Fellow Humans: Let's Not Give Up Our Power

A new essay from author Shane Snow

Welcome back to The Snow Report—where I share science and stories that help us work smarter and think clearer. New posts now coming every week-ish!

For anyone who lives outside of the small Central American country of Guatemala, the year 1954 might conjure up a lot of different things. But it won’t conjure up what it does for Guatemalans. That was the year a rebel army overthrew Guatemala’s popular, democratically elected president, a former teacher named Jacobo Arbenz.

It’s been well-known for a few decades now that the U.S. had its hand in the overthrow. The C.I.A funded the rebel army, with help from a U.S. corporation, the United Fruit Company.

But what wasn’t known until recently, was that much of the overthrow was accomplished through a campaign of intimidation and fake news—over a radio station.

What actually happened is the C.I.A. broadcast a fake radio program for months that slowly convinced the people of Guatemala—and its newspapers and other radio broadcasters—that a rebel army was growing, and a revolutionary movement was becoming more and more popular. (It sounds unbelievable, and it literally was. I was one half of the reporting duo who uncovered and digitized the broadcast reels of that fake radio program.)

By the time the “rebel army” was “marching toward Guatemala City,” according to the radio broadcast, the Guatemalan army was too scared to fight. Its leaders stood down. And President Arbenz was forced to resign. They lost the war without putting up a fight.

The craziest part of this sad story is that there actually was no rebel army. The only reason the Guatemalan government lost power ended up being because it gave up its power.

We Don't Lose By Beating Beaten; We Lose By Giving Up Our Power

In the United States (and many other democracies), it’s common for only half of eligible voters to actually vote during an election. Even in the most “popular” elections in recent history—controversial and high-stakes presidential ones—a third of American voters sit out.

In the conference room at work, study after study shows that people with good ideas—diverse perspectives that can push a team forward—often don’t make the contributions they could. Their teams don’t unleash their potential energy because they don’t (or can’t) speak up.

In both cases, people have power, but don’t use it. The pressure to give up our power is often intense. But the truth is: when we don’t use our power, someone else gets to step in and use their power instead.

Why am I writing this in a business column today of all days? There are two reasons.

The first is because I want you to take notice of how often people (including yourself) don’t exercise our power, for whatever reason. Notice how often the tactic of getting people to back down from their power gets used—whether intentionally or not. And when you notice this, recognize that not using our power is a decision. It's a calculation. Giving up our power to contribute, to do the hard work of speaking up or pushing back or pushing forward for things to be done in smarter ways, is an active choice.

The second reason I'm writing this is more time-sensitive.

We are entering an era where machines are becoming more intelligent by the minute. We can access information via AI faster than ever. We can ask and receive answers and analysis without needing to think about the how behind the what we’re requesting.

And the more we integrate AI into our lives and thinking processes, there’s a very real danger looming. It’s what futurist Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed, described to me as his concern in the coming era, “that people will surrender their human will to AI.”

AI Doesn't Replace Us; We Do

In the movies, we see AI as either the friendly companion robot—think, Data from Star Trek—or the Terminator. Artificial Intelligence is either going to make our lives sweet or its going to obliterate us. The real danger of AI is something that’s going to creep up on us instead of coming at us with a machine gun.

It’s the fact that this powerful technology can do so much thinking for us that we just might stop making decisions for ourselves.

“That's the thing people don't get. AIs don't rule the earth by getting rid of us. They rule the earth by annihilating our will,” said Rushkoff to me in an email interview.

In theory, an all-intelligent robot making all our decisions could take a lot of pressure off. In practice, however, someone else—intelligent or not—making our decisions for us is a risky proposition. It presumes that the someone else (or something else) prioritizes the same values that we do. There can be many different answers to a dilemma, but the answer that is best for us, or for those we care about, will depend on us.

When we’re faced with a moral dilemma—say when justice conflicts with mercy, or transparency conflicts with kindness, or saving resources conflicts with providing comfort—do we really want to give up our power to shape the decision-making process? Do we really think that a bot programmed by someone else will believe the same case-by-case philosophies we do? And do we really think that a world where everyone's ideas and priorities are the same will actually be a resilient, productive, and failsafe place?

Even when we’re faced with a choice between two good things, do we really want to give our power to decide up to a chatbot? The danger isn't in asking for information; it's when we let go of the next step of deciding what to do next that we surrender.

We may not be facing down a fake army. And perhaps we ought not to think about technological progress as a war between us and machines. But we should think about our adoption of AI as a battle for our human decision-making power.

If machines are going to give us instant answers, we humans need to exercise our power by asking the right questions. If AI is going to take care of more and more of our knowledge work with the click of a button, we humans should take more and more time to think about which button we really want to push.

I, for one, think we’re going to need even more human wisdom in the coming era.

Because if the new era of AI is a war over intelligence, we’ve already lost. Computers are already integrated into our lives and glued to our palms. But if we’re in a battle for control over where all this technology helps take us, we humans are the ones with all the power.

We just need to remember that.

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