Human
Clash of the Titans
It was about half way through this book that I stopped reading.
I'm glad I returned to it, because Luke Kemp's book is genuinely astonishing and makes a series of wide-ranging political and economic points that offer a none-too-flattering mirror to our current age. Unlike Alexander Karp's The Technological Republic, it genuinely engages with all the major crises that affect humanity today, not merely defence (for which read the military-industrial complex) and culture wars. And yet once Kemp moves into our current age for a series of excruciating chapters Goliath's Curse becomes a litany of despair that can have the effect of sapping the reader's will to engage with the current struggles of our age. Goliath seems simply too big, David's stone simply too small.
This is a great shame because Goliath's Curse begins extremely well and, as I discovered when I returned to it, also offers a more practical plan for our engagement. The title is dual-edged: it is the curse of domination that first begins to affect our ancestors some 12,000 years ago when we enter the Holocene and hunter-gatherer societies become more sedentary farmers and settlers, making them easier prey for violent and ruthless overlords; it is also, however, the fact that such dominant power societies are inherently unstable, prone to collapse as those violent factions struggle for overall control. They key to this rise is what Kemp refers to as "goliath fuel", the surplus of labour that literally becomes lootable resources that can be plundered and extracted by criminal warlords:
What changed between the egalitarian ice age and the rise of inequality in the Holocene was the use of lootable resources. Once you had resources that others depended on, you could leverage them for other forms of power. The economic power of access to stores of fish or cereal could be converted to other forms of power by throwing feasts, such as with the north-west coast Native Americans, making others work for them in return for resources, or gifting them to create debts and obligations... Lootable resources were, in the words of economists, 'fungible': economic power could be transformed into other forms of power.
In the long span of humanity (which, as the archaeological record has shown us for centuries is much longer than human history), Kemp argues that we were remarkable resistant to the rise of authoritarian, dominant societies. One of the reasons why the curse of Goliath often failed to take hold in the early millennia of our culture was that it was actively resisted by pastoralists and nomads - either violently, in the form of rebellion and revolt, or simply by slipping away from the boundaries of nascent kingdoms and dominions to find a freer life beyond tyranny. As such, the early parts of this book deal with the recurrent failure of what we tend to consider as civilisation (a term which Kemp resolutely refuses to restrict to urbanisation and hierarchical societies): farmers produce a surplus, warlords hoard it and enslave the people, the people rise up or escape to new territories.
There are, of course, examples even in the ancient world where kingdoms and empires flourish, notably the Roman imperium and the dominant powers of Mesopotamia, but Kemp makes an interesting observation that when these mighty powers fall the archaeological record tends to suggest that the regular populace seems to improve: their skeletons are taller, and their are fewer signs of malnutrition and deprivation. Our histories are written around monumental remains such as the Pyamids of Giza or the Colosseum, but such structures involved hardship and a life of constant struggle for the majority of people.
Goliath and Modernity
While the archaeological anthropology of Goliath's Curse is fascinating, the moot question for anyone making it this far into the review should be: "What does this have to do with tech moguls?" Part of the answer is to be found in the establishment of domination systems that spread across the globe as part of colonialism and globalisaiton from the sixteenth and seventeenth century onwards, acts which - for all that individual European powers (Portugal, Spain, France, Britain) rose and fell - proved to be remarkably resilient in creating the conditions of our modern world.
At the start of the First World War, European empires controlled about 84 per cent of the world's land surface... At least officially, there are no empires left. Over the course of the 20th centur the last land empires fell apart, the maritime empires fragmented, the colonies became independent, and everyone started calling themselves nation-states instead of empires.
That phrase - "At least officially" - is doing a lot of heavy lifting at this point, because what becomes clear throughout the twentieth century is that while individual empires and dominant nation states may come and go, Goliath itself has perhaps finally found a way to become "anti-fragile" in Kemp's words, having become truly global. This, however, is where things start to become truly gruelling as well as more relevant to the impact of new technologies, as Part III: Endgame, outlines the potential disasters waiting to befall us.
Indeed, it is AI technology that beocmes particularly relevant (alongside other potentially apocalyptic scenarios involving climate change, pandemics or nuclear war) in chapter 16, "Mors ex Machina". Here, Kemp argues, we face not just one challenge but many, all of which could result in disastrous impacts on human civilisation, and one where the interconnected nature of human existance - in agriculture, finance and trade - means that devastation in one part of the world can ripple out much more immediately across the entire globe. Nuclear conflict remains the most enduring existential crisis that could wipe out the most significant numbers, although climate change and (possibly man-made) pandemics are more likely to kill hundreds of millions in the near future. Into this mix is added the potential threat of "unaligned AI", that is automated cognition that does not share perceived values for the preservation of human life.
The concern is not that the machine will be malevolent or murderous; rather, we'll just be collateral damage for them to attain their programmed goals. This wouldn't be a mere collapse, but potentially complete human extinction, or perhaps an even worse fate, like perpetual enslavement.
Rather importantly, Kemp surrounds such claims with notable caveats, noting that AI is an industry that is prone to "hyperbole and exaggeration" and that it is far from clear what many researchers are talking about when they discuss AI (or AGI - Artificial General Intelligence). More accurately, he takes a term from writers and researchers such as Mustafa Suleyman who discuss the "AI accelerant", that it allows many current dangers to be speeded up through automation. And at root, this danger is one that is entirely our problem (and our fault) in that we treat AI as a godlike problem rather than the result of our all-too-human concerns.
Although I found much of the latter part of Goliath's Curse very hard going, there is one reason I was glad that I did persist to the end: Kemp's epilogue, "Slaying the Goliath", contains more than its share of wishful thinking but it is also clear that some of the actions outlined are very much within our power if - to paraphrase Shelley - we remember that we are many, they are few. At root, the solution to taking back control is to democratise power and return to a more equal world that was the condition of humanity for millennia before the rise of goliaths and empires. To this end, his final proposal is a pledge, or manifesto: Don't be a Dick. This is a pledge "to not work for, invest in, or support any firm, institute, or individual that significantly contributes to global catastrophic risk" (p.442), whether it is a fossil fuel company, arms manufacturer, or AGI company that wants to make us all unemployed to boost its profits.