A Note from the Editors: Today at our new sister publication, Persona, our friend Osita Nwanevu — journalist, author of national bestseller The Right of the People, and one of the sharpest observers of the new politics of our digital age — exposes the philosophical question at the heart of our ongoing “techlash.”
Below is a sample. Want more? Subscribe to Persona! Wisdom of Crowds subscribers can enjoy a comped, one-year subscription to the paid version — just click.
It has been a commonplace for most of the last 20 years of punditry in this country that the American people are hopelessly, perilously divided — incapable of finding common ground, not only on policy or values, but on basic facts. Polarization, it’s been said, has cleaved us apart into functionally separate societies and separate realities. We’re as unlikely to seek out friends or partners we disagree with as we are to vote for candidates of the opposing party; the only truths we are willing to embrace are the ones that come from the authorities least likely to proffer truths that discomfit us.
This reading of the American political situation has always elided important questions: whether it is actually wrong or a mark of inferior intelligence to have partners and confidants who generally share your political principles; whether it is actually the case that the American people are more divided than ever, given the violent sectarian conflict that has marked much of American political history; whether the American people might be divided not only or even primarily because they have been bamboozled by demagogues and populists, but because the challenges facing the country are existential, and deep divisions over how we might understand and address them are warranted and likely inevitable. Nonetheless, all those who inveigh daily against political tribalism are right to say that much of American life today — perhaps too much — happens along a deep and seemingly unbridgeable fault line. Americans who have invested themselves in politics and political causes do not trust or understand each other, often despise each other, and cannot agree on any significant issues.
Any significant issues, that is, except for one. Over the last few years, the development of artificial intelligence has become the defining issue of our time. On its present trajectory, even if Silicon Valley’s most outlandish predictions, positive or negative, don’t come to pass, the development of artificial intelligence may become one of the defining issues of all time.
For more . . .