Dominoes of Hearts and Minds

Technology will set us free. It will read our mammograms better that our doctors can. It will predict potential litigation outcomes with such accuracy that the adversaries will settle their differences without wasting a lot of money and time in court. It will lift us up from ignorance and poverty.

In the process, it may also enslave us.

Power is the ability to change behavior; and technology gives that power to those who control it. Those are the central themes of Jamie Suskind’s new book, Future Politics. I heard him speak yesterday at Stanford Law School. I came away tingling with anticipation, but not altogether in a good way.

Artificial intelligence is becoming more capable, and sensors and processors are increasingly woven into the fabric of society. Suskind believes this paves the way for manipulation of behavior through scrutiny and perception control. 

Scrutiny is like surveillance, but more focused on learning about us to influence us than merely watching us to see that we are behaving. The more you know about someone, their likes and dislikes, the more you can influence their choices. The most obvious example is cellphone ads: because they are based on your online activity, they are better and better targeted at you.

Perception control is another way to say fake news. Not much more need be said about that. We’re awash in it now and can’t figure out how to turn off the firehose.

All that is disturbing enough, but not exactly news. 

What I hadn’t thought as much about is how thought control through technology might be used to colonize. In the old days, to take over other nations countries had to send in troops. Now they need only send in high-speed wifi and chatbots. If you’re China, for instance, a country that offers up only the news it wants you to see, it’s pretty easy to convert a country or a continent to your belief system. 

We fought the Vietnam war because we feared that if Vietnam fell to the Chinese communists, other countries in the region would follow, like so many dominoes toppling one after the other.

Now China has announced its One Belt, One Road plan to invest broadly in the underdeveloped world. Brazil. Africa. They are focused on developing natural resources and energy. And they are planning to import technology. They will control the message to those people, as authoritarians do, and those dominoes of hearts and minds will fall without a shot being fired, without a twinge of alarm from the country that sacrificed over half a million soldiers and billions of dollars to try to prevent what we thought was a similar threat a half century ago.

The domino theory of the 1960s was probably wrong-headed. Vietnam was a civil war, not a communist conquest.

This time, though, there may be more to fear.