Exploring delicate balance between high tech, humanity
Blockchain chicken farming is either the utopian or dystopian apotheosis of farmtotable, depending on your particular bent. For Xiaowei Wang, an artist and writer who embraces technology but is no fervent evangelist, it’s the perfect lens through which to explore the tradeoffs that come in the name of progress.
You don’t have to be interested in blockchain to be taken in by this endlessly thoughtprovoking book. ( And a blockchain, by the way, is a decentralized ledger of all transactions across a peertopeer network. The term often refers to the process that enables cryptocurrency.) While it might sound like the most soulless of endeavors, Wang brings a humanity to it — or rather is passionately arguing for the need to do so. By traveling back and forth between China and the U. S., from cities to rural areas, factories to farms, Wang ( who uses the pronoun “they”) is constantly pushing to dissolve binaries in search of a more nuanced conversation about progress, innovation and technology.
But back to the blockchain chicken farm: Imagine a scenario in which the
food supply is so under threat, so plausibly unsafe, that consumers are willing to pay a premium for food that comes with a provenance. That scenario exists in China, and it manifests in the form of blockchain farming — chickens are raised by the same farmer who raised them before, but now they’re delivered to ( wealthy) consumers’ doors, butchered and vacuumsealed with an ankle bracelet attached. Scanning a QR code informs the customer about the chicken’s life, even the number of steps it took each day. Traditional farming techniques are optimized for safety and maximum efficiency. In this incarnation, argues Wang, raising food is no different than manufacturing an iPhone. Where are all the human farmers? Wang asks, “Are they relaxing, eating peanuts as the machines do all the work?”
Food safety, writes Wang, is crucial for political stability and ultimately revolves around social trust. China is notoriously bad at both. The scaling up of agricultural processes can be seen as progress, but only if one turns a blind eye to what eroded in its wake: It’s not that chicken farmers were doing anything wrong before, it’s just that the scale of production was inadequate to serve the incomprehensibly large population of the country. In order to accommodate growth, the industry needed to turn its back on things deemed less important in this era of globalism: skill acquired over generations, facetoface interactions, community.
In writing about not just surveilled chickens but also artificial intelligence pork farming, delivery apps, techguided rural revitalization and ecommerce towns, Wang demonstrates a seemingly unresolvable tension: The greater the optimization at scale, the weaker the social trust and, ultimately, human relationships. With every push toward automation and “progress,” a little more culture is lost, a little more autonomy. What are we willing to lose in the name of radical efficiency?
It’s rare to read a book by a technologist that isn’t a polemic placed squarely in the pro or con camp. Wang is genuinely interested in discovering a more nuanced approach. Wang is deeply committed to the promise of tech but also incredibly open to recognizing its downsides.
“I think of the difference between AI helping doctors diagnose and identify disease versus AI replacing the human social service worker who determines whether someone should receive medical benefits,” writes Wang, cautioning that the latter tendency doesn’t jibe with the economic realities of artificial intelligence, which necessitates an expensive corporate model. In other words, it makes far more economic sense to scale and optimize for the latter than the former — and it is this path that concerns them. Viewing technological innovation as a replacement for human contribution rather than an aid to it veers us into dangerous territory.
A world where a computer program can perform defined tasks as well as humans can, where computers can understand the world as well as humans do, presents “an optimized version of human life that is very seductive: rational, errorproof and objective.” But humans are not rational, errorproof and objective — how boring it would be if they were!
“After all,” Wang writes, “life is defined not by uncertainty itself but by a commitment to living despite it.”