Skip to main content

Future Politics - Jamie Susskind ***

Don't ignore this book if you are turned off by politics, as, despite the title, the theme of the book is how the internet, AI and the future of information and communication technology will impact our lives. Although politics is the primary way this is reflected, the book has a much wider remit - and these technologies are, without doubt, producing sweeping changes that will increasingly have a disruptive impact.

 Jamie Susskind starts with a rather breathless (and sometimes over-the-top) vision of the future of these technologies - he admits, like all futurology, what he says will almost certainly be wrong, but argues that just because this is the case doesn't mean we shouldn't examine potential consequences. He then goes on to examine how lives transformed by the internet, AI and mobile technology will have different opportunities and threats in the areas of power (human power, not rate of energy consumption), liberty, impact on democracy and justice.

 There is some really interesting material in here - particularly about the power that is increasingly in the hands of tech companies and the ways that democracy could change. Unfortunately, though, this is done in overly-wordy fashion - in this, the book's more like a business book than a science book: it could be a third the length and still contain all the significant material. It's interesting that at one point, Susskind refers to the book The Future of the Professions by his father and brother. That too suffers from excessive repetition, and the business/textbook tendency to have to dream up unnecessary names for things. (At one point in Future Politics, for example, Susskind pointlessly defines 'Deliberative Democracy, Direct Democracy, Wiki Democracy, Data Democracy and AI Democracy.') But the good news is that this Susskind is a significantly better writer than his father and brother - mostly this book is written in English rather than academic-speak.

 Perhaps the weakest part here was the future gazing at the beginning, where Susskind tends to wildly underestimate timescales for, for instance, the immersive adoption of self-driving cars or smart home technology (yes, for example, there are the robotic vacuum cleaners he mentions - but they cost six times as much as an ordinary cleaner and don't do the job as well). What he doesn't seem to get is that just because something is technically possible doesn't mean it will be widely bought into outside early-adopting tech lovers for a considerable time.

 Taking an example from a parallel situation: it's perfectly possible to build a zero carbon house - one that has no net carbon emissions in its day-to-day operations. And a few people have. But it will be decades or even centuries before they are dominant, because it would mean replacing most of the existing housing stock, and because even now most new builds aren't zero carbon, because it's too expensive to build them that way.

 So, bringing this back to Susskind's examples, I don't think people will be rushing into, say, self-restocking fridges, because again they're far more expensive than the ordinary variety, and most of us like to buy things when we want rather than when a fridge wants. Similarly, I think he vastly underestimates how long it will take self-driving cars to become common. Initially they will be very expensive, and it will take a long time for the majority to trust them. Also Susskind doesn't at all address the psychological problem of adopting them. Fans argue they will reduce deaths on the road. Great. Let's say they reduced the worldwide figure from 1 million to 250,000. That seems wonderful - 750,000 lives saved. But it would be a political minefield. Because those are 750,000 hypothetical lives. But 250,000 actual people will have been killed by self-driving cars - and their families will blame the technology.

 It seems, then, that some of the issues Susskind discusses are perhaps a lot farther ahead than he thinks. But we can't dispute, for example, the power already in the hands of social networks, search engines and the like, or the impact that technology is having with democracy. And because those issues are already with us, despite its faults, this is an important book and well worth reading.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more