Peter Jobless knows machines can err
Two new books look at present and ways to cope with future
Think of the last time you logged on to a device. Did you give any thought to what you were doing? About what information you were giving up? How privacy’s been eroded? How algorithms are taking over?
Then, did you think to yourself, “how did we get here?”
Two new books take a look at where we are now and how we might cope in the future by thinking more deeply about how we live today.
We can’t say we didn’t see it coming. Marshall McLuhan famously thought that, when it comes to technology, “we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
And so, as technology is becoming less open, more secretive and manipulative, with its promise of freedom a fading dream, we’re seeing how we are turning into information ourselves, even as our machines develop greater autonomy.
McLuhan might have warned us, but it was another Canadian guru of the information age, William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace and has always been the intellectual’s sci-fi writer.
“Agency,” his newest, isn’t exactly a sequel to Gibson’s 2014 novel “The Peripheral,” but instead, to borrow the language of today’s franchise filmmaking, it takes place in the same universe.
That universe, however, is only one of many that are in play. In the future, or one possible future, a way has been invented to allow information (including consciousness, but not a physical body) to travel through time. Once such information arrives it can operate by way of a peripheral, or “quasibiological telepresence avatar,” and rewrite history.
In our own time, or something like it, Verity Jane, an “app whisperer,” is given a bit of cutting-edge tech to test drive in the form of a next generation AI personal assistant that goes by the name of Eunice, or UNISS: an Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System. The plot takes a while to become clear, but it involves steps taken by some people in the future to make changes in our timeline to head off a nuclear war.
Eunice is one of a long line of AIs in science fiction with more personality, and more agency, than the humans around her. Even Verity has to be turned into a kind of cyborg in order to function in different timelines. And it is precisely this notion of agency, of who is in the driver’s seat shaping the co-evolution of humans and machines, that remains a nagging question in the then and now.
If Gibson writes from the point of view of technocrats on or near the commanding heights of the new economy, then, in his new book, Marc-Uwe Kling looks up from the bottom. In the future state of QualityLand (a rebranded Germany), surnames designate one’s profession and social rank. Peter Jobless is one of the Useless caste, which means he’s totally at the mercy of the algorithms that control every aspect of daily life.
“QualityLand” is a very funny book that hits close to home because it understands the best satire only needs to tweak its subject a little bit to work.
We can relate to Peter’s struggles after a drone delivers him a pink dolphin vibrator from online retailer TheShop. This must be a mistake, but the system can’t be wrong. Hence what gets dubbed Peter’s Problem: when reality is fully customizable, a bad profile can lead to your being booted into the wrong world.
Peter, accompanied by a hacker girlfriend and a family of discarded robots, then leads a crusade against such faulty profiling under the Howard Beale-ish slogan “The system says I want this, but I don’t.”
But how can one’s profile be wrong? “Machines don’t make mistakes,” is the motto of QualityLand, and the entire economy depends on that supposition. We are our data, that vast collection of digital DNA shaped by our browsing histories, purchases and all the other threads of our online lives. In QualityLand clicks have turned into kisses, and every one seals our fate a little more firmly, making sure that each of us becomes what the system believes us — and wants us — to be.
You may think you’re smarter than that system, or think you’re something more than your profile, but the data says you’re not. When we look into our screens our screens are looking far more deeply into us. We are, in every sense of the word, products of the algorithms.
The inheritors of this brave new world are the AIs like Eunice, who emphatically declares she is “not a product,” and John of Us, a robot campaigning to become president of QualityLand. That these AIs are not only smarter and more capable, but even more human, than the rest of us is no irony. Our tools are evolving faster than we are, making them better adapted to this new environment.
Meanwhile, the code we write has begun to write us, turning us into so many ghostly avatars and profiles, no longer capable of even pretending to be the authors of our own story.