As we debate which people, events and institutions are responsible for Donald Trump’s shocking election win on Tuesday, we must remember not to let technological advance off the hook.
Technology, as it ever has been, is a double-edged sword that solves the pressing problems of the day while simultaneously creating others that must be dealt with in the future.
The best we can hope for is that the new issues prove to be less serious than the ones they replace – that the positive effects outweigh the negative side effects.
Well, we’ve had the 4K televisions and the apps that let us hail taxis from our phones. Now it’s time for the downside.
Mr Trump is, in my opinion, the proverbial negative side effect. The president-elect of the United States embodies the very real potential of that equation reversing.
Technology’s good effects have been grand indeed.
The world economy, enabled over the past two decades by the internet and increasing globalisation, has experienced supercharged growth.
Developing countries – China and India in particular – have benefited tremendously from this interconnectedness, finally joining the ride that Western nations had been on for more than a century. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have been lifted from poverty as a result, many of them living in those two countries.
The United States has also benefited, with gross domestic product nearly tripling to US$16 trillion since the mid-1990s. But, unlike the effects in developing countries, those gains have not been as broadly distributed.
Real incomes for typical Americans have stagnated while the richest have become richer. Apple, Google, Facebook and the like have become the biggest and wealthiest companies in the world. The number of American billionaires, many of them residing in Silicon Valley, has mushroomed tenfold since the early 1990s.
And so we have our side effect. A vast number of disaffected middle-class Americans so fed up with missing out on the spoils that they decided to throw a veritable grenade into the soup.
They were joined by other Americans, many of them white and earning better-than-average incomes, who are worried about their old-economy jobs becoming obsolete. It’s an understandable fear considering the accelerating pace of automation.
If they didn’t purposely vote for Mr Trump, they certainly voted against Hillary Clinton.
Mr Trump successfully painted his opponent as part of the problem, where a vote for the long-time Washington insider meant a continuation of the increasingly untenable status quo. Mr Trump also benefited greatly from a fractured and increasingly incapable media, another side effect of technological change.
Traditional media outlets such as CNN and The New York Times, beleaguered by steadily declining advertising revenue and staff cuts, never believed the reality TV star stood a proper chance – an attitude that was profoundly out of touch with middle America. Alternative right-wing media such as Fox News and Breitbart helped by ratcheting up the rhetoric and chipping away at the middle ground that many Americans used to be able to find.
Both of those factors combined with the echo chambers of Twitter and Facebook, where it’s too easy to gravitate toward like-minded individuals and where opposing viewpoints aren’t as apparent thanks to algorithms that give us more of what we want, rather than what we might need.
The results are political divisions that now more closely resemble dug-in tribal warfare than simple disagreements over policy positions.
Where this all goes from here is anyone’s guess.
Perhaps he will surprise and indeed somehow “make America great again”, but that promise has always had an air of ridiculousness about it considering Mr Trump has never had any concrete plan on how to make that happen.
In the context of technological advance, the lesson going forward is not that we need to embark on the impossible task of guessing what the myriad side effects might be.
It’s that we need to do more to ensure its effects are more equitably distributed, lest the tables once again turn in dramatic and potentially catastrophic fashion, leaving us with only the side effects to contend with.
Winner of the Week: Peter Thiel. The PayPal co-founder and outspoken libertarian became Silicon Valley's pariah months back by publicly supporting Donald Trump, but he now stands to benefit. He'll probably be rewarded with a key appointment in the administration.
Loser of the Week: Green energy. The president-elect is a fan of coal-burning plants and a climate change denier. Renewable energy companies and possibly even electric vehicles are going to have a tough go of it.
Peter Nowak is a veteran technology writer and the author of Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of the Species
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