We used to be such optimists. Technology would bring us a world of wealth in harmony with the environment, and even bring us new worlds. The Internet would erase national boundaries, replace gatekeepers with a universal opportunity for free expression, and bring us all closer together. Remember when we looked forward to every advance?<\/p>\n
I just finished Liu Cixin\u2019s magisterial science-fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth\u2019s Past<\/a>. It is very much a bracingly pessimistic story for our era. Without spoiling it too much, I\u2019ll just say that it\u2019s a depiction of a transition from optimistically anticipating contact with other worlds \u2026 to a bleak realization that we haven\u2019t done so yet because the universe is a \u201cdark forest,\u201d the title of the trilogy\u2019s second book. \u201cDark forest theory\u201d holds that civilizations fear one another so much that they don\u2019t dare to reveal themselves lest they immediately be considered a potential threat and destroyed.<\/p>\n There are certain analogies here. We\u2019ve grown to fear technology, to mistrust everything it offers us, to assume its every new offering has a dark side. Consider the recent mini-viral-storm around the \u201c10 Year Challenge\u201d meme, and the resulting Wired piece<\/a> suggesting it\u2019s a Trojan Horse designed to manipulate us into training Facebook\u2019s AI to improve recognition of aging faces.<\/p>\n I strongly doubt that that is actually the case. Not because I have any faith in Facebook\u2019s transparent benevolence; because they already have a way-past-enormous cornucopia of such data, more accurately (implicitly) tagged. Even if explicit tags were helpful rather than counterproductive \u2014 which I doubt, given the stripping of metadata, the jokes riffing on the meme, etc. \u2014 they wouldn\u2019t move the needle. As Max Read puts it<\/a>:<\/p>\n