IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 88

Feature
And even if the hardware and software systems
do most of the work that needs doing, freeing us to
do whatever we want with our unemployed leisure,
the loss of the need for human mental, physical, and
social exertion in AI swept away jobs will see to it that
the future will be a rapidly rising world of targeted
human dissipation. Serving as reverse adapted, " conditioned
to want to obey, " entropic effluent recipients
of dopamine-fueled, Skinner box-designed,
" objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly
inescapable raw material extraction operation, "
is not smart.
Backstage of our affairs with technology, on all
scales, from up close and personal, physical, mental,
and social, to our collective impacts on the biosphere
from which we extract resources and discharge
wastes is the proposed reality that nature really does,
by all means at its accelerating disposal, go all out to
maximize the dissolution of gradients. In service of
that all-consuming goal, the second law of thermodynamics
allows, indeed wants order to rise-up, to
concentrate, to make targeted differences in driven
systems that more effectively and efficiently increase
what it wants-success in the quashing of all differences
in the environments of those systems that are
making or can make a difference. Recognizing that
advancing technology is the leading edge of the thermodynamic
imperative to dissipate differences that
can make a difference that do not exclude us is a
first step en route to corralling the juggernaut.
The key to not allowing ourselves serve as a convenient
sink for technology's vested interest-driven
entropic effluents is to engage our lazy but vital critical
brain intelligence (system 2) that engenders the
means to resist the knee-jerk urge to let the technology
do more and more of the work (system 1) [57]. Engaging
hey-wait-a-minute sets the stage for injecting friction
into the whirling gears of the untethered machine.
Removing the smartphone from our hand, Alexa from
a first grader who knows his arithmetic but nonetheless
asks her " what's five minus three, " thanking her
after she supplies the answer [49], creates a space for
critical thinking to ask what all the apps doing it all for
us are also doing to us, and to our children.12
12In their IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, " Socioeconomic Impacts " column,
" Age appropriate digital services for young people: major reforms, " Rye Farthing,
Katina Michael, Roba Abbas, and Genevieve Smith-Nunes, fasten on how deliberately
designed for " click through " fine print of " Terms and Conditions (T&Cs), " " fail young
people, and why this is problematic from moral, legal, and commercial perspectives. "
Their essay opens on the staggering scale of young people's digital lives with " over
one billion children and young people online, and every day another 170,000 go
online for the first time. During lockdown, one U.S. survey found that nearly half of
American children were spending six or more hours a day looking at screens...
Making the effort to critically think about what
hooks and dissipates, this techno-media literacy
must also include the caveat that this is not what
autonomous, persuasively designed " machines
that can change what [we] think and what [we]
do, as 'objects of a technologically advanced and
increasingly inescapable raw material extraction
operation,' " wants. Nor is it the path of least effort,
of seamless convenient shortcuts to painlessly, on
demand, getting what we want, when we want it.
Corporations, their investors, their executives, driven
by the goal of maximizing profit, will go all out to
block the incursion of backstage, sales threatening,
system to critical thinking, especially in the young,
in the schools, in the home. " Technopoly-the submission
of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty
of technique and technology, " as media critic, Neil
Postman (1931-2003) defined it [62], does not want
the emergence of an AI Greta Thunberg.
While in the largest scheme, we, all of life, extending
even to non-life as the self-similar upward thrust
of intelligence, including the existence of gravity as
a universal means for realizing the maximizing of
future freedom of action, share a oneness, under
the thumb of competitiveness, it is us against them.
In the race to gain an innovative edge in advancing
technology, proposing that " we " should do this, we
should do that to avoid the looming threat of technics
out of control, will not work. Competition drives
our future with " the accelerating returns " of advancing
AI out of human control. The dilemma is there is
no " we, " but there has to be [63], [64].
In his New York Times Opinion Column, " Maybe
humans can no longer get along, " former Technology,
now Opinion columnist, Farhad Manjoo, asks
this: " What if humanity's capacity to cooperate has
been undone by the very technology we thought
up 500% from pre-COVID levels...Getting T&Cs right is particularly important
because T&Cs claim to set the rules of engagement for product and service users...
Overly complex, 'unfair,' click-through, and poorly visible T&Cs, which subsequently
go unread, undermine trust, so much so that T&Cs have been described as 'the
biggest lie on the internet.' " In the context of technology as a dissipative structure,
the power asymmetry they represent between Big Tech and users, especially young
users, is yet another case in point of discharging power compensating entropy into
the lives of others [58]. As Adam Alter, the author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive
Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, points out in his joint ABC
(A = Australian) interview with the co-author, Katina Michael, many tech titans
send their own children to technology can wait [Waldorf] schools, and will not
allow their kids to use what they are selling in their own homes-including the late
Steve Jobs-while grabbing and cannot look away latching the masses of children
who buy, or who nag their clueless by design, overstressed parents into buying their
bottom line swelling products [33], [59], [60]. While the proposed standards on
children's rights and needs based on principles focused on empowering young
people are necessary, they represent one component of the need for system to
critical thinking in the form of techno-media literacy that systematically addresses
the plight of Victor Frankenstein become the plight of us as we and our children are
ever more cleverly reverse adapted by vested interests " to match the character of the
[increasingly] available means, " often with dire consequences [61].
88
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022
