Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack that working on a technology story seemed tone-deaf, if not futile. On a plane from New York to San Francisco, I wrote a column to answer that impulse, directed as much to myself and my colleagues as it was to readers. I argued that regardless of the enormity of this event, one thing hadn’t changed; the biggest story of our time was still the technological revolution we were living through. Disruptive politicians, even destructive ones, may come and go—or refuse to go. But the chip, the network, the mobile device, and all they entailed were changing humanity, and maybe what it will mean to be human. Our job was to chronicle that epic transformation, no matter who was politically in charge. The headline of my column was “The iPhone Is Bigger Than Donald Trump.”
This week, Trump was once again elected president despite … oh hell, I won’t go through the litany of what would seem to be slam-dunk disqualifiers. You’ve heard it all, and to the majority of voters it doesn’t matter. It’s an unbelievable story, and the next few years will undoubtedly be the stuff of history. Maybe not in a good way. Maybe in a very bad way for a country where many expected to celebrate its continuing values on America’s 250th birthday. (In the spirit of unity, I’ll use the “maybe” qualifier since losers should be humble, and who knows what’s ahead.)
Yet I’m not budging from the thought I had in 2016. As Stewart Brand once said, “Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.” What is happening in technology and science remains the activity that will ultimately make the biggest impact on our species. Hundreds of years later, future generations (and possibly Ray Kurzweil) will look back at this time and identify it as the period when microchips and neural net software changed everything. And who was that strongman with the funny hair who crashed the country that used to occupy real estate in the Western Hemisphere? I no longer run a publication and instead represent but a single voice in a much larger staff. (For WIRED’s institutional view, please note the words of my boss, which I endorse.) So, speaking for myself, I emphatically reprise my 2016 statement of purpose, with a slight tweak: Artificial intelligence is bigger than Donald Trump.
Of course journalists must cover Trump’s second presidency vigorously, with relentless demands for accountability. In the short term—for some of us codgers it may be all of our remaining term!—what happens in our community and country will have a bigger influence on our daily lives than the latest version of Claude, ChatGPT, or even Apple Intelligence. (Sorry, Tim Apple.) If you lose your health care, or your reproductive rights, or find yourself in a deportation camp or a prison cell because of the policies of our returning president, the knowledge that AI, mixed reality, and quantum computers might one day redefine us won’t lessen the pain.
Also, those of us covering tech will definitely wind up reporting on the Trump presidency; policy as always affects the course of technology. (Remember, the US government produced that thing called the internet.) Right now a debate is raging about how, or whether, we should regulate or restrain AI, a technology which some refer to as “the last invention.” I’m already hearing discussions about the new administration nixing the elaborate executive order on AI that Joe Biden mandated. Some worry that the new president’s mega-adviser Elon Musk—who has his own AI company and builds AI into his other enterprises, like Tesla and Neuralink—will have an outsize and possibly inappropriate influence on government policies and contracts. I’ve also heard speculation that the movement to regulate AI might be, um, trumped by the threat of China’s full-throated efforts in the field. That’s important, because the ground rules of today’s AI, and the quirks of its inventors, may affect whether the worst fears about the technology come true.
That’s why, the day after Donald Trump got reelected, I visited an AI company and interviewed one of its leaders and a top engineer. Yes, on the walk back to the office I thought about the election results and got depressed all over again. But I will finish the article about that company, and then do another, sticking to the tech beat for as long as my broken heart keeps beating. AI, after all, is still the biggest story in town.
Time Travel
In that 2016 post-election column I went into a little more detail on my thesis about the relative importance of politics and tech.
It might not feel like it today, but technology and science is a bigger story than Donald Trump. Think about it. Who ran Italy when Galileo made his discoveries? How was Italy even run back then? Who was king during the industrial revolution in England? The quirks and flaws of government leaders are not relevant information when studying the enlightenment. In the long run, the Galileos and James Watts of the world have even more influence than the Napoleons.
And the fact that I can Google the answer to those above questions—that we have given humanity endless knowledge at the tap of a touchpad—will ultimately be recognized as more important than the identity of whoever sits in the White House, even if he has no attention span and boasts of sexual assaults. As horrible as 9/11 was, the fact that one single corporation might connect almost all of the world’s population on a single service is, in the long run, actually bigger news.
Ask Me One Thing
John asks, “Would you have written part 3 of Facebook: The Inside Story differently, given what you know now?”
Hi, John, thanks for asking. I hope you enjoyed the book. I’m not sure what exactly you mean by “what I know now.” Maybe the revelations in what’s known as “The Facebook Papers,” which showed that the company’s researchers were alarmed at the consequences of its policies? The transformation of Mark Zuckerberg from thoughtful nerd to buff fashionista?
None of these, in my obviously biased view, makes me think that the key points of the book, and certainly not the narrative arc, have been negated. My story ends a bit before Zuckerberg, captivated by the belief that virtual and augmented reality were the future of computing, changed the company’s name to Meta. But the fact that the company now goes by a different name does frame the book as a history—excuse me the history—of Facebook when it was still called Facebook. It’s always tricky to land the ending of a book about a company that’s still a prominent force, but that rechristening seems to neatly wrap up a distinct period. And the book’s final scene, where I press Zuckerberg about his choices, appears, to its author at least, as an appropriate flourish. Now he has little patience for such conversations, and his podcast interlocutors are just as happy as he is to move on.
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
Goes without saying.
Last but Not Least
Tariffs, trade, Tiktok: How Trump might steer tech policy.
Inside a cybersecurity company’s five-year war against its Chinese attackers.
What’ll happen to EVs? With Elon as his pal, Trump’s views on the electric transition have gotten more complicated.
California’s been written off as a woke wasteland. But it’s still inventing the future.
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Source : Wired
