Is technology corrupting humanity? History says no. | Elad Gil | Big Think

[Music] So one of the things that worries me the most in the technology world today is the degree to which the external world has viewed technology with more and more cynicism and the degree to which, you know, there's a little bit of a backlash starting. I think that there's a few drivers for that. I think the recent elections are sort of one example where people feel that they were manipulated, I should say, by third parties using technology.

And I think separate from that, there's also just these sort of media waves where, you know, media tends to go in cycles. The press will build something up and then tear it down, and then build something up and tear it down. I think technology was really built up in the media for a 20-year period or so, and now is sort of a time of reckoning. To some extent, I think that's very unfortunate because I believe that optimism is a reflexive asset.

It's sort of the George Soros view of the world where, you know, something that people give value to gains value by that belief in the value of that thing. If you actually look at the major changes that have happened in the world, it's because people have been extremely optimistic in ways that some folks thought were irrational. That optimism allowed them to actually accomplish that giant goal.

I mean, think of putting somebody on the moon and what we were able to accomplish in the 60s, or think about a variety of other examples like that—the Manhattan Project or, you know, major breakthroughs have all sort of come through an enormous sense of optimism. You know, the manifest destiny and sort of the development of the United States as a country is a good example of that on the sort of country and governance level.

One thing that I've seen more and more increasingly is an increase in cynicism and people being made fun of for saying they want to change the world when they're genuine about it. I think that's a very big negative. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about recently is how can you actually increase societal optimism? What are the mechanisms by which people can become more enthusiastic about their future and more enthusiastic about technology?

Because if you look at the changes that technology has wrought over the last twenty to thirty years, it literally has lifted tens or hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It has created access to global markets and created access to global information. You know, everybody's walking around with literally a supercomputer in their pocket that gives them access to the sum of all of humanity's knowledge, with maybe the exception of scientific journals, which are still blocked.

So I do think that people should be incredibly optimistic about the future. One thing I wonder about is how can you help spread that optimism? I think if people believe they can do something, they often achieve things that they never thought were possible.

A lot of people have recently had a lot of very cogent concerns around the rise of misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms and how that impacted our last election. You know, I think those are very legitimate concerns, and I think some of the platforms have made pretty major mistakes in terms of how they've approached some of those things.

It's interesting, though, because if you look at it over the arc of history, this is not a new story. Every time there's a new technology, particularly around media, there's a set of outcries about how that media is corrupting culture or how it's destroying certain aspects of our life. In some cases, those are real concerns.

There's a great book from Tom Standage about the early telegraph in the 1800s called "The Victorian Internet," and he basically makes the argument that a lot of the behavior that exists online today was being done by telegraph operators in the 1800s because they were just sitting on these lines talking with each other over Morse code. They would gossip, they would trade recipes, and they would date. But also, it was a way for news to spread quickly.

A lot of people argued that it was the downfall of a variety of things; it could be the downfall of markets because suddenly markets were more efficient, or it could impact religion or other things. Then we had radio. Actually, before radio, we had newspapers in the early 1900s, and there was the wave of yellow journalism. There was a Spanish-American War that was caused by a new form of media.

Then we had radio, and radio was corrupting youth by spreading rock-and-roll and sin and, you know, all sorts of bad things. Then we had TV, which was turning everybody into vegetables, and then we had video games, which were turning all of our children into killers. Now we have social media as the next new media platform, and Instagram is destroying our youth. I think that fact about Instagram is true, but I'm joking about that.

In the broader context, if you think about it, every time we have a new form of media, we make that argument that that form of media is the thing that's going to destroy our society. It's corrupting our politics, it's corrupting our children, it’s destroying our ability to think for ourselves, and every time society's turned out okay. Now, that doesn't mean that social media platforms shouldn't be reacting or shouldn't be addressing these issues.

I'm just saying if you look at it through the larger lens of history, this is not a new story. [Music]