The Butt Ugly Weblog

In 1957, one of the greats of science fiction, Isaac Asimov, wrote one of his famous robot books: The Naked Sun. He describes a world called Solaria, where only 20,000 humans live alone on vast estates, with every need catered to by a billion robots. They, of course, have a vibrant social life, but only by “viewing,” that is, telepresence. “Seeing” other people physically is frowned upon so much that people feel nauseated if another living person is in the same room. (Then a murder occurs, and a detective is sent to investigate from planet Earth – a planet with billions of inhabitants, where privacy is rare and underground city streets are constantly crowded with millions. The Solarians are naturally distraught, and this drives a lot of tension in the book. It’s a great book; you should read it!)

Why dig old speculative fiction? First, I like it. Second, sci-fi writers make their living by thinking very hard about the future, but without a lot of pressure to be “sensible” in whatever way “sensible” is defined in their times.

And third: You can be very sure that the current tech leaders have read the same books. Some of them are actively trying to bring some of them to life.

What got me thinking about this book was some of the weak (and not so weak) signals that I’ve been seeing recently.

We are losing the human connection

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work was on the rise. The freedom to work any time from anywhere was holding great promise to certain expert jobs, but COVID-19 really broke the bank, and many people found out the hard way that yes, their jobs could also be done remotely.

And I get why people like remote work: commuting is terrible and skipping it frees hours of your time per day. Working remotely means you can also find more affordable housing away from the city. There are clear productivity gains for certain tasks when you are basically in focus mode most of the time and don’t have to suffer constant interruptions. For the more introverted people, remote work can be a great anxiety management system.

Also, while we are right now seeing AI replacing white-collar entry-level jobs, we’re also seeing the first steps of human-like robots stepping into the areas traditionally thought of as blue-collar jobs such as factory-floor work. It is obviously a huge disruption when a programmable, mass-producible tool can be used to replace workers in entire industries. It has happened before, and we remember those times as the First and Second Industrial Revolutions.

At the extreme, we see the *otaku*, people who like to isolate in their own homes and not have any physical social interactions. Everything is ordered online, including social life.

A not-so-extreme example is how people in Western countries are turning inwards, something that the Harvard Kennedy School calls the “Friendship Recession”. People spend more time at home and less time seeing friends. The so-called Male Loneliness Epidemic (which is more likely an “everybody loneliness epidemic”) is just one aspect of this.

Return of the teenage bedroom

This is honestly a bit of a weak pet theory of mine, so you are free to ignore this chapter, but hear me out: A massive portion of the internet innovation happens because the young founders, barely out of college or university, desire to go back to the happiest period of their lives — the teenage bedroom. Dad drove you around? Uber. Mum made you food? DoorDash. Endless entertainment? Netflix. Hanging with friends around the mall? TikTok. Dreams of the conquest of space? SpaceX.

Many of the corporate founders are people who had only very limited experience of life when they started. They locked in a particular kind of culture, and the stereotypical CEO self-searching and experience hunting cannot really change the culture already established.

I like this hypothesis as it sort of kind of explains in my mind why we don’t seem to evolve as a society that much. Yes, tech evolves, but the big and massive societal changes seem to revolve around the comfort of the middle-class teenage bedroom from the 1990s.

The rise of the social algorithm

There is also a big social experiment running — the regular human contact is being mediated, perhaps even replaced, by social algorithms. You no longer just meet people because you happen to share the same job, hobby or local pub; no, you see content from people that the algorithm deems suitable for you. An algorithm that’s optimized to maximize your engagement with the site itself, not with the people. Sometimes it’s as simple as listing the latest content – the Fediverse is the linear-TV equivalent of social media – but the smartest algorithms are self-learning and very good at wasting your time. Time, of which you have a limited supply.

But the big thing is *scale*. Internet companies are built around scale: they need to grow their revenue constantly. Some economists argue that in service industries, there is no limit to growth, but most firms battle for eyeballs and user time, both of which are limited resources.

Frictionless wins

One key thing in the online battle is the idea that frictionless wins. The company that builds a service that needs less interaction, less learning, less commitment and less money from the user is more likely to win the fight.

The problem is that online is almost always less friction than physical. It’s easier to order stuff online than walk to the store. The assortment is always better. The prices often cheaper too, if you don’t mind waiting an extra day. In Finland, robots deliver your groceries so you don’t have even the social friction of meeting a human.

The need for growth automatically drives internet companies to less friction by reducing the physical activities of customers and moving towards online. Meeting people is a hassle. Calling them is less of a hassle. Messaging them is even less of a hassle. Watching a TikTok stream is even less, since you don’t really have to do anything; not even swipe.

Frictionless scales.

Growth needs scale.

Therefore, the internet companies (well, any company really, but the internet companies are at the forefront) are compelled to drive *solarification* of the world. We simply need to be isolated and pampered by robots, because it’s the only way towards a truly frictionless world.

Roll “save vs limitless growth”

Of course, this is hyperbole. My desire is just to highlight that there is a logical end result for the growth needs of the internet companies, and call for more human technology.

Still, there is delicious irony in looking at internet CEOs railing against remote work, yet trying to make sure their users never have to meet a living human. Return-to-office does not make work have less friction, on the contrary! Work life is stressful, and with our population aging with less people supporting the economy, it’s likely to become even more so.

There is also growing awareness of the mental and physical toll that isolation and stress takes on you. People who work from home might move less (there seems to be conflicting research on this), and anxiety appears to be increasing on the whole.

Also, bluntly put, there are limits to growth. The “Limits to Growth” model from the Club of Rome, and its updated versions, does set some hard limits on how much growth can be achieved. But if you think about it this way: 20,000 people would not be a big burden on Earth, no matter how advanced a lifestyle they lead. So perhaps there is a callous movement out there as well, people who plan to be the progenitors of those 20,000.

So what?

A very good question indeed, my friend! I’m sure some of my readers are right now thinking that hey, that does not sound so bad, actually. Living in a utopia, where you don’t have to meet dumb people, and all your needs, wishes and fantasies are catered to by intelligent robots.

For others, this would be an absolute dystopia. Not being able to meet and feel other people? Spending your entire life in a high-tech version of Teams? Horror.

And, for engineers, you have to think about the brittleness of such a system: Is there enough genetic variance? Could power be grabbed and society be disrupted by bad actors? How about global tech malfunctions or natural catastrophes? Could society survive with such low numbers of people? What would happen to culture? Would they entertain themselves with an infinite number of old TV reruns and an unlimited stream of jabbering in Teams meetings? Would it be a monoculture, and we would lose all historical context of the thousands of cultures enriching humanity right now?

Could such a society *evolve* in any direction, or would it be a stagnant endpoint?