A couple of years ago Brian Arthur, an academic affiliated with the Palo Alto Research Center, made a startling prediction. In the next two to three decades, western digital networks would end up performing functions equal to the size of the “real” US economy. Or, to put it another way, if you looked at all the work being done by electronic supply chains, robots, communications systems – and the humble bar code – then the digital economy would “surpass the physical economy in size”, Arthur wrote, on the basis of productivity and output calculations.
It sounds impressive. But it also raises a crucial question: as those digital networks swell in size, what are flesh-and-blood workers going to do in this future world? Last month Simon Head, an academic who teaches at Oxford University and New York University, plunged into this debate with a book entitled Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans.
As the subtitle suggests, Head is profoundly gloomy. For the dirty secret of these digital networks – or “computer business systems”, as he calls them, using corporate jargon – is that humans do not know how to fight back. These networks keep displacing jobs that used to be performed by the middle classes, tossing them out of work or into thankless, monotonous drudgery, even as a tiny elite of skilled managers (or business owners) gets wealthier. As a result, income inequality keeps growing and digital systems increasingly dictate what we all do, overriding human common sense.