George Gilder. Life After Google. Regnery, 2018.
I have read a few articles by George Gilder and heard him speak, but I have never read any of his books. I was under the impression that Gilder was one of the brightest men of his generation. This book does nothing to dispel that idea. This book is profound.
I had a friend who used to highlight articles he read using a yellow highlighter. He would sometimes pass a copy of an article on to me, saying that the whole article ought to be dipped in yellow ink. That is the way I felt about a few of the chapters in Life After Google.
Gilder states his thesis pretty clearly near the beginning and then proceeds to tell a number of stories to demonstrate his main idea. One paragraph that sums it up says:
Cleaving all information is the great divide between creativity and determinism, between information entropy of surprise and thermodynamic entropy of predictable decline, between stories that capture a particular truth and statistics that reveal a sterile generality, between cryptographic hashes that preserve information and mathematical blends that dissolve it, between the butterfly effect and the law of averages, between genetics and the law of large numbers, between singularities and big data—in a word, the impassible gulf between consciousness and machines. (19)
Gilder wants us to think. And there is a big difference between mere number-crunching and thinking. Back in the nineties someone came out with a book called Machines Who Think. Notice the word who. Raymond Kurzweil, for example, anticipates a point in time which he calls singularity when machines will think the same way people do. Gilder says in so many words that it ain’t gonna happen.
While Gilder writes here mostly about the blockchain and how that can make many things personal and private, his overarching thrust is something more. He notes that with the coming of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and others, people began using the scientific method to discover things. In Newton’s case, for example, this included discovering a mathematical model that fit his gravity observations. To Newton and many who followed, nature was something for mankind to observe and make discoveries about. (See Proverbs 25:2.)
For some like Einstein that was still true in the twentieth century, but things were changing. In the nineteenth century determinism began taking over. Nature was no longer something to be discovered but something to be explained. Hegel, Marx, and Darwin stand out but there were others. In England, Malthus claimed to “scientifically” show how England would shortly be overpopulated. In the 1960’s Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb claiming all kinds of human disasters by 1980 caused by overpopulation. Even though history has shown both Malthus and Ehrlich to have been mistaken, Gilder notes that Ehrlich still preaches his message of environmental disaster due to overpopulation in spite of the failure of many of his predictions.
There may be mathematical models, but as Gödel emphasized, mathematics is a human invention. It is a tool like language. Any mathematical model that tries to explain science has to be based on observations like Newton’s F=G(m1m2/r2). Hypotheses need to be supported by factual observations.
This, then, takes us to Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM). They all use algorithms for searches and recommendations. However, these algorithms do not really think. They simply make connections faster than our minds can make them. Not only are they limited but they have the potential for evil because they are deterministic. The user enters a search word and Google “determines” what you are looking for, even if it is a wacky conspiracy theory. If you complain that YouTube or Facebook is censoring you, they say, “The algorithm determined that the post did not meet the community standards.” With pornography that may be the case, but with many expressions, it is mere censorship.
I have not normally used Google for searches in about twelve years. Here is why. Towards the end of George W. Bush’s presidency in 2008 or so, I googled his name. I just wanted to get some quick information about him; I think it was just the year he was born, nothing special. Except for the Wikipedia article, all the links on the first page were weird conspiracy theories: “George W. Bush: War Criminal,” “George W. Bush and the Illuminati,” nonsense like that. That is hardly an impersonal algorithm!
As different web sites track you, they begin to make mathematical patterns. In many cases they are probably harmless, but they can be used to get personal information. The blockchain promotes privacy. One can keep records with it, not just monetary transactions as with Bitcoin but legal documents and other databases.
Gilder notes that Newton also successfully proposed the first gold-based money exchange. For the next three hundred years Western economies were relatively stable and people became confident in purchasing and investing. Since the 1970s, the world has depended on fiat money rather than a gold standard. Gilder sees Bitcoin and similar digital currencies as a correction to fiat money.
More than a correction to promote privacy and financial stability, Gilder sees a life after Google that is not deterministic. Why do so many Silicon Valley geeks support socialism? It is deterministic. Like an algorithm, history, they think, is headed in an inevitable direction. Recent polling data in American elections prove this is not the case, as much as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube would like us to think differently.
We know that Marx asked Darwin to write an introduction to Das Capital. Darwin turned it down because he was apolitical and did not want to get into a political controversy. Marx understood that not only was evolution a challenge to religious belief, but that it was deterministic. A biologically superior mankind would continue to evolve and finally make the perfect communal society.
I am reminded of the two pills Neo had to choose between in The Matrix. With the blue pill, “the story ends.” That was deterministic, with “an end to history.” With the red pill, Neo’s choice, he is told: “Remember, all I’m offering is the truth— nothing more.” It was a risk. It was against both conformity and security in the authoritarian Matrix, but it is the truth that sets us free. (See John 8:32.)
Gilder notes that real advances in technology come from human creativity, not “from Darwinian trends in the Valley.” (115) He gives examples of other creative computer people, too. Behind many of them is Peter Thiel, who has been giving fellowships to promising teen-aged computer coders and hardware builders so that they skip college and go right into the field.
Life After Google came out in 2018, but the book also is raising one question that the current flu epidemic has been emphasizing, namely, is an expensive college education really worth it? We note also that Gilder’s web site supported the Great Barrington Declaration which questioned the heavy hand of the state in reaction to the coronavirus. (Not unsurprisingly, though supported by thousands of M.D.s, the Declaration was initially censored by Google.)
Many “politically correct” people claim to be anti-establishment, but in being p.c., they prove to be part of the establishment. Gilder here is really anti-establishment. He is not promoting conformity. He is promoting privacy and creativity. Isn’t that where mankind can really shine? More than with lockstep determinism any day!