New Dark Age summary

Climate change is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject: like the internet, it’s so vast and pervasive a thing that we simply cannot think of it in a meaningful way. Instead, we just witness its imprints on the world around us.

One such dramatic imprint is the Syrian conflict of recent years, described by many observers as the first climate war in history. Due to rising global temperatures, between 2006 and 2011, the Syrian countryside suffered massive, unprecedented droughts. Huge swathes of farmland became unusable, and nearly 85 percent of livestock died. The resulting demographic pressure of farmers fleeing to the cities, and built-up resentment about President Bashar al-Assad’s handling of the situation, finally resulted in the armed conflict that became palpable to the West as the refugee crisis.

If you’re a little familiar with the world of computation, you’ll have heard of Moore’s law: the idea that the raw computing power of our devices doubles every two years. Since its first formulation in 1965, this law has held approximately true. But as you can probably attest from casual observation, the fact that technology is getting ever smaller and faster doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s making our lives any easier.

Tech optimists who cite Moore’s law usually do so in the spirit of computational optimism. They believe that more computation is always better, and that the more data we collect and process of the world, the more our understanding of it increases.

On the surface, Slough is a pretty unremarkable, small town some 25 miles outside of London. Unbeknownst to most, however, the many vast and anonymous warehouses that line its main road form the physical base of some of the most important parts of our digital world. For example, one of them, given the unassuming name LD4, houses the data servers of the London Stock Exchange.

The fibre optic cables that lead to and from LD4 carry financial information of almost unimaginable value, transporting and receiving it to and from other financial data centers around the world at the speed of light. This super-speedy network between companies, investors and markets has given rise to a new type of financial exchange: high-frequency trading.

There’s a lore about an AI built by the US Army that illustrates the dangers and limits of machine learning, by which is meant: teaching computers how to think.

Allegedly, the army tried to train a computer to recognize camouflaged tanks in a forest. To do so, they presented it with picture after picture of forests with tanks hidden in them, and picture after picture of forests with no tank, until the AI had learned to tell the test images apart perfectly. But out in the field, the AI failed completely. It was no better than a human at guessing whether there was a tank in a particular forest or not.

In a previous blink, we considered the hydrogen bomb simulation computer, SSEC, which conducted its top-secret calculations in full view of the public.

Ever since World War II, intelligence agencies such as the CIA and NSA have spent millions of dollars on developing secret technologies, the existence or true purpose of which the world only becomes privy to decades after the fact – if ever. For example, it was the CIA, not the US Army or Air Force, that developed the first drones, years before they became a staple in modern warfare.

Since the beginning of history, humans have been inclined to spin complex events into simple stories to make sense of the world. In a way, our conception of history is, itself, an example of oversimplification.

Of course, none of these narratives can ever encompass the full, multidimensional truth. But in our networked, information-saturated present, many stories people tell themselves about the world seem further off the mark than ever.

Have you ever fallen into a YouTube spiral? Clicking from one suggested video to the next, you find yourself in ever-weirder corners of the video platform that barely classify as human entertainment.

One reason why there are so many vloggers, self-made entertainers, and increasingly, bots vying for your attention on YouTube, is that successful videos can make a lot of money from advertising. The music video for the viral Korean pop hit “Gangnam Style,” for example, earned eight million dollars from its first billion views.

At Google’s 2013 Zeitgeist conference, an annual gathering of tech elites and politicians which discusses the state and future of technology, CEO Eric Schmidt made a startling claim. If camera phones had been around in 1994, the horrifying Rwandan genocide of that year would never have happened, because people would have been able to film and share news about the atrocities taking place.

Schmidt’s idea is rooted in a belief shared by many of his peers: that making something visible automatically fixes it, and that new technologies are making the world a better, safer, and easier-to-manage place. As we’ve seen in the previous blinks, this couldn’t be further from the truth.