Action! There is a “red button” in the middle of a high-tech control board. If this button is pushed, that will be the end of life on Earth. All the living things including humans will be scattered around as grains of a nuclear dust cloud. Natural life will go back to prehistoric ages!
It is scary, isn’t it? It is dreadful. You may think that this hair-raising scene which can wake us up in the middle of the night fits in a science fiction movie. However, it is not far-fetched when you consider the destructive power of the world’s nuclear weapon capacity.
Let me ask a question in a manner suitable for today’s zeitgeist as we are entering the age of artificial intelligence: What robots will produce the robots which will supervise the robots that will produce the robots which may push that red button?
Our world is on the brink of becoming a bedridden patient. However, far from finding rational solutions to cure it, we do nothing apart from accelerating the progression of the disease.
Everyone gets their share from climate change. A food crisis is just around the corner. Potable water sources are drying up. Epidemics of unknown origin are continuing to kill millions of people. Poverty and famine are no longer experienced only in some parts of the world but all around the world. Hot wars are on everyone’s doorstep. Humans are working together to prepare the end of the world that they live in.
One thing is certain: Humans have always moved to the next phase for “a better life” throughout history. However, they have come to a point where they are like a machine designed to destroy this planet.
The contents of Sapiens written by Prof Yuval Noah Harari were “already known” to some of us, but they “broke taboos” for some of us. I made inferences in accordance with the contents of the book as everyone else who read this book. Harari mentions the “main problem” in various parts of the book, but I would like to write my own comments by drawing inspiration from him.
If we have to look for an offender, I have found one: “wheat”! It was the beginning of the end when hunter-gatherer societies discovered wheat seeds and when they found out that they can produce more wheat from these seeds, because humans ambushed other humans like themselves as they moved to the next phase on the basis of this information. We did not know about the trap set by this information. We stopped hunting and gathering, and preferred to settle down. Maybe it was too early for shopping malls and housing estates, but humans were divided into two groups as “we and they”. “They” were always the bad ones who had their eyes on our land, grains, possessions, property, oil etc. However, processing ordinary information about wheat led humans to an “agricultural revolution”. We don’t know if life got better, but we know that the second innovation was “the invention of writing”. Another experience humans had with information. Commerce was shaped, and calculations, books and astronomical findings emerged after the invention of writing. Books were written on tablets. Law was documented with the Code of Hamurabi whereas wars were documented with the Treaty of Kadesh. Writing handed over its legacy, which made humans step into a new age, to Gutenberg’s printing press in 1400s. The Bible was reproduced by printing for the first time. Humans, who ended domination of the Church, started a journey towards another lifestyle on the basis of “information”. One of the way stations on this journey was called “the Industrial Revolution”. Inventions and technology based on these inventions followed one another. As a result of this development, wars became a “business model”. Money became “finance”, oil became “energy”, and cannons, rifles and bombs became “the defence industry”! Once those three joined hands, the “invention” of world wars and the reconstruction of what was destroyed during these wars were called “economy and development“. Behind that win-win model, there was “a better life” picture which was worked into the years that came after Gutenberg’s ability to process information on a machine and which originated from the Industrial Revolution. That picture showed humans both the atomic bomb and the Moon landing.
That wasn’t the end. The information age started in 1980s. Humans’ experience with processing information went down in history as Macintosh which gave its name to PCs. We thought nothing would be kept secret, life would be better, taboos would be broken, governments would become transparent and individuals would become free! All the years that had passed since then revealed that the situation was nothing like our dreams. The machines of the information age “blacklisted” all of us. There was no privacy even in our bedrooms. Everything from what we ate or drunk to where we went and what we bought was watched by the government, Big Brother. Our experience with “information” failed to make life better once again. However, that information brought another revolution to our doorstep in line with the course of history: “artificial intelligence”! Robots that produce robots.
Let me ask the same question again: What robots will produce the robots which will supervise the robots that will produce the robots which may push that red button?
When we look at the ten-thousand-year history of mankind, we see that humans weren’t able to reach a happy ending as they found information, processed that information and then shaped it for “a better life”. There is a file full of criminal records which makes us worry about the future ahead of us!
As life was shaped in the above-mentioned way throughout the history of mankind, three professions which formed the backbone of social life have tried to feed off the same values: judges, doctor and referees. These three professions have always existed in the culture of every society in every period of history. They have been trusted with the dynamics and inertia of the social life as well as the solutions and remedies for problems/disagreement. Justice, ethics, responsibility and accountability have been “the North Star” for this trio. They all have their “oaths” which define their missions in order to meet the expectations of society.
On the other hand, CEOs, who play the leading role in turning our world into a bedridden patient, have a different oath. Their oath includes nothing more than telling their companies’ shareholders “how much they made in the related period” once every three months. Considering that nature’s inability to renew itself gained momentum during the Industrial Revolution and that the global market was shaped through the agency of companies in the 20th century, what we worry about now is the outcome of the last hundred – hundred and fifty years. We are talking about CEOs who do not worry about “some things” as judges, doctors and referees do, because they do not have to “take an oath” like judges, doctors and referees do!
They may not take an oath, but they try to manage their jobs on the basis of a magic foundation called “vision, mission and values“. If we look at it from a different point of view, this foundation is a document that can be counted as their “oath“. Very few of these documents have been put into practice, and they have not been more than decorative elements hung up on company walls with their fancy frames. They are the only things remaining from the campaign for total quality management discovered by the top managers of global companies in 1990s. Vision and mission statements take refuge in “being a best-seller, having the widest range of service, being an ambitious player in new markets, making no concessions on quality, being the unchanging preference of consumers, meeting customers’ demands and expectations at the highest level, being number one, being the best, becoming a world brand or becoming one of the top five companies”. However, when it comes to practice, they are covered with a “values” blanket which does not mean anything.
As a matter of fact, this is the problem!
CEOs were not able to join the class of judges, doctors and referees due to an “oath” they didn’t believe in. Nobody called them to account for the “visions, missions and values” that they developed. Nothing like that was written at the end of a balance sheet. “Visions, missions and values” did not protect the interests of society, which was the real owner of all the sources that CEOs used, but the interests of the companies which may not even exist tomorrow.
And the last act! Sources started to dry up in their places of origin. People who uttered those challenging sentences started to have trouble finding raw materials for production. Nature has come to an end in mathematical terms! The number of people who have to live on a few dollars a day constitutes a significant part of the world population. Mass migration due to poverty, diseases, hot wars or economic reasons started to penetrate into the walls of rich countries. An agenda managed by terror destroyed the usual government management habits. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the walls of Wall Street fell in 2008. Thus, taboos were broken. Clichéd vision, mission and values sentences remained under the ruins of those walls.
What remains is to assure sustainability of this planet. There is no other reason d’être than passing our world onto future generations with its nature, humans, lifestyles and cultures any more. Whatever CEOs’ jobs are, visions and missions which will enable their promotion to a higher class are shaped at this point. If CEOs are to manage these sources which belong to our kids by renewing them, they have to read the bottom lines of balance sheets as justice, transparency, responsibility and accountability.
This is where the dreadful “artificial intelligence” revolution comes to a dead end after the information age, because robots are going to be produced by artificial intelligence. There will be no judges, doctors or referees where artificial intelligence is produced. There will be CEOs!
Let me ask again: What robots will produce the robots which will supervise the robots that will produce the robots which may push that red button? Who will be the CEOs of the companies that will produce these robots?
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