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A review by drewbutler
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle
5.0
How To Step Out of A Feedback Loop
This book will blow your mind, and not in the most comforting way. Technology has worked its way into every single facet of our society and in so doing has restructured and reorganized everything around itself. James Bridle takes us through the many ways in which technology has transformed the world, and the ways in which we have lost control of it, and therefore ourselves. If that doesn't sound encouraging or hopeful, you'd be right. However, as Bridle himself points out, in order to correct the system we must first reckon with it in an honest and straightforward matter. Pretending the problem doesn't exist only takes us further and further away from fixing it.
This isn't a very long book by any means, but it packs a punch. Bridle takes us through the history of computation and how it transformed industry after industry until it became inseparable from our daily lives in the Information Age. With this idea of computation as the base, we look at different elements of our modern world and how technology has shaped and molded reality into its own image.
One of the scariest themes of this book is how fragile this giant, worldwide machine really is. One chapter is about the physical infrastructure of the internet - server farms, undersea cables, antennae, etc. Even though it feels abstract and unreal, the internet and all its workings have a very tangible and real presence (and energy demand/carbon footprint). The workings of the world rely so heavily on this network, and so any disruptions can have catastrophic global impacts.
This is one of the many ways that Bridle explores what I believe to be the main theme of this book - that we as humans have become too reliant on technology to think for us, rather than using it to help us think. Computers excel at modeling situations and taking into account all its logical outcomes, but by and large lack the human capacity to push in an illogical or unexpected direction. These algorithms base their results on simulations run billions of times over, and we have allowed our own reality to be based on the simulation of a computer. (This is an oversimplification I'm sure, but I think the point still stands.) The lines between reality and simulation are increasingly blurred, and so in an ironic twist, we are increasingly living in a simulation, but it's one of our own creation.
All hope isn't lost, however. Bridle discusses situations where creations were made and new innovations discovered when humans and computers worked in tandem. Scientists using the raw computational power of a program were able to see a much broader view of the problem they were working on, but pushed it in a much different direction than the computer would have determined on its own. They were informed by the results of the computer, but not commanded by it.
I think that Bridle would be among the first to tell you the value of technology as a whole and the potential it has to inform our understanding of the world around us. However, it's only a tool. It cannot explain every facet of reality, cannot predict the future, cannot eliminate all uncertainty. When we rely on it to do so, we enter an overwhelming feedback loop of looking backwards to try and tell us which is the right step forward. An over-reliance on technology has brought us into the warped world we live in, where no matter how much data we produce, the less things make sense.
I admit I felt hopeless at the beginning of this book because it laid bare so many of the problems with how technology has used, as well as the sheer scale of these problems. However I think there's an optimism infused here, even within the oftentimes brutal honesty. Technology is a tool - the scale of technology in the modern world is far beyond a simple hammer or spear, but it is still a tool, albeit a much more pervasive one. We have lost sight of this, and become far too reliant on this tool to tell us exactly what to do, all the time. I don't think the solution is to get rid of all technology, and I don't think Bridle would advocate that either. If there is a solution to all this, I think it begins with rethinking our relationship with data and tech - using it to help and support us, but not to lead us. If we can start to think with technology instead of trying to make it think for us, we might have a chance at undoing some of the damage we've caused. But first we have to take that step forward, for ourselves.
This book will blow your mind, and not in the most comforting way. Technology has worked its way into every single facet of our society and in so doing has restructured and reorganized everything around itself. James Bridle takes us through the many ways in which technology has transformed the world, and the ways in which we have lost control of it, and therefore ourselves. If that doesn't sound encouraging or hopeful, you'd be right. However, as Bridle himself points out, in order to correct the system we must first reckon with it in an honest and straightforward matter. Pretending the problem doesn't exist only takes us further and further away from fixing it.
This isn't a very long book by any means, but it packs a punch. Bridle takes us through the history of computation and how it transformed industry after industry until it became inseparable from our daily lives in the Information Age. With this idea of computation as the base, we look at different elements of our modern world and how technology has shaped and molded reality into its own image.
One of the scariest themes of this book is how fragile this giant, worldwide machine really is. One chapter is about the physical infrastructure of the internet - server farms, undersea cables, antennae, etc. Even though it feels abstract and unreal, the internet and all its workings have a very tangible and real presence (and energy demand/carbon footprint). The workings of the world rely so heavily on this network, and so any disruptions can have catastrophic global impacts.
This is one of the many ways that Bridle explores what I believe to be the main theme of this book - that we as humans have become too reliant on technology to think for us, rather than using it to help us think. Computers excel at modeling situations and taking into account all its logical outcomes, but by and large lack the human capacity to push in an illogical or unexpected direction. These algorithms base their results on simulations run billions of times over, and we have allowed our own reality to be based on the simulation of a computer. (This is an oversimplification I'm sure, but I think the point still stands.) The lines between reality and simulation are increasingly blurred, and so in an ironic twist, we are increasingly living in a simulation, but it's one of our own creation.
All hope isn't lost, however. Bridle discusses situations where creations were made and new innovations discovered when humans and computers worked in tandem. Scientists using the raw computational power of a program were able to see a much broader view of the problem they were working on, but pushed it in a much different direction than the computer would have determined on its own. They were informed by the results of the computer, but not commanded by it.
I think that Bridle would be among the first to tell you the value of technology as a whole and the potential it has to inform our understanding of the world around us. However, it's only a tool. It cannot explain every facet of reality, cannot predict the future, cannot eliminate all uncertainty. When we rely on it to do so, we enter an overwhelming feedback loop of looking backwards to try and tell us which is the right step forward. An over-reliance on technology has brought us into the warped world we live in, where no matter how much data we produce, the less things make sense.
I admit I felt hopeless at the beginning of this book because it laid bare so many of the problems with how technology has used, as well as the sheer scale of these problems. However I think there's an optimism infused here, even within the oftentimes brutal honesty. Technology is a tool - the scale of technology in the modern world is far beyond a simple hammer or spear, but it is still a tool, albeit a much more pervasive one. We have lost sight of this, and become far too reliant on this tool to tell us exactly what to do, all the time. I don't think the solution is to get rid of all technology, and I don't think Bridle would advocate that either. If there is a solution to all this, I think it begins with rethinking our relationship with data and tech - using it to help and support us, but not to lead us. If we can start to think with technology instead of trying to make it think for us, we might have a chance at undoing some of the damage we've caused. But first we have to take that step forward, for ourselves.