In the bad old days of the cold war, western political and journalistic institutions practised an arcane pseudoscience called Kremlinology. Its goal was to try to infer what was going on in the collective mind of the Soviet Politburo. Its method was obsessively to note everything that could be publicly observed of the activities of this secretive cabal – who was sitting next to whom at the podium; which foreign visitors were granted an audience with which high official; who was in the receiving line for a visiting head of state; what editorials in Pravda (the official Communist party newspaper) might mean; and so on.
The Soviet empire is no more, much to Putin’s chagrin, but the world now has some new superpowers. We call them tech companies. Each periodically stages a major public event at which its leaders emerge from their executive suites to convey messages to their faithful followers and to the wider world. In the past few weeks, two such events have been held by two of the biggest powers – Google and Apple. So let’s do some Kremlinology on them.
Google kicked off this year’s ceremonies with its I/O conference for developers on 8 May. As usual, the big event was the traditional “keynote” by the Great Leader, in this case Sundar Pichai. His theme was the great benefits that will accrue to humanity from artificial intelligence (AI), a field in which, coincidentally, Google happens to be a world leader.
So AI will enable us to analyse retinal scans, which might enable us to better predict a person’s likelihood of having heart problems. It will help us to do clever things with our photos, train our children to say “please”, while the company’s new custom-designed AI chips will make machine-learning even faster than ever.
Mr Pichai demonstrated a striking application of this tech: an AI that could make restaurant bookings by phone while engaging the restaurateur in human-sounding verbal exchanges. All of which went to prove that Google’s sole desire is to create technology that will make our lives easier and better.
Last week, it was Apple’s turn to take the stage. It would be interesting to know what a visiting Martian anthropologist would have made of the spectacle of grown men (and sometimes women) talking like semi-literate teenagers in order to extol the wonders of technology. Everything, you see, is “fun”, “amazing”, “incredible” and possibly even “fantastic”.
This year, the Apple event was all about software. (To the disgust of hardened geeks, there was nothing about new laptops, tablets or phones.) But the dominant message was clear: Apple’s “incredible” new iOS and Mac operating systems would make our lives even easier than they were yesterday. Siri (the company’s AI-driven virtual assistant) would morph into a strange blend of digital butler, concierge and personal assistant. One was reminded of the adage that tech progress mostly means that what only billionaires had 10 years ago, everyone can have today.
What would a latterday Kremlinologist make of all this? Well, first she would notice the interesting internal tensions that were manifest in both events. The Google boss’s hymn to AI was designed to divert attention from the fact that the technology will destroy jobs and vastly increase algorithmic power – and therefore the power of the companies that wield it.
She would also note that growing public concerns about the addictiveness of Google products was implicitly recognised. “People feel tethered to their devices,” said Mr Pichai, so the company is developing ways to help people “switch off and wind down”.
Likewise, a new feature of the Android operating system will show people how much time they spend on their smartphones and there will be some kind of tool for reminding YouTube addicts that they need to take a break.
Over at Apple, our Kremlinologist would have spotted the same tension. On the one hand, the company is hellbent on making its devices more and more integral in the daily lives of its customers. On the other, it too has been reading the runes of growing public disquiet about social media. So it’s now trumpeting tools it has devised for warning users about addiction. Strangely, though, this doesn’t seem to apply to Apple devices. As American journalist Farhad Manjoo observed: “Though Apple acknowledged the darker side of society’s obsession with the digital world, it didn’t go anywhere near the idea that its own technology might bear any of the blame.”
Yep. There’s now a neurotic undertone to these public celebrations of tech superiority. To understand what lies beneath it, all we need to remember is Kenneth Tynan’s shrewd definition of neurosis as “a secret you don’t know you’re keeping”. So what is this secret that’s bothering the new masters of our universe? Answer: they’re worried that we’re coming for them, just like we once came for JD Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan. And it couldn’t happen to nicer folks.
What I’m reading
#FaceWho?
Papua New Guinea has banned Facebook for a month in order to research the social network’s effects on the population and to crack down on fake accounts. But as the Guardian noted, the vast majority of the country’s citizens don’t use Facebook much, so it’s difficult to see what the government will learn from the experiment.
Quick fix
Dissatisfied with your car’s braking performance? Just ask the company that provides its software to download an enhancement. The US magazine Consumer Reports refused to recommend Tesla’s Model 3 because it discovered lengthy braking distances. But as Reuters reported, it changed its review to “recommend” after Tesla improved braking distance by nearly 20ft with an over-the-air software update.
