“If you had to choose any time in the course of human history to be alive, you’d choose this one.” So says Barack Obama in the editorial that opens the “Frontiers issue” of Wired magazine he has just guest-edited. On the face of it, it’s a sentence so banal that it barely merits comment. But set against the backward-facing mindset currently defining so much of politics – from the rise and fall of Donald Trump to the mess of crabby nostalgia that drove a lot of the vote for Brexit – his words seem defiant.
In the material that follows, by far the most fascinating item is the transcript of a conversation between Obama and Joi Ito, the Japanese director of the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology’s Media Lab, and a digital entrepreneur sufficiently aware of where the action is to have invested early money in Twitter, Kickstarter and Flickr. The ostensible subject is artificial intelligence, or AI – though once the exchange gets going, it becomes a general series of glimpses of what the near-future is going to look like, and how politics and the state might respond.
Obama’s contributions are all about an acute, worldly kind of cleverness being tentatively applied to things he probably regrets not having enough time to think about. And when he turns his attention to the mess of stuff usually subsumed under the increasingly cliched heading of “automation”, he gets interesting. “As AI gets further incorporated, and the society potentially gets wealthier, the link between production and distribution, how much you work and how much you make, gets further and further attenuated – the computers are doing a lot of the work,” says Obama. “As a consequence, we have to make some tougher decisions.” One is whether it is time to consider a universal basic income, “a debate that we’ll be having over the next 10 or 20 years”.
Within all this are the implicit stirrings of some very interesting stuff indeed, focused on “what we are collectively willing to pay for”. Increasingly, the state will presumably have to assume a much greater role in redistributing money from the digital economy’s winners to its losers. That, Obama seems to suggest, might open space for a long-overdue look at how we reward people whose contribution cannot be reduced to an instant financial return, and who we are going to need more and more of – “whether it’s teachers, nurses, caregivers, [or] moms or dads who stay at home”.
From a British perspective, all this sparks two obvious thoughts. One is about how the huge changes Obama and Ito discuss are already playing out in the UK economy, and the sense that the chaos and uncertainty let loose by the vote for Brexit could not have come at a worse time: to put it crudely, if our exit from the EU doesn’t take your job, a robot may well. The other is about the state of the national conversation, and a simple enough question: can you imagine any current front-rank Westminster politician talking about this stuff? The future barely intrudes on British politics these days. Neither, in fact, do large swaths of the present. In both main parties, the former dominance of a clique of self-styled “modernisers” has been avenged, and politics is about a new emphasis on age, experience and supposedly traditional values.
In contrast to the excitable 40-somethings of the recent past, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are 60 and 67 respectively. Besides leaving the EU, her flagship policy is the return of grammar schools; his, as far as I can tell, is the renationalisation of the railways. There may be occasional signs of interest in things more relevant to the 21st century (even if they have yet to cohere into a convincing vision, witness some of the recent pronouncements by the shadow chancellor John McDonnell). But the mainstream too often seems to be carved up between two conservative parties, led by people who are neither intellectually curious nor shaped by the great technological convulsions that have defined the past 25 years.
How did we get here? As is often the case, it might be at least partly down to a backlash against Tony Blair, a politician so blankly fixated with the future that he seemed to surrender to the free-market, liberal interventionist version of it, and abandon any idea that adopting particular versions of modernity could be a matter of choice. From a Tory perspective, the same might be said of David Cameron and an obsession with the cutting-edge that often turned absurd, as captured in The Thick of It’s spoof of his future-gazing consigliere Steve Hilton, and the immortal line, “I like the plasmic nature of your data modelling.”
The electorate is growing older, and politics is clearly being reoriented accordingly. And in any case, Britain – or, rather, England - has long had an ingrained conservatism, there in everything from our eternal fondness for the idea of some lost Arcadian age, to the clarion call of the great English radical William Cobbett, which suits the time of Brexit as well as it fitted the late 18th and early 19th centuries: “We want great alteration, but we want nothing new.” But something more insidious is also going on. Increasingly, the orthodoxies of government and politics are so marginal to the way advanced economies work that if politicians fail to keep up, they simply get pushed aside. Obviously, the corporations concerned are global. The amazing interactions many of them facilitate between people are now direct – with no role for any intermediate organisations, whether they be traditional retailers or the regulatory state.
The result is a kind of anarchy, overseen by unaccountable monarchs: we engage with each other via eBay, Facebook and the rest, while the turbo-philanthropy of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates superficially fills the moral vacuum that would once have pointed to oversight and regulation by the state.
This is all deeply political. Very occasionally, as when digital giants face questions about their tax arrangements, its problematic aspects are revealed. But then the people in charge return to a politics mired in the past, and the future speeds on, regardless.
I wonder whether May, Corbyn and others – including, it has to be said, most of the media – grasp that the realities of what Obama talks about are already here. When it comes to automation, do they understand the incredible symbolism of the new Rolls-Royce factory near Rotherham, which covers 150,000 square feet and produces some parts for jet engines in a quarter of the time the processes used to take, but needs a mere 150 people on site?
Do they get the bracing view of the future contained in the same company’s claim about a plant in Tyne and Wear, where the machines run for “between 12 and 45 hours without any [human] intervention, compared to every half-hour before”?
With every turn of those machines and each bleep of a self-service checkout, we get nearer the future in which the Bank of England’s chief economist has said that technology might take 15 million jobs. If that sounds too abstract, try the projections of the Israeli sage Yuval Noah Harari: “Billions of people are likely to have no military or economic function. Providing food and shelter should be possible but how to give meaning to their lives will be the huge political question.”
Says Obama: “We are going to have to have a societal conversation about how we manage this.” Again, the words might look laughably banal, but they embody something absolutely urgent. And how grim to be stranded in the old world, watching politicians talk about anything but.