rushed in, hardly catching my breath. No other customers were present, and there was this lone old lady standing behind the register. She looked indifferent at first but upon noticing my anxiety, her face lit up like a sleeping computer booting. Before seeing me, she may have felt there’s no meaning to be at the post on this very holiday while everyone else would be celebrating. But now my sudden appearance may have provided a purpose.

I explained the situation, anxiously. She quickly ushered me to the isle and located the bottles I needed. She comforted me, even joking that her kids had the similar sickness when they were young, and there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. “Now you can even message doctors on your phone, and everything is on the internet,” I remember she said. “Kids are resilient. In our time, we couldn’t do much but only wait. Your girl will be fine. Get back to her quickly, she may be already running around.”

I thanked her, and felt much better. On my way out, I couldn’t stop wondering: in a few years when all stores are self-service with A.I. aid, what will the experience be? While fetching medicine could be much more effortless with automation, A.I. could detect anxiety from my facial expressions, elevated heart rate and excessive respiration. Will the A.I. respond with the same level of empathy and care? Will the machine identify the soft spots in my emotions, and make a joke about its never-existed but well-simulated experience of raising kids? Will I look at the screen or hologram, and feel the same warmth from the silicon hearts?

I turned my head around and saw her waving goodbye to me behind the register alone, like a last-standing rebellion guarding the final post from the inevitable machine takeover. I wished her fortune. I wished her well.

Two

The summer of Kyoto was more humid than I thought. It has been almost fifteen years since my last visit to Japan, and this time I brought my family along. I have been fascinated by the ancient city since I was a child — the temples, the lores, the summer festivals and markets running for centuries. Finally, I got a chance to explore everything first-hand. My wife made all the arrangements. Since we really wanted an immersive experience, we booked an Airbnb instead of a touristy hotel. From the website it’s a traditional Japanese condo with Tatami in a historical part of the city, perfect for the family. I was thrilled — I even bought myself a set of Yukata (traditional summer male outfit) and wanted to blend in with the locals a bit. I thought my Japanese fluency probably can get by maybe for a minute or two.

When we got there, things were bit different than we expected. There wasn’t any false marketing — everything about the condo was as advertised. What was different though, was the neighborhood. The condo sat on a narrow back alley with three other similar condos, all operated by other property management companies. The funny part was in order to make the property look less like a rental, fake owner names were hang at the entry way. Hence for that day we were role playing Mr and Ms Nijo, and so do all of our neighbor tourists. I walked around the neighborhood and found at least 1 out of 3 condos were operated by various Airbnb-like companies. The owners have all moved out so that they could profit from the lucrative rents during the busy touristy season. The houses still look traditional, but the local charm are long gone, leaving only empty shells.

As we walked along the narrow streets, we stepped to the side to apply some sunscreen. The door behind us opened, and a grumpy old man asked us whether we wanted a haircut. As we said no and were apologizing we blocked his entry way, he literally yelled “Get the F*** out” in Japanese. I was sympathetic to him — this may happen maybe dozens or even hundreds of time a day. His barber shop may be the last few standing, in a town encroached by impersonating residents.

Three

I noticed my mom has been more melancholy last few years. She has been a bit of a pessimist when she was younger, so at first I thought there may be something going on with my her and my father. I tried to talk to her more, and I heard a lot of petty complaints, as well as mentioning of bad things in the news that don’t really matter to her. One day: nobody care about the seniors. Next day: the medical doctors are all fraud and only care money. A week later: social security will be bankrupt, the elderly will be helpless. She was not like this before. She use to enjoy travel and cooking, but all she can think about now is the ominous future.

So I started investigating. I tried to figure out what her day is like — where she went, who she talked to, etc. I was initially worried that she was involved in some pyramid scheme. But nothing suspicious emerged; she was hanging out with the same group of people, and her day-to-day life wasn’t changed. I was bewildered. Her negative view towards the world just kept spiraling worse.

This mystery remain unsolved until she visited me — when I’ve got the opportunity to observe her from close. Immediately I noticed where the problem was — her smartphone. She spent an awful lot of time on her black mirror, primarily with two things: News App and Social Network. Since both of these Apps were personalized, she was stuck in an echo chamber on steroids: these News App kept recommending her negative news about seniors, especially on topics like healthcare, social security and loneliness. She then shares the personalized, primarily negative news to her social networks and friends, which would then resonate and promote more sharing and engagement of similar material within the same group. And this goes on and on.

This back-and-forth feedback-loop between the seemingly unrelated News App and Social Network App dug such a deep hole for this cluster of seniors that they can’t see anything else other than the dark side of the world, despite they are connected to the web the entire time. They become a group of stranded people trapped deep on an island hopelessness. Everywhere they look, it’s something pessimistic and mentally damaging without a way out.

Then I tried to rescue her — I explained how recommendation engine works and why what she’s reading everyday online or hearing from her friends may not reflect the world she’s in. I was worried that she may be overwhelmed by the technology, but she listened. I asked her to spend less time in those Apps, and if she couldn’t, try to engage more things she’s usually not interested in at all, like — race cars, fishing, even anime, to resist the algo takeover of her mind. I asked her to go back to reading books, and travel with her friends. I even tried to click on random news when I had access to her phone.

Things improved noticeably— I don’t know whether it’s because of the video of grandkids, I talk to her a bit more, or her consciously battle against the feeds that keeps trying to pull her back into the echo chamber. She may be petite and seemingly harmless, but not easily surrendering to the sophisticated machines that try to hold her a hostage. Not yet, Skynet.

The Best and Worst of Times

We are living in an era of unprecedented technological marvel. With a push of a virtual button on palm sized phone, we can reach out to almost anyone (60{18fa003f91e59da06650ea58ab756635467abbb80a253ef708fe12b10efb8add} internet pen., 40{18fa003f91e59da06650ea58ab756635467abbb80a253ef708fe12b10efb8add} smart-phone pen.) instantly on this planet, have food(200B) and merchandize(25T) delivered directly to our doors, and enjoy immersive entertainment in details that far beyond retina’s resolution. We have never been so interconnected in this massive network of people, devices, sensors and algorithms — technologies have become air to humans, can’t live without. Those robots and autonomous cars that used to only exist in fictions, are emerging into reality. We are, at the peak of our civilization, aiming for voyage into the stars.

Yet technologies don’t only bring in convenience and progress; they have also created a slew of problems which are often left unnoticed or hidden under the prosperity. The previous industrial revolution rapidly changed manufacturing and transportation, at some visible costs: irreversible environmental damages(pollution, deforestation), culture clashes, humanitarian and public health problems, etc. Fast forward today, the lingering effects of excessive usage of electronic products can be much less alarming to a smog infested skyline. Nevertheless, it’s only been fourteen years since the debut of the first iPhone, and we are already on spending on average a jaw-dropping 4–6 hours a day on these smart-devices. My son learned how to swipe before he learned how to draw.

As the blending of technology and humanity into a meta-organism is inevitable, how can we assure a future of sustainable mutual survival? Who should be the guardians of this being? Who, or which party, should be monitoring the vital signs, know when it’s healthy, and when it’s not, and step-in to intervene when necessary? The world will continue to exist for many more millions of years. What we don’t know is whether humanity as we know today will still be part of it.

The Latent Harm

One key functions organisms developed through surviving the gladiatorial evolution is the feedback loop — each action is associated with an outcome: proceed with reward, retreat if there’s harm. Neurons send near-realtime signals to the brain and reactions are almost immediate. This way a human body could regain balance after a fall without even consciously thinking, and overtime we learned how to evade danger and stop making harmful decisions collectively as a civilization. This simple system works most of the time, but it’s flawed when the short-term reward dwarfs the long-term harm. Hence it gives rise to problems like substance-abuse and addition to gambling, since the guards in the human brain just don’t deem the small short-term damages as life-threatening. It’s just another drink for today, how bad could it be?

Embracing technology is obviously not as grave as over-intoxication, but over the last decade there have been growing parallels. The benefits from technology have been so overwhelming that the downsides, unless extremely severe (such as autonomous car accidents), are easily overlooked; the massive scale of application render the damage of thousands of paper cuts difficult to measure. It’s not uncommon that good intensions of making the human community better with technological innovations, may eventually lead to unintended harmful results: growing inequality, political polarization are some of the issues catching public attention. As a civilization together, maybe it’s time for us to allocate more resources to proactively identify such risks and harms early on before they become intractable. Everyone of us, regardless of as an undertaker in the tech industry or a consumer of the innovation, bears a sliver of responsibility — we are all individual cells in this massive organism of technology and humanity. Mutual survival has never been so urgent, for us, and the generations to come after us.

Insta-gratification and Waning of Slow-Thinking

For folks who are old enough, the term snail mail may still ring a bell. I used to have pen-pals across the pacific and we mailed each other every three to six months. The slow nature of the communication made the exchange deeper and more engaging; in addition to food and hobbies, we discussed culture, environment protection and geo-politics. The pace was slow but remarkably rewarding with an element of surprise — I never knew when the next snail mail would appear.

With internet, everything changed. First we have emails, followed by peer-to-peer instant messengers (IMs), and then video chats over mobile devices anywhere, anytime. We talk more with each other (because, why not?) with less substance, and become growingly inpatient when a swift reply wasn’t responded even within seconds. The shift of mindsets towards instant gratification has an oversized impact on many aspects of daily lives: why investing time to improve drawing skills when you can just beautify a picture and receive more likes on social networks? why spending days to polish a plastic hobby model when you can order a pre-made one from Amazon, and have it shipped to your door same-day? why reading a whole book, or watching a full movie, when you can just get a summary from Youtube or podcast? Every single day we inadvertently want more with doing less. More instinctive reaction, less contemplation. Technologies then, by increasingly tapping into our minds, keep pushing us further into the comfort zone. Remember the comical portrayal of future obese human beings with faced glued to the screens? That may just become reality very soon.

If the overdose of instant rewards isn’t alarming, the more dangerous change might be, waning of slow thinking. In many complex scenarios not taking an action in the heat of the moment is, arguably, a better option. Because current technologies naturally compete for our attention and want to make decisions on our behalf, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to act immediately. Maybe you have noticed many email clients start to improve autocomplete capabilities: first by autocompleting the next few words by the first couple of letters, then trying to guess the next sentence. If things keep going without guardrails, A.I. will eventually be capable of guessing the next paragraph, the whole statement, and putting thoughts into our minds. This, as stated by President Abraham Lincoln: the best way to predict your future is to create it. The development of abilities to understand our wants and needs eventually evolves into self-fulfilling prophecy. Is it good or evil? We don’t know, but at least this warrants an educated debate in a safe forum without the aid of devices whispering into our ears.

I used to have very long conversations with friends, some exceeding several hours, on various deep topics. I found it much rarer these days. Maybe it’s natural because we are all older now with more responsibilities and less time to squander on intellectual freedom, but also maybe we have been too indulged in doing many petty things with our dear gadgets and forgot about deep thinking. A couple of years ago my wife and I took a cruise trip to Mexico, and we had a wonderful time chatting between ourselves and with strangers (over some good drinks, of course). Nobody had any 4G bars on the open-sea, and we were left to our own devices to communicate.

Over Exploit, Insufficient Explore

I took a trip to Denver last year for a conference. The first evening I took a stroll in downtown and tried to find a good restaurant. I saw a young man sitting on a bench, so I approached him and asked whether he was local and could offer some advice. I used to do this all the time when traveling to a new place to gather tips from the street, to avoid touristy areas and explore what’s genuinely local. The reaction was, both hilarious and sad. He looked at me in disbelief and confusion, since I was holding an iPhone with Google Map on. “Why don’t you just yelp?”

The first page of Google Search probably accounts for over 80{18fa003f91e59da06650ea58ab756635467abbb80a253ef708fe12b10efb8add} of all clicks, with first 3 taking in over 50{18fa003f91e59da06650ea58ab756635467abbb80a253ef708fe12b10efb8add} (my guess). On Amazon, this imbalance may be even more lopsided, which is reflected in the skewed distribution of reviews. It was both shocking and not unexpected in a playdate that we noticed all other parents had exactly the same set of toys, diaper bags, pacifiers, etc. as ours — all Amazon best sellers. Technologies have granted us far more options than local news paper and corner stores, yet we make more homogenous decisions. More diverse data actually accelerated the regression to the mean.

In a typical human life cycle, we balance time spent on explore and exploit. The former allows us to trial and error, and gain experience such that we can exploit our skills for the ultimate return — survival. As technologies have combined all human knowledge and experience into one interconnected mega-mind, why taking the risk trying a new restaurant that nobody has tried before, and just take advice from those who have paid the early-adopter tax? It’s undoubtedly safer and more efficient. The unintended consequence is that if everyone thinks the same way, our collective life experience would become not only boring, but risker in the long term. Diversity is one key element to ensure the survival of a species — what if the restaurant everybody goes to caught fire and closed down? Now what?

I remember I visited a small town in China years ago, and my friend brought me to a food block. It was striking to see that people line up for restaurants on one side of the street, with the other side barely serving any customers. I was intrigued by the stark contrast and inquired my friend why. He couldn’t explain, but assured me that the food is probably worth waiting for due to the long line. I suggested we try one on the other side with nobody waiting. He was reluctant — what if the food is not good? Technologies, algorithms and low ROI of trying new things from consumers together, have made it exponentially more difficult to open a new restaurant on that same block.

Cross-ecosystem Echo-Chamber

The tech giants have been primarily operating in their own swimming lanes — social, search, media, e-commerce, game, etc, though crossovers are becoming more common. Typically we don’t think about the cumulative effect of the technologies on individuals and society as a whole, as it’s extremely difficult to measure. In reality, each individual user is a unit that connects all tech ecosystems and function as a member of communities — think about a bipartite network of people and platforms. Unexpected outcomes may appear as a result of secondary, or tertiary effects from the cross-over of these technologies.

One example is the reinforcing echoing effect. Since the majority of the technology platforms embrace some flavor of engagement as a primary metric, naturally algorithms tend to feed consumers things they are most likely to engage: click on a website (search), watch a video (streaming), make a purchase (e-commerce), and add new connections (social). Within each echo-system, some guardrails are usually in place to prevent fatigue of homogenous or click-baitty content, to ensure the consumer experience is meaningful and rewarding in the long term. However, such guardrails are non-existent across different ecosystems; the feedback-loop can permeate from one ecosystem to another via the individual consumers. The aforementioned example of my mother is exactly that: she carried the personalized signal from the news platform, to the online and offline social platform that determined people who interact with. Through such cross-ecosystem echoing, the signal from both the news and social networks were amplified; and these people become trapped deeper in their own bubbles with reinforcing confirmation biases. They may social more online and offline, purchase similar things, even move closer together physically. Eventually a well connected network of people and information fragmented itself into disconnected clusters that have little awareness of the existence of others, even their next-door neighbors. This multi-platform echo could have also contributed to the extreme polarization in politics in the last election: I have friends on supporting both sides, and both believed that they would have a landslide win — just demonstrates how biased views they have formed from iterative reinforcements. Without modulation, people can be trapped in these chambers with padded walls and moats. They may check out anytime they like, but they can never leave.

Regardless which web platform I use, I consciously engage in things I don’t think I am typically interested in, as an adversarial play against the gravitational pull from the algos and try to at least stay close to the doors of echo chambers. Even so, I still find the recommendations I get on some platforms are … very appealing. Maybe there’s a group of people like me who refuse to let go the driving wheel, but then by definition we formed a group, and algos poked into our hearts and learned what we wanted — I’d love to meet the others fellow members in this rebellious cluster.

The Skewed View of the World

The boom of the big data era has enabled massive collection and storage of data, from mobile phones to satellites, the world can be reconstructed with the digital bits with unprecedented high fidelity — you can already have an immersive experience in VR on Google Earth. All the information is in the cloud, the only thing you need to do is ask (literally, to one of the voice assistants).

Naturally many metrics are developed to capture various aspects of the world. From temperature to stock exchange and game ratings, we use such numbers to probe what’s happening around us. Businesses try to harvest as much data as they can to understand market penetration, customer satisfaction, competitions, etc. Data-informed strategy has gradually substituting the good-old gut feeling. Nothing could be more convincing than a slide filled with charts and numbers in a strategy discussion. Talk is cheap. Show me the data. However, bad data is worse than no data: as the data become increasingly more accessible, there can be significant risk by over-reliance on numbers. We tend to assume data are objective and unbiased (endorsed by technology, right?), which is hardly true. Depending on how data is collected, stored, transformed, processed and analyzed, each intermediate procedure may add some dust and noise or omit something that could eventually fabricate a skewed view of the subject matter — biases in business health, customer sentiment, and overall impact to the society: in the aforementioned room-sharing example, each property management company may believe they have only penetrated a small percentage of the local neighborhood using their own data, but collectively a substantial portion of the town may have already been taken over by this new business model. This slow-burn on the vibrance of neighborhoods may be less damaging than others: polarizing opinions on political matters, biases in social justice and equity, misinformation, etc. I used to chat quite often with Uber drivers: collectively, they are summary statistics. Individually, everyone is a unique story.

All this comes to how we obtain our information today — personalized information streams. Unfortunately, polarizing materials naturally receive more attention since most of the recommendation engines optimize for information that contain very strong signals — easy to get eyeballs. There’s another bias from the data generation side: you may find even many product reviews follow a bimodal distribution: more 1-Star and 5-Star reviews than those in-between: those who love or hate the product are more likely to review, and reviews with stronger opinions receive more clicks, carry stronger signals, and subsequently ranked higher by algorithms. In reality, the majority of the patrons probably had a good meal, but learning from data, you may think people only either love or hate. The real world is hardly black or white, but a lot of grey. It’s not easy to distill nuances and ambiguity into binary bits.

Some breakthroughs in technologies are pushing the envelope to further blur the digital and physical world. New machine learning models can generate life-like human faces, synthesize speeches mimicking a celebrity’s voice, and even manipulate a face from a recorded video all together. While these impressive technologies may give rise to various innovations, serious harms may be inflicted if they are in malicious hands. A world in which seeing is not believing is nerve-wracking to say the least. Superior counter-measures are then essential to safeguard our society: if technology is the superman, we need the batman as an assurance.

Those Who Are Left Behind

Last time I connected a flight in Shanghai, my cell-phone was almost out of battery and I accidentally packed the charger in my check-in luggage. You would think that it shouldn’t be a problem to find a charge station — well, not so simple. While mobile charge pods are almost ubiquitous, they all require one thing missing from my U.S. phone: local mobile payment. Walking from one stand to another, I only found that neither credit cards nor cash could save my day. Eventually I had to beg a stranger to help me rent a battery bank.

The current smart phone penetration in Unites States is around 72{18fa003f91e59da06650ea58ab756635467abbb80a253ef708fe12b10efb8add} and 78{18fa003f91e59da06650ea58ab756635467abbb80a253ef708fe12b10efb8add} for Unites States and China, respectively. It’s an impressively high number, but what we should not ignore, is the remaining 1 out of 3-4 people who are excluded from today’s digital social fabric. Failure to charge a phone is probably just a minor inconvenience, inability to shop merchandise, pay bills, or taking transportation can be life-changing. It was reported that recently in China an elderly man had to walk ~ 590 miles because he didn’t carry a smart phone and hence couldn’t register his health status in the COVID-19 pandemic. Concurrently, I noticed that many physical stores topped to accept cash due to safety concerns during COVID. While the lives of many became more convenient with mobile based technology, the lives of the few who are most vulnerable, such as those in poverty, marginalized groups and seniors, became much more difficult. They don’t even have a voice: without smartphones and internet, these communities became invisible. Those who are left behind become the lingering ghosts in the technological wonderland.

For those who may be riding the wave for now, the good times can be ephemeral: the disruptive of innovation is merciless. Artificial Intelligence paired with automation and the scale of today’s tech is a double-edged sword: together they drastically improve our lives and render us irrelevant simultaneously. I remember the first time I visited San Francisco, yellow cabs were everywhere. I had to pay 120$ to get a taxi from Mountain View to SFO 3 in the morning because that I was the only option. A decade later, the ride sharing industry completely obliterated the hundred year old business. It has never been so convenient to travel from point A to B, but some taxi drivers who paid hefty fees for the medallions had to swallow deep losses. What will the truck drivers, tax accountants, translators, teachers, radiologists do when technology take over their livelihood overnight? Andrew Yang and Kai-fu Lee have their take. Working hard everyday may not guarantee survival, we will learn to work with the machines and get ahead of them. Tech workers are proud, sometimes complacent, about the changes and values they are brining to the society. Rewind 100 years, autoworkers moved the world. Now, the Rust Belt.

I remember a story from South Korea many years ago. A single mother worked relentlessly in her corner grocery store to provide her son the best education so he could go to college. After graduation, her son elevated into the management of a national grocery chain, which eventually forced his mother to shut down that very store which supported his tuition. We may witness many similar stories in the years to come all around the world, when technology created by the young, with the intent to make some people’s life better, inevitably displace others. The question we need to ask ourselves is: is this the right direction for our humanity? Who would look out for those got left behind when the rest marched forward? If we don’t have sympathy to those who became victims from the technological innovations, then eventually like what was portrayed in the Matrix, we will no longer be the beneficiaries; we will be come fuel to this massive optimization machinery. Efficiency, instead of benefiting us, made us part of the grand optimization.

Map Apps are really trying to be smart and impress me lately. As soon I got into the car and launch car-play, it would try to predict the destination. On a weekday morning, to drop-off my daughter at the daycare. On a weekend evening at the beach, probably time to go home. I am pretty sure that next step is to auto launch navigation, and autonomous driving afterwards.

Is this my ideal life, or my kids to have a life like this? I don’t want my decisions to be completely dominated by algorithms, no matter how convenient it can be. When I grew up as a kid, I hated public transportation. I would rather ride a bicycle for 10 miles instead of riding a bus, for the simple reason that I don’t like riding on a pre-defined path. I like to have the uncertainty that half-way during the trip, I may wanted to be distracted to do something different. Many years later, we can wield unprecedented power from devices that fit in our pockets, but at the same time, as humans, all together, the total possibilities of our thoughts, decisions, explorations, may have regressed. The ephemeral spark or thoughts from the complex interactions in our neurons, are now overpowered by the optimal actions we ought to take, suggested by the silicons neurons, from learning and interacting with the collective minds of all. The manipulated, silently, became the manipulator. The Skynet did not start a thermonuclear war to eradicate the mankind. The Skynet became one of us, and all of us.

My kids are already pretty tech-savvy. My 4 year old daughter can already issue commands to voice assistants to play some music and dance with her younger brother, and she almost unlocked my phone once. She thought my favorite thing is computer since I am with it all the time when I am at home. Yet that moment in her life that left the most lasting impression to me so far, is not when she learned to walk, talk, write or manipulate digital devices, but rather that one day in a playground, she walked to this new kid, shy and playing alone. She gave him a big smile, and said: would you like to play with me? We have not ever taught her to do that. If she followed an algo recommendation to maximize her fun at the park, she would’ve probably just joined her friends and left the boy alone. But she chose to be empathetic, to be less efficient, to be less optimal. I asked her why she did that — “it’s the right thing to do.”

What is your choice to make?