IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 85

viewed as a form of embedded, purposeful, goal-directed
form of intelligence. Stars evolve to exploit
and consume the inherent low entropy existence of
hydrogen. Their downstream further collapse, when
their hydrogen fuel is used up, fuses and consumes
helium then carbon up to the supernova-scale collapse
of massive stars, and their spraying into space
of the elements needed for the emergence of further
freedom of action in the form of life on gravitationally
formed planets of future generation stars like our sun.
Is it really co-evolution?
The implication of co-evolution is that we homo
sapiens and technology advance together as rising
intelligence in the universe, a view that meshes with
the conventional wisdom on technology. Good technology
is good for us.5 The fly in this ointment, the
missing link, however, is the second law. The shrinking
entropy in techno-intelligence and its feeding of
future action enabling spillover into us is being conceptually
uncompensated by rising-always greater-
entropy in the environment of we co-evolving humans
and technology. Since the second law will not allow
this, where is the entropy being discharged? What is
compensating the exponentially rising organization,
radically shrinking entropy in co-evolving technology
and humans? The answer, as the second law insists,
is the environment. Today, this environment not only
includes the usual victims-pollution of air, water,6
and land, climate change, including its catalyzing of
wildfires and floods, the sixth extinction of species, the
clearcut and burned desecration of rain forests,...-
the environment of advancing tech includes us. Just
not all of us. Not the insiders symbiotically rising with
the products and insights and access to power feeding
order (money) that they bring about and exploit.
Their driven, specialized, outlier intelligence is maximizing
their freedom of future self-serving action. The
5A New York Times article by Paul Stenquist, " The future of car navigation has arrived, "
illuminates the conventional wisdom regarding equating good technology with good
for us, few to no questions asked. " GPS, " Stenquist claims, " is now a crucial driving
companion. " He illustrates how far the technology has come with the system in a
2021 Cadillac Escalade. " If you select audio driving directions in the system menu,
the voice underscores the required action. When approaching a right turn, the
voice comes from the right side of the vehicle. As you approach the intersection,
the volume increases. " Not unexpectedly, there is not one word in the piece that
addresses what the increasingly sophisticated GPS systems, not only in luxury cars,
are doing to driver' brains [21], [22].
6In her front page, in a New York Times article, " The fisherwoman, Chevron, and the
leaking pipe, " West Africa bureau chief, Ruth Maclean, writes that " Oil companies
like Chevron, Shell, and Eni have made billions in profits in the vast Niger Delta
region in the last decades. But now some are pulling out-and they are leaving
utter ruin in their wake, according to government monitors, and environmental
and human rights organizations. The delicate ecosystem of the Niger Delta, once
teeming with plant and animal life, is today one of the most polluted places on
the planet " [23].
entropic compensation is the rest of humanity whose
freedom of action, captured by the deeply exploited
draw of convenience coupled to the ad-hyped illusion
of power, is being increasingly trapped by design.7
Shoshana Zuboff captures the gist in her new
book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, writing that
we are the " objects of a technologically advanced
and increasingly inescapable raw material extraction
operation [26, p. 10]. We and our offspring are the
raw material being extracted. She solidifies her claim
by citing Facebook's (morphed into " Meta " ) marketing
director who " openly boasts that its precision
tools craft a medium in which users 'never have to
look away,' " and adds the caveat that " the corporation
has been far more circumspect about the design
practices that eventually make users, especially
young users, incapable of looking away " [26, p. 453].
Or as Wissner-Gross might put it, by corporate design,
their intelligence gets trapped. Their inability to look
away also sets up the perfect storm of authoritarian
state surveillance feeding on Big Tech enabled surveillance
crushing future freedom of action as the
cutting-edge merger of George Orwell's 1984 with
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In her WIRED
article, " The complicated truth about China's social
credit system, " Nicole Kobie writes that " China's
social credit system has been compared to Black
Mirror, Big Brother and every other dystopian future
sci-fi writers can think up. The reality is more complicated-and
in some ways, worse " [27].
In Addiction by Design, Natasha Dow Schüll fastens
on the dependency trap captured in her book's
title and her in-depth focus on the designed to hook
machinations of Las Vegas casinos [28]. But freedom
of future action crippling addiction by design
in Vegas does not just stay in Vegas. It self-similarly
branches from physical slot machines to smartphone/social
media apps slot machines, to our crucial
GPS driving companion, to our rolling computer
on wheels called a car with 100 million lines of doing
it all for us, intelligence trapping code [29].
Forwarding that goal is B. J. Fogg, founder of the
Stanford Persuasive Technology Laboratory. Its aim
is to alter human thoughts and behaviors via digital
machines and apps. According to Fogg, " We can
now create machines that can change what people
7Entropic compensation of rapidly advancing AI along with its undeniable benefits
to those on the receiving end of its rising power is vividly unearthed in the PBS
Frontline documentary, In the Age of AI. Technology as a double-edged sword is
especially well captured in the segment on the AI-enabled emergence of self-driving
trucks [24], [25].
March 2022
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

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