Navigate the direction of technological development

Chen Yongwei/Text

Different worlds in two phones

I have two phones. One is commonly used, and it is basically used for daily work and entertainment. The other is a spare, and although various applications are installed on it, it is basically not used. For a while, my mother's phone broke and I took it to the store to fix it, so I lent her a spare phone. After her phone was repaired, she returned the spare to me. Later, once the regular machine ran out of power, I found a spare machine to use. With this use, I found that the content I saw from this phone was very different from what I was used to seeing.

Since it was used by my mother for a period of time, the various applications on this mobile phone have been "tuned" by algorithms to suit her habits - when I swipe the video, I no longer see the technology news I love to watch, but the elderly health care she loves; When I open various e-commerce applications, what I push is no longer a variety of new books, but a variety of daily necessities. The most interesting thing is the news information software, although the news topics pushed from this phone are not different from those on my usual machine, but the commentary on these news is quite different.

I started to feel very unused to it, and I planned to "correct" the push of the phone, but soon thought: why is this not an opportunity for me to see the world from another perspective? Gradually, the phone became a window into my "other world."

Not long ago, Xing Bin, a teacher at the School of Literature of Linyi University, wrote an article "In the winter of 2022, I delivered food in Linyi City" that became popular on the Internet. In this article, Mr. Xing vividly records what he saw and heard in his one-month food delivery experience, as well as the income he earned through food delivery. Although Mr. Xing's original intention in writing this article was to call on intellectuals to get out of the information cocoon and understand society firsthand, because it involved keywords such as "platform" and "algorithm", the discussion around the article was quickly led to topics such as "how to view algorithm control" and "how to view the exploitation based on algorithms of platforms".

Since my circle of friends is mainly composed of friends with a background in economics and those who agree with the concept of free economy, most of the views I see in the WeChat circle are criticisms of Mr. Xing and his articles. Many friends believe that Mr. Xing's article one-sidedly replaces statistical surveys with personal experience, and the conclusions are very unobjective. In order to demonstrate how the platform promotes employment and how the algorithm optimizes the allocation of social resources, some friends have also worked tirelessly to move out a lot of papers and list a lot of data. Of course, in addition to these rational comments, there are some more heated comments. After brushing the moments, and then opening various news information applications and short video applications, the algorithm in it has already guessed my preferences through my past browsing records, so the information views pushed to me are similar to those seen in the moments.

If I only rely on the information I get from this phone, then I am afraid that the conclusion I get is that the vast majority of people do not agree with the view that platforms exploit people and algorithms control people. However, when I turned on the backup machine and used it to swipe the news app, I saw a completely different picture. The first article that the algorithm pushed me was a support for Teacher Xing by an undergraduate graduate. The author of the article said that because he did not find a job after graduation, he also took up the food delivery business. According to his account, the control and squeezing of delivery workers by the platform through algorithms is much harsher than in Xing's article. In order to prove his point of view, he introduced many methods of platform algorithms to control delivery workers, such as constantly optimizing the so-called best route according to the practice of delivery workers, so as to compress the reference time of delivery, and compress delivery fees by encouraging competition among delivery workers. The number of means is dizzying. After reading this article, I continued to brush, and most of the articles pushed to me by the application denounced the platform and algorithms, and some of them even pointed out that the takeaway platform is a new economic form that exploits and oppresses people, and algorithms are accomplices of exploiters.

Here, I have no intention of discussing which kind of view is more correct on the incident of Mr. Xing's food delivery, but I want to use this matter to state the fact that there are actually diametrically opposed views on the value and role of platforms and algorithms. However, under the effect of peer effect and the "information cocoon" created by the Internet, these two groups are divided into two groups that have almost no intersection. Therefore, under the confirmation of repeated co-frequency resonance, no matter what point of view a person holds, he will think that his point of view is correct.

The dark side of technological progress

The split in public opinion about the impact of algorithms and platforms is just one example of the countless controversies surrounding technological progress and social development.

In textbooks, economic development and social progress are usually interpreted as the result of a series of technological revolutions, and as the crystallization of human wisdom and the fundamental force of human conquest of the world, those more advanced technologies are usually celebrated in various beautiful words.

Over time, in people's minds, a concept has been established that technological progress is positive, and those who question or oppose technological progress are representatives of ignorance and backwardness. However, if we look at history from a more microscopic perspective, we will find that the situation is not so simple.

Take sedentary agriculture, for example. In traditional history books, the invention of sedentary agriculture is described as the first and most important technological revolution in human history. According to this view, this revolution not only gave people more food to feed themselves, but also contributed to the explosive growth of early populations, and the material abundance brought about by food surpluses also laid the foundation for the emergence of later civilizations.

But much research later showed that the technological revolution, described as the dawn of civilization, did not seem so glamorous. For example, James C. Scott, a professor at Yale University in the United States, pointed out in his book "AgainsttheGrain" (literally translated as "Against Grain") that before the advent of agriculture, people relied on hunting, gathering and other means to obtain food resources were actually very rich. When people adopted sedentary farming and focused on a few crops, such as cereals, they had less food to eat and worse nutrient intake. Moreover, the cyclical nature of crops greatly limits the temporal and spatial scope of human activities, thus making otherwise potentially colorful life boring. Later, Yuval N. Harari repeated Scott's above ideas in his famous book A Brief History of Mankind, and described the agricultural revolution as "the history of the domestication of mankind by grain" in very shocking words.

Grain does not domesticate people, only another group of people can domesticate people. In Scott's writings, this history is analyzed more. He pointed out that although the agricultural revolution on the whole was not a good thing for humanity as a whole, it benefited some people. Scott uses his research to tell the reader that it is a group of people with the characteristics of group violence who first discovered the secrets of agriculture, and then forcibly pulled those who were carefree to the game life into the agricultural age. Then those who wielded violence became aristocrats, and those who were drawn into farming became peasants engaged in heavy labor. Although the life of the peasants was miserable, the living conditions of the nobles supported by them improved dramatically.

If you compare the archaeological findings with Scott's analysis, there is actually a very high degree of consistency between the two. For example, in many sites of early human civilization, archaeologists will find a large number of simple utensils used by ordinary people while discovering exquisite ornaments and artifacts used by a few nobles. It can be inferred from this that soon after the agricultural revolution, the living conditions of those nobles had reached a very high level, but this price was the ruin of the lives of a large number of ordinary people. Those ornaments and utensils used by the nobility will be sent to the museum to be admired and admired by posterity as a representative of the era, while those traces of life belonging to ordinary people will not be valued. Therefore, the dark side of the agricultural revolution will naturally be hidden in the dust of history.

We are much more familiar with the Industrial Revolution than we are with the Agricultural Revolution. Still, it's only natural to overlook many details of this history.

In traditional historical narratives, the Industrial Revolution is often described as the result of several important technological inventions. In particular, the improved steam engine, invented by Watt, is often described as the key to the Industrial Revolution. After Watt's death, his obituary praised the machine's exploits: "It has armed mankind, made weak hands powerful, and perfected the human brain to deal with all problems."

However, this kind of praise of machines is clearly a historical selection. In fact, numerous studies have shown that the idea that the progress in productivity throughout the industrial revolution is attributable to the invention of a machine or technology may not be so reliable. For example, the British historian Alex von Tunzel-mann made an interesting estimate in his book Steam Power and British Industrialization to 1860: If Watt had not invented the steam engine, when would Britain have reached the level of national income on January 1, 1801. Her estimate was February 1, 1801. That is to say, even without the steam engine, the economic development of Britain throughout the Industrial Revolution would have been delayed by only one month. After Fujisawa, many historians made similar estimates to her, and although the specific conclusions differed, a considerable number believed that the role of the steam engine in the industrial revolution was actually overestimated.

If we go back to the scene of history and look at the situation during the Industrial Revolution, we will find that many people at the time saw that the new machines were not only angels who brought the gospel, but more like demons that brought suffering. For example, the revolutionary teacher Engels once wrote a very famous little book "The Condition of the British Working Class", which described in detail the tragic conditions of workers in the era of the industrial revolution. He wrote: "The factory worker was sentenced to ruin all his physical and intellectual strength in this boredom; His vocation was to suffer from boredom all day from the age of eight. Moreover, he had not a minute to spare: the steam engine was spinning all day, wheels, drive belts, and spindles were rumbling and rolling in his ears all day, and as soon as he took a breath, the overseer with the fine book would immediately appear behind him. Being sentenced to be buried alive in a factory, constantly watching a machine that never gets tired, is one of the cruelest torture for workers. ”

Although more than a hundred years later, historians can easily interpret everything described above as a throes of economic development. But for those workers at the time, this "labor pain" may have been their life of suffering. How can we get rid of this pain? There were two possible methods at that time: one was to use the "weapon of criticism", that is, to seek change through appeals; One is to use "weapon criticism", that is, to resort to violence to express one's dissatisfaction. However, history has shown that both methods have failed. The upstarts who have used the magic of machines to accumulate huge profits in a short period of time, thus achieving class leaps, are obviously unwilling to bargain with those who have fallen in this round of technological revolution. They did not have the patience to listen to the cries of the latter, and in the face of the latter's violent resistance, they preferred to fight violence with violence and suppress it.

Take the famous "Luddite Movement", for example: in this labor movement that took place during the Napoleonic Wars, British workers took hammers and smashed the machines in the factory. But then they were severely suppressed by the British government. Under the force, the resistance of the victims of the machine was quelled. And, in later narratives, the Luddite movement is mostly described as a failed rage of incompetence, which ultimately failed to stop the wheels of history driven by technology from rolling forward.

There are many examples of agricultural revolutions and industrial revolutions. In each case, we can see that the development of technology does not benefit everyone in society at the same time, and even makes a considerable number of people worse off at some point. In such cases, technological progress is often strongly promoted by a small number of people who wield power and wealth. While in hindsight these technology-driven behaviors are generally socially pro-progressive, many people will have to pay the price for all this for a period of time. But are these costs really inevitable?

Revisit of the Red Flag Act

In 1865, Britain introduced a famous Road (Steam) Locomotive Act. The law made a number of provisions on the road conditions for then-newly invented cars:

"First, at least three staff members shall be employed to drive or direct railway locomotives, and if the number of cargo or passenger cars attached to the rear exceeds two, an additional staff member shall be hired to manage the attached wagons.

Second, one of the aforementioned staff members shall guide the vehicle on foot at a distance of not less than sixty yards in front of the vehicle while the vehicle is moving, and shall hold a clearly visible red flag, warn the riders and carriages in the vicinity of the vehicle, warn the vehicle to stop driving if necessary, and assist the horses and carriages in traffic. ”

Because the red flags mentioned in this bill are so impressive, in many cases, this bill is also referred to as the Red Flag Traffic Act or Red Flag Act.

In today's view, the content of the Red Flag Act is really absurd. The car was originally to increase the speed of transportation and reduce the use of manpower, so make such a regulation, isn't it to press back the speed of the lifting, and add back the saved manpower? This is simply a complete anti-efficiency and anti-progress behavior! Under this understanding, many articles discussing innovation will now take the Red Flag Act as a negative example, and pull it out from time to time to criticize. There are many interpretations of the origin of this law, the most famous of which is that this law was instigated by the coachman group, the purpose of which is to stifle the new invention of the automobile.

However, if we revisit that period of history, we will find that the above views on the Red Flag Act are very debatable.

First of all, many people think that this law is aimed at the familiar internal combustion engine-powered cars, but in fact, the title of the law clearly indicates that it regulates steam-engine-powered cars, which at the time were the mainstream. Compared to later diesel locomotives, the steam engine was not only much heavier (about a dozen tons), but also started very slowly, and if it was completely "cold started", then the whole process took about 45 minutes. Not only that, but its safety is not too high, and explosion accidents often occur. Therefore, in reality, people often resort to human traction during the start-up process. And the guides who walked in front of the car assumed part of the role of launching assistants. At the same time, given its prominent security concerns, limiting its speed, as well as requiring specialized personnel to follow, also seems to make some sense.

Secondly, it does not seem accurate to think that the Red Flag Act was driven by a group of coachmen. According to historical records at the time, the biggest contributors to the introduction of the Act were rail transport companies and private road owners. Both groups have greater incentives to hinder cars on the road than coachman groups. Needless to say, the purpose of the former is self-evident, if the latter grows, it will have a great possibility of seizing a large part of its market; As for the latter, the reason why they are reluctant to put the car on the road is more direct - these big guys are so heavy that as soon as the road that is hard to repair allows them to go, the depreciation will accelerate significantly. Compared with these two groups, although the coachmen also have a certain incentive to hinder the car on the road, it is obviously much smaller in terms of motivation and strength. Therefore, it is not true to say that the coachmen instigated the introduction of the bill.

Third, in addition to the two paragraphs that were excerpted for wide dissemination, this bill actually contains many detailed provisions. For example, the corresponding explanations can be found in the bill on what standard a car should be charged when passing through a private road, and how compensation should be paid in the event of a traffic accident.

Based on the above points, it is not difficult to see that the "Red Flag Act" is not actually as legend has it goes, it is an evil law instigated by interest groups representing old technologies and hastily introduced by the government to hinder the development of new technologies. In fact, the opposite may be true, as it provides guidance on the development and diffusion of new technologies and provides guidance on their handling, thereby significantly reducing the transaction costs of diffusing new technologies. By that standard, it is more likely to be a good law.

It should be pointed out that regardless of the specific content of the bill, the introduction of the Red Flag Act also provides a good example for coordinating the various contradictions caused by the emergence of new technologies. Obviously, compared with the "who listens to whom" solution during the Ludd movement, this method of expressing opinions and lobbying by various interest groups, and then coordinating with the government as an intermediary, and introducing laws to regulate it may be much safer. While on the face of it may limit the rapid growth of new technologies and the businesses that use them, it may be a more robust approach to development when viewed in the longer term.

In fact, the later development of Europe and the United States also shows this. Beginning in the late 19th century, many similar control laws were introduced in these countries – some, like the Red Flag Act, were soon discontinued; Others, such as the Anti-Monopoly Law, have been used to this day. Although these laws have been denounced as evil laws, objectively speaking, after them, social movements such as the Luddite movement against technological change have rarely appeared, and at the same time, technology has advanced far faster than in the past.

Will compromise hinder technological development?

We can take a moment to discuss from a theoretical point of view why the approach of consultation and appropriate regulation of new technologies does not hinder the development of new technologies.

In order to carry out this discussion, it is necessary to establish a standard by which to judge whether technology contributes to social development. As mentioned earlier, for different groups, the quality of one technology is very subjective, and for one group, the technology that can bring benefits to another group can be a disaster. However, if there is a technology that does not make everyone in society worse off, and at least some of them are better off - for example, if there are two people in society, A and B, who originally had 10 and 15 units of wealth, respectively, and after technological progress, their wealth became 10 units and 20 units, then this technological progress should be considered a good technological progress, or at least a not bad technological progress. In the language of economics, such technological progress is called "Pareto Improvement."

But in reality, "Pareto improvement" is almost impossible. As a result, a modified version of it, the Kaldor-Hicks Improvement, is more commonly used as a measure of technological progress. The so-called "Kaldor-Hicks improvement" refers to an improvement that can be converted into a "Pareto improvement" through the transfer of wealth. For example, there are two people in society, A and B, who originally owned 10 units and 15 units of wealth, respectively. After technical improvements, the wealth owned by A was reduced to 5 units, and the wealth owned by B was increased to 30 units. Then according to the Pareto standard, such a technical improvement is obviously not a good technological progress. But do we have a chance of translating this into a good technological advance? The answer is yes. For example, we can have the government collect 5 units of wealth from B as a tax and compensate it to A, so that in the end A's wealth is still 10 units, and B's wealth becomes 25 units. At this point, according to the standard of "Pareto improvement", this technological progress becomes a good technological progress.

After understanding this, and then re-examining the logic of the "compromise" legislation of the Red Flag Act, we will understand that it actually adheres to the basic logic of the "Kaldor-Hicks improvement". To make the masters of new technologies compromise with all the stakeholders affected by them is to make it compensate in the Kaldor-Hicks sense. The definition of "Kaldor-Hicks improvement" shows that if the new technology is really better in a social sense, then even after removing these compensations, it can still bring enough benefits to the dominant player of the new technology. It follows that the approach of consultation and appropriate regulation of new technologies does not hinder the development of really good new technologies.

What hinders the consultation mechanism?

The question now is, if as early as the 19th century, people found a way to better reconcile the contradictions brought about by technological progress, why do similar conflicts persist? In my opinion, there are about three factors:

The first factor is interest. As we saw earlier, while many technologies may not benefit society as a whole, they may bring huge benefits to a small number of people. In order to ensure their own interests, this part of the group will spend a lot of power to influence public opinion and lobby relevant departments.

It is worth noting here that as the financial industry evolves, adopters of new technologies have far more power than their predecessors. In the era of the Industrial Revolution, while factory owners could earn good money from their machines, the wealth they had at their disposal was usually nothing more. And the process of accumulating this wealth can be lengthy. Therefore, in the early days of the rise of machines, they had no advantage over traditional classes such as landlords. But now, times are completely different. In reality, we can see that many new technology users can get a huge amount of financing even if they don't have any products or any actual profits, but as long as they can convince investors with a touching story, they can get a huge amount of financing, and they themselves can become a billionaire club in a short period of time. In this way, they can use a lot of resources to build their own persona and sell their views to the government. By contrast, the discourse space of those groups damaged by technology has been severely compressed. In this case, the normal negotiation and compromise mechanism will be destroyed, and the contradictions that could have been resolved thus will remain.

The second factor is the idea. Specifically, there are two currents of thought, the influence of social Darwinism and expertism.

Let's start with Social Darwinism. Those who hold this view see the survival of society as a process of the law of the jungle and survival of the fittest. They glorify those who can master new technologies and use them to make great fortunes as representatives of entrepreneurship, believing that only they can guide society. And those who have fallen behind in the process of technological progress are blamed for not working hard in their eyes.

Let's look at expertism. Those who hold this view strongly admire the opinions of professionals, believing that the planning and management of society should be done by professionals, and that people who lack professional knowledge should not have the right to speak. For new technologies, the advocates and users of those new technologies are obviously more professional than others, and correspondingly, they should also have the right to speak. For example, with regard to the food delivery incident mentioned at the beginning of this article, some people will think that teachers like him should not express their opinions, and the logic they rely on is actually a kind of expertism. In their view, a liberal arts teacher who understands neither technology nor economics should shut up on these issues, even if he himself is a stakeholder.

Since both of the above views are highly respected and promoted by successful people, they are very marketable in society. Even among policymakers, there is no shortage of adherents of such views. In this context, the institutional environment and public opinion environment of the entire society will be more inclined to the winners in the technological revolution, and the voices of those who fail will be difficult to be heard.

The third influencing factor is the structure of the information. One prerequisite for successful resolution of technical conflicts through negotiation is that all stakeholders know what other stakeholders are thinking. Whether this condition can be met depends on many factors, such as whether the public opinion environment of society is relaxed and whether the relevant technical conditions can be supported.

In the early days of the development of the Internet, different groups of people in society could use online public forums and other channels to better achieve the purpose of expressing their own views and talking with people with different views. However, with the advancement of algorithms, things have changed a lot. Under the role of recommendation algorithms, people are increasingly trapped in information cocoons, only willing to see the same views as themselves from their mobile phones, and express their own views in their own circles, rather than understanding different views from themselves. Over time, people of different classes and different intellectual backgrounds will form islands, and even if they are like me and my mother, they may not know each other's thoughts at all. It is clear that under such circumstances, it is difficult to fully discuss various issues, including the impact of technological progress, and the mechanism for resolving conflicts will no longer function well. In reality, we are seeing that people's views on various issues are becoming more and more extreme, in large part because information cocoons undermine the operation of this information communication mechanism.

How to navigate the direction of technological development?

Now, we are entering an era of technological explosion, and many fields, including semiconductors, computers, artificial intelligence, and life sciences, have made a lot of progress in a short period of time. While these technological advances have brought endless possibilities for economic and social development, they have also brought a lot of risks and uncertainties, at least in the short term. In the face of such a situation, it is more important to control the direction of technological development, organically combine the speed of technological development, the degree of change caused by technology, and the affordability of society, and seek a path of technology application and development that can benefit most people.

So, how can this be achieved? In my opinion, the following points are probably the most important:

The first is to rebuild the negotiation mechanism. In the face of the increasingly serious information cocoon, we should try our best to build a mechanism that allows people with different views and backgrounds to speak out and communicate directly at the same time, so that everyone's voices can be heard and everyone's views can be fully expressed. Only in this way can the polarization of ideas between different stakeholders be avoided, and the mechanism for resolving contradictions in technological development through consultation and compromise be operationalized.

The second is that the government should play the role of coordinator. It should listen to the perspectives of all stakeholders in the process of technological change and have a full understanding of their respective interests. On that basis, it should balance the interests of all parties and formulate relevant rules that would reflect the greatest common divisor of each group. With such rules, transaction costs in the process of technological change can be greatly reduced, and the development of technology can become smoother.

The third is to establish a "Kaldor-Hicks compensation mechanism". In order to turn a technological progress with the characteristics of a "Kaldor-Hicks improvement" into a "Pareto improvement" that benefits the whole society, a complete compensation mechanism must be established. Specifically, reasonable taxes should be levied on the users of new technologies as compensation for the negative externalities they bring. If such a compensation mechanism can be well established, then as long as technological progress is in the right direction, it can benefit more people in society.