Which camera do you want me to look at?
So, wait, are we talking about whether technology is good or bad?
I think that’s too simplistic because the argument is...
...we know technology can be good or bad
Are we too worried about technology?
Or how worried should you be...
...or what’s the right amount of worry?
...something like that
The 21st century
This is what it was supposed to look like...
...according to the Jetsons at least
Flying cars, weekends in space...
...and robots that would carry out domestic chores
Here we are in the 2020s and we’re expecting it to be like “Blade Runner”...
...and you know where are the flying cars? Actually there are some flying cars
I’m not sure I’d want to go in them just yet but they are here
But I think if someone visited today, the 2020s, from the fairly recent past...
...they’d be amazed at what we have
Like aeroplanes that travel to the other side of the world in a matter of hours
In the past, people took months or years to get to some parts of the world...
...and had a pretty good chance of dying on the way
Rather than wait weeks for a letter...
...people can communicate with one another...
...at the click of a button...
...a saviour in the covid-lockdown era
Almost everyday she waits here by the mailbox
Technology is getting better, but what about our relationship with it?
Well, I think we have a love-hate relationship with technology
We like the good parts and we like them so much that...
...it becomes part of our lives and then we kind of stop noticing it
I mean, the classic sign of a mature technology is that...
...you only notice it when it stops working
...and the pandemic has really made us realise...
...how important it is for technology to work...
...because we’re using it now more than ever before
Before the pandemic, Americans consumed digital media...
...for 6 hours 49 minutes each day
In 2020, that went up by over an hour
During lockdown the internet was a lifeline for businesses...
...and enabled social connections
Technological advances also facilitated rapid vaccine development
However, recent years have shown how quickly optimism about technology...
...can turn to pessimism
In 2010-2011, the Arab spring was happening...
...and people were talking about the power of social media...
...to spread democracy
And everyone was very, very optimistic about it
Of course, that’s not what happened
The same technology that galvanised people...
...and gave the world cute cat videos...
...also disseminated ISIS beheadings that spread extremism...
...and fake news that undermined confidence in vaccines
It’s not just that we’re worried about the consequences of it
It’s also this really dramatic contrast between...
...what we thought we were going to get and what we actually got
It’s easy to make starry-eyed predictions...
...about the wonders of technology
But in reality unforeseen consequences often dampen our view of it
Look back at history, and it’s clear that humanity has swung between...
...being optimistic and pessimistic about technology
Seeing the repeated pattern is key
Let’s take a journey back in time
The Victorian era was a period of rapid technological transition...
...when many world-changing innovations first appeared
They had to get used to not having things that could go faster than horses...
...to having things like steam trains and telegraphs...
...you could suddenly send messages from point to point...
...you know, faster than you could send an object...
...which had not been possible for the whole of human history
So the world changed over just a period of a few decades...
...really beyond recognition. And of course...
...the same thing is happening again now with computer technology
So, seeing how people reacted then...
...can help us understand how we’re reacting now
Some people were not all that thrilled
The Luddites became a symbol of the resistance against industrialisation
They rebelled against the introduction of machinery in the textile industry
But were they right?
To be fair to the Luddites, they weren’t saying technology is bad
What they were saying was we are worried that...
...the introduction of this technology is going to change...
...the balance of power between the owners of capital and the workers
And they were absolutely right. So, actually they had a point
The deeply unpopular Luddite movement was met with huge resistance
Factory owners took to shooting protesters
The army too was brought in
At one point, more British soldiers were fighting the Luddites...
...than against Napoleon on the Iberian peninsula
In the end, the Luddites were crushed into the pages of history
The Industrial Revolution was the greatest wealth-creation event in history
It’s very dramatic and you’ve seen as countries around the world have...
...industrialised, they’ve become much richer
But at the same time, it did change the balance between capital and labour
It did mean that people who were alive in the 1820s got a bad deal
In the long run, everything turned out better...
...but people had to live in the short run
It was a brutal time of change that brought about net benefits
Between 1760 and 1901 in Britain...
...life expectancy rose from 34 to 50 years of age. A nearly 50% increase
And adult literacy went up by 27% between 1760 and 1850
Then in the 1900s came another technological revolution...
...the horseless carriage, otherwise known as the automobile
In the 1890s there was this big problem in fast-growing cities...
...like London and New York that there was just horse poo piling up everywhere
The automobile shows up and everyone goes...
...oh, thank goodness, we’ll switch to this
And there were all these predictions made about how...
...the automobile is going to get rid of pollution
It’s going to get rid of congestion
It’s going to be much quieter and there were going to be fewer accidents
And so people were really optimistic. And of course, we now know...
...those predictions turned out not to be true
There’s no horse poo, but there’s carbon dioxide coming out of them instead
There’s lots of noise and there’s lots of congestion...
...and there are still lots of accidents
Can my machine talk to your machine?
Thanks Mary, here we go
By the 1970s technology was in every home...
...making life more comfortable
The future was looking bright
Do you have it in green?
Certainly, here it is
But the cold war was dominating world politics...
...and with it the prospect of nuclear annihilation
Concern about technology was, once again, on the rise
People were worried about technology and they were worried about...
...several technologies at the same time
1973 dramatised US dependence on foreign oil
The world was going to run out of oil
They were worried about overpopulation...
...and was there going to be enough food to feed everyone
It was very much a familiar sounding litany of...
...“technology is running faster than we can cope”
But by the 1990s the tune was very different
This Ameritech ad sums it up
Do you have a cellular phone?
Why, yes I do
Oh, so do I
So you’ve got this pendulum swing from the 1970s to the 1990s...
...and suddenly everyone’s really optimistic
And at the end of the 1990s you get the dot-com boom where...
...like the internet is going to fix everything, it’s going to get rid of poverty...
...and lead to world peace
People actually believed that...
...because they thought that people would organise themselves...
...into sort of online tribes. And there was a guru at MIT who said...
...our children are not going to know what nationalism is
This utopian view of an online global community...
...has been replaced by tech doom-mongering
At The Economist, we’ve come up with a word to describe...
...the sort of backlash against technology and against technology giants
And we call it the “techlash”
So how can the world get over its techno-pessimism, or techlash...
...and move forward in a way that’s cautious but not fearful...
...adventurous but measured?
The pandemic has reminded us of the upside of modern tech...
...much of which we had taken for granted
The rapid development of vaccines...
...proves how science and technology can change the world for the better
So I wonder whether that might make some people...
...feel a bit more optimistic about technology again
At the same time, however, social-media platforms...
...have been used to spread misinformation about the vaccines...
...and there has been an uptick in cybercrime and ransomware attacks
Even criminals, it turns out, can work from home
All of which is a reminder of the need to tread carefully
The pessimism and the techlash are good things in the sense that...
...we’re having that debate and we’re going to move forward constructively
And if we learn the lessons of history...
...then maybe the pendulum won’t swing quite so far next time...
...because we won’t have had quite so many problems next time around
What we don’t want is overdoing the pessimism and just saying...
...“oh, this is all terrible”
There’s an inconvenient truth...
...the solution to tech-related problems often involves more and better tech
If you look at what’s happening now with the climate crisis, for example...
...we’re really just kind of finally being faced with the bill...
...for what we’ve been doing for the last 200 years...
...which is the Industrial Revolution and now we’ve actually got to pay the bill
And how are we going to pay it? With more technology
Solar panels, electric cars, geoengineering...
...are all possible technological responses to humanity’s greatest threat...
...climate change
So perhaps there’s a better way of thinking about technology
We need to recognise that technology has no agency
But humans have agency
And it’s you know, whether a technology is used for...
...good purposes or bad purposes is down to the humans who use it
A hammer can be used to build things or destroy them
Advanced technology is no different
Part of the problem is that innovation moves quickly...
...often faster than regulators and rulemakers can keep up
Certainly the regulation of technology...
...it does need to be very nimble like the technology itself
You’re never going to get the rules right first time
So we’re starting to see with some technologies...
...a sort of sandbox approach. And this is where regulators say...
...we don’t know what the right rules are going to be
And we know that we don’t know
So what we’re going to do is we’re going to let you try doing this new thing...
...but we’re going to be looking over your shoulder all the time
And at any point, we can say stop, we think this is having a bad consequence
People fear technology because its effects are often unknown...
...so mass perceptions can easily swing between bright and bleak
These swings between optimism and pessimism towards technology....
...are nothing new
By recognising this historical pattern, we may be able to ensure...
...we don’t swing too far in either direction in the future
We need new ideas to fix big problems like climate change
And if you imagine a world that looks just the same as it is now...
...with all of the problems that it has, and you imagine another world...
...where there’s more innovation...
...well, I know which one I’d like to live in
I’m Tom Standage, deputy editor at The Economist
To read more about our changing relationship with technology...
...click the link. Thanks for watching