REFUSENIKS

I was strolling around the internet when I happened upon this quote:

A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project survey notes that 42 percent of respondents fear that humans will lose control of technology, creating dangers like those in science fiction movies such as “The Terminator” or “The Matrix.” Some even believe that the intelligent robots we create will wind up treating us like pets. |link|

After searching around for a while, I found that the Pew foundation recently updated its famous Internet survey (PDF) from the beginning of 2005. The original was rather bright-eyed and optimistic, with the most surprising statistics detailing the vast market penetrability of the internet (upwards of 70%) and broadband (around 40%) in American households.

This newest survey is simultaneously more speculative and more reserved, and asks over 700 ‘experts’ in technology and related fields about their predictions for future. Specifically, they posed seven possible (and in most cases, compatible) scenarios obtaining in the year 2020, and asked if they agree with these scenarios. The scenario the media clinged onto was the following:

The Future of the Internet II

Autonomous technology is a problem: By 2020, intelligent agents and distributed control will cut direct human input so completely out of some key activities such as surveillance, security and tracking systems that technology beyond our control will generate dangers and dependencies that will not be recognized until it is impossible to reverse them. We will be on a “J-curve” of continued acceleration of change. Agree: 42% Disagree: 54% No reply: 4%

Although Kurzweil is not among the responders, his influence in this question in particular is obvious.

I’m not sure what, if anything, should be made about these results. In fact, most of the scenarios offered are pretty evenly balanced, with a disparity just large enough to win a presidential election. Most of my reluctance to read this survey with any seriousness is because of the rather silly question posed: how might the internet evolve, and what will be the impact of this evolution?

My objection is not that the internet (and technology in general) does not evolve. Of course it does. However, we have to be careful about the analogy to biological evolution. We have almost no understanding of the mechanisms or trends by which our technology evolves, because we have very few historical examples by which to strengthen the analogy. Hence, the divergent opinions almost across the board. Part of the problem, of course, is that we can only pose these questions in terms of issues that matter to us now, which sheds very little insight into the problems posed by the future. However, I think that it is ultimately a theoretical failure that accounts for the lack of concensus on any of these questions.
I’m still slogging through the report, I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.